While I will beg to differ that the well has dried up for the Star Trek universe, I would have to agree that putting the series into hiatus would be a good idea.
When I hear director commentaries of Star Trek movies, or listen to actors make comments regarding their involvement with Star Trek, they seemingly have a universal theme: "I never saw Star Trek before I was hired by Paramount."
It makes me wonder about the writers as well. It is one thing to try and bring in some people from outside the Trekkies fan base to add some new and fresh ideas, but the near universality of the people producing and creating both the movies and the series doing it just as another job speaks volumes about how committed Paramount is to maintaining quality in the series.
Basically none.
One of the reasons why the Lord of the Rings was so absolutely fantastic was that the people involved with making those movies were some major fans of the work. Sure, a couple of actors may not have been as familiar with the story as die-hard fanatics, but with the rest of the production team really pulling to make it something special, those actors "caught the vision" and even added more to the passion to get it done.
I could even use the "Passion of the Christ" produced by Mel Gibson as an example of how somebody with in this case a deep religious conviction bringing something extra to the production that turned what could have been an ordinary movie into something extra ordinary.
I just don't see that kind of fire coming from Paramount these days. The attitude of William Shatner comments of "Get a Life" to fans is more typical. Star Trek has simply become a cash cow for studio executives, and they really don't care at all about the fan base other than trying to figure out how to get more money from what they percieve as a bunch of suckers. The Trek-based fan web pages legal mess is more proof of how stupid Paramount doesn't really know what they are doing other than trying to make a quick buck.
One of the casualties of this mis-use of SSNs and birth dates is that it is now incredibly difficult to obtain birth certificates, and a depreciation of birth certificates as documentation of citizenship.
I also think it is incredibly stupid to have SSNs issued at birth... indeed you have to apply for them at the hospital when you are signing the discharge papers, and are usually processed jointly with the birth certificates now. Very different than when I got my SSN (which was when I was 16, and that was because I had to fill out a W-4 form for a new job... to pay Social Security taxes).
I do think we are on the same page here for what should be done, and why banks are being stupid legally for using a SSN as a password. Evenutally it will catch up to banks, to their demise.
I don't think you need to worry about blatent ways to take over Wikipedia like from Google.
More likely the ways that Wikipedia will be "taken over" is through grants to the Wikimedia Foundation where to get the money there will be so many strings tied to how the money must be spent that it will be doing things that ordinary Wikipedians won't be supportive of.
The current board has shown some extraordinary restraint in accepting grant money, even with the recent $30,000 grant they just recieved. Several grant proposals were flatly turned down simply because it was felt that they were contrary to the goals of Wikipedia and the foundation in general.
At the moment the foundation is very approchable, and Jimbo has been a very good supporter of the Wikipedia, with quite a bit coming out of his own pocket. This project has grown beyond what he can reasonably pay for himself, but the Foundation is getting established in a way that I believe will be more of a model on how similar kinds of projects should be handled in the future. In general, I have nothing but admiration for the current Trustees. E-mail Anthere and Angela if you really want to know the dirt about this proposal. I guarentee they will reply (they are simply that kind of people). I will leave finding those e-mail address as an exercise as I don't want them to get spammed.
While I don't speak for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, I am a regular follower and poster of the events on the Wikimedia Foundation mailing list where this proposal has taken on a bit of urgancy.
The main point that needs to be looked at is the fact that Wikipedia has been experiencing some absolutely explosive growth in demand from people both trying to add articles, as well as people simply accessing it, like numerous cross-links to Wikipedia mentioned in various/. articles as well as references in news media. All of this crushing demand to view content (where Wikipedia could produce a slashdot effect on/. itself) is taking up bandwidth that simply requires money just to be able to serve up the content.
Google has quietly given an offer to not only co-locate some Wikimedia servers at their facilities, but also to pay for the servers themselves as part of the general Google server farm.
From what I've seen, nothing in the proposal is to have Google "take over" the Google content. Just like Google uses data in the Open Directory Project for their google website directory, they are free to use the content of Wikipedia as long as they comply with the terms of the Gnu Free Documentation License.
This is not a way to "lock up" the content, but rather a way to browse Wikipedia in a way where you can be assured that the bandwidth is available to view the content. Basically, a mirror of the Wikipedia project. This is not even a new idea.
I would imagine that the fine points of negotiation right now are that links to add content would be folded back into the main-line Wikipedia database. This is just like the Open Directory Project has been doing for a number of years, so the preceedence is definitely there, even for Google. I don't deny that there is a valid business rationale for Google to host Wikipedia, but don't read more into it than is there: Google offering to host Wikipedia content.
John Dvorak absolutely does not speak for the Wikimedia Foundation, or even as a member of the community in general, and his comments are just to inflame issues from an otherwise uninterested technology journalist just trying to improve the sales of the publications he works for. Having been through similar publicity flare-ups in the past with other "open source" groups, Mr. Dvorak is not showing behavior consistant with even mediocre journalists that would at least contact members of the community he is reporting about. He is just doing raw speculation and that is it.
This article is disingenuous and I hope that Dvorak gets taken to task for the comments that he has made. I also hope that people like him don't kill the good-faith proposal that frankly the Wikipedia could really use, nor "poison" the water of other potential offers to help out in relieving the crushing bandwidth needs of the Wikipedia and other related projects. It is articles like this that give journalists an awful name and destroy what is left of credibility to their profession.
The problem here is that the SSN (Social Security Number) is just an "account number" that has been heavily abused.
The fact that the number is legally unique (it is illegal to apply for more than one SSN...and verified that you havn't recieved another one by the Social Security Administration), and widely used (you must have an SSN if you work in most jobs in the USA, and also if you pay taxes to the IRS) make it a very useful identifier. Because of this, it is also used in other U.S. Federal Government organizations like the Passport Bureau (forming part of your passport ID number) and by the military for the identification number required by the Geneva Convention (replacing the military serial numbers issueed during WWI and WWII).
The problem lies in the fact that too many people (including the IRS) use the SSN for things that they shouldn't. Banks are required by law to ask for an SSN due to tax reporting issues. The problem here is that the bank then links the SSN with other information to that SSN rather than just your name, because they don't want to bother with a unique customer identification number. As pointed out in the previous post, it is an identifying piece of information like your name or birth date to describe you as a unique individual. It is not a way to identify that you are who you say you are.
That really is the clinching thing here. How do you identify that you are John Q. Public with SSN# 555-55-5555 born July 20th, 1969? (or any other similar set of identifying figures) I may be able to provide a full set of information that Mr. Public would know in his lifetime, but all of that can be researched to some extent or another.
A picture ID or other biometrics like finger prints or DNA are useful because it can be used to establish that at the time the identification device was created the person who issued it had a strong reason to legally believe the other information on the ID device is correlated with the biometrics information.
While that information can be useful because it is difficult to fast talk a DMV officer that you are somebody other than who you really are. Still, even that can be defeated through social engineering methods just like any other social hack.
The only "fool proof" system would be to take a DNA sample at birth, tied into the SSN application also done at birth, and even that has problems with identical twins or clones.
The #1 problem with all of this paranoia over identification is that biometrics data is very difficult to transmit electronically. State Legislatures (with strong lobbying from banks and other businesses) have passed laws to permit commercial transactions electronically and there are efforts to make the information transmitted in binding electronic tranactions (like a purchase on E-bay) simple to perform. In addition, the identification verification must be done with an automated process, and advanced AI architechture generally isn't available, nor legally required, to compare biometrics data to confirm you are indeed the person you claim you are.
So how do you confirm identify in an electronic arena? Crytographic methods are much more secure in the sense that if your identity has been previously decided it can be used to say the cryptographic ID has been used consistantly by the same individual for some period of time, and has not been reported as compromised. This can stop some classes of identify theft, especially since most people who steal a credit card and other related items only use them for a short period of time.
In short, using a SSN in a way other than as you would your name is just silly and should absolutely never be used as a password. Banks and other organizations should simply treat the string of characters that is your SSN as if it were another part of your name.
Frankly, one of the best parody sites I have ever seen. Thank you, thank you for a good chuckle, and something I'm going to have to make sure gets spread around.
IANAL. (full-disclosure) I do know, however, that there are anti-identify theft laws and businesses that through neglect contribute to identify theft can be held liable for damages resulting from that theft of information.
The major problems are:
1) You are indeed a victim of the identify theft (not something you necessarily want to have happen to you). Merely the potential to become a victim is not enough.
2) You have not been notified that you may be a potential victim of identify theft from an action that the company is aware of occuring.
3) Even if you have been notified, you must take reasonable steps (changing bank accounts, putting a hold on credit cards, ect., all at your expense) and problems still occur.
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I would have to agree that these consumer information bureaus should be held to some potentially high liability standards should the information they possess get to people who use it for fraud or illegal purposes. Laws that govern the collection of personal information into databases should be as strict, generally, as credit bureau regulations, particularly if that data is in turn sold on a commercial basis (such as/. selling the subscriber e-mail lists to a bunch of spammers). The problem is that people involved with collecting this information (like grocery stores and the "club discount cards" or even a telephone opinion survey... they got your phone number and usually name if you answer the questions even if you don't directly tell them) are very sloppy with the information that they collect, and if somebody offers even a very modest amount of money they are willing to share just about everything they have collected, with basically no strings attached.
If these businesses who have personal information had liability issues to worry about, they would be more inclined to get rid of personal user information as fast as they could, unless it was a critical function of their business (like billing records). And even then that information would be a guarded secret like most reasonable people expect that data should be kept. Mind you, this is a totally seperate issue to wheither the government should maintain databases on individuals, but rather governance of databases by private companies.
The one critical issue regarding apps under Mono is the GUI development issues for cross-platform development.
There is the Windows.Forms implementation, and then a similar effort under Linux, but the portability between the two platforms is difficult at best, primarily because the two environments have such a huge difference in basic API archetechture, especially at the component level.
That said, there are efforts to try and overcome these issues, and for non-GUI applications (command-line or content servers) Mono works equally well in both Linux and Windows.
No wonder the deadline is slipping. That just shows yet more of the cruft that they are dealing with, and I guess they are making a commitment to backward compatability with "undocumented" API calls as well? (where you directly access core kernel functions normally used for strictly internal and usually low-level access)
I hate most of the brand new features anyway. I just want a very clean OS that doesn't interfere with the applications that I am developing, but allows me ease of trying to access equipment peripherals in a convienint and consistant manner. In other words, Microsoft doesn't know the heck of what they are doing.
I actually had this problem happen to me unintentionally.
There was a porn 1-800 number that was identical to my phone number, except that my phone number was located in the Salt Lake City (UT) area code---801.
Needless to say, I got some very interesting phone calls, especially when the number appears in a German magazine. Generally it was a little bit of fun, and a chance to embarass the callers, especially when I put my three-year-old son on the line.
The phone calls ended when my area code changed due to redrawing the phone district and adding a new area code to my state, and the fact that I moved to a new telephone exchange neighborhood.
At the moment my phone number is identical escept for one digit to a local grocery store, where I get phone calls for grocery delivery and occasionally some kids trying to call their friends while they are at work. The senior citizens who can't seem to dial the correct number is kinda sad, and I try to be patient with them and not piss them off.
There was one time, however, that this one person call up and wanted to give a customer complaint. My wife answered it and tried to explain she called the wrong number. This lady who called was so irate that she insisted my wife transfer me to her "supervisor". I ended up talking to the lady and saying "How can I help you?" and took the complaint. I then tried to assure her that the problem would not happen again, and she shut up.
I get about 2-3 calls per week due to this phone number similarity, but I try to avoid really making fun up the people calling up.
The #1 core business that Microsoft has been most successful at even from the beginning is software development tools, and in particular compilers. Writing an operating system is a very natural outgrowth of this activity, as well as an incredible series of good luck when they secured the IBM contract for PC-DOS.
Office software, at least at the initial stages, really isn't too much different than writing a good user interface for a compiler text editor. Microsoft wasn't even the first company to try and integrate office automation software packages, but there were natural advantages of selling this sort of software where you could tweak the operating system itself to boost performance of this sort of software. Even now, many parts of Windows are built to make it easier for MS-Office developers to get their product working, and it is often difficult to describe where MS-Office ends and Windows begins.
Silly projects like MSN and MSNBC are some major tangents that are sucking the lifeblood out, as well as the host of small companies MS has bought out over the years.
And now with Bill Gates trying to make computers for 3rd world countries, as well as trying to figure out how to get China to pay for its copies of Windows. Very definitely way out of dealing with their core business.
I agree that MS won't collapse right away, unless Bill Gates simply wants to shut the whole thing down, take the money, and run. At the moment Microsoft is still a profitable company, so even if the return on the money isn't that great it isn't a sinking hole like Enron or Tycho.
This article mentions the fact that Longhorn is slipping on its shipping schedule.
There are a number of reasons for this, perhaps most importantly is that Microsoft is trying to do a true X.0 full-rewrite release of the core operating system, with a bunch of "new" features. It is dubious that their "customers" (aka independent software developers and small businesses).
I will also say that for any major software project, when you do a genuine X.0 full code-base rewrite (cleaning out the cruft hopefully and redesigning the base archetechture) it is a major gamble. It is also a situation that tests the mettle of the management to see if the resources are properly applied and available, and if you got a small group of excellent developers or a large group of ordinary developers. This is often what makes or breaks any software company.
From my own perspective, even though I've been using Microsoft operating systems now for close to 20 years (gee.... has it been that long?) I will never personally own a copy of Longhorn willingly. I may even quit a job that forces me into using it, I feel so strongly about avoiding it. I was pushed into using XP, and I've since reverted back to Windows 2000 because I can't stand the direction XP has gone. Transitioning from Windows to Linux (or other Unix-based operating systems) is a huge jump, especially since skill sets are so much different, but it appears as though Longhorn is going to be just as big of a jump so I might as well simply ignore what Microsoft is going to do. My preference would be to go back to VMS, but that isn't an option as a major OS platform for new development.
The only projects I hear that might move onto Longhorn are from die-hard Microsoft computer development groups, and that is more because of "*Rah* *Rah* Microsoft can't do wrong" fans who have an MSDN Universal subscription and have been doing this for some time. Genuine new software development is not being planned in that direction. This situation is far worse than the relutance of moving on to Windows 95 or Windows NT (which had real slow acceptance when it first came out). Or even the fiasco that Microsoft had with Windows 3.0 that somehow they pulled out of when Windows 3.1 came out and fixed many of the 3.0 bugs.
My kids are still abuzz over the X-Box, and if Microsoft is going to have any legs, it probably will be in the electronic gaming industry... where it is largely a hegonomy anyway and difficult for small independent developers to get involved. Propritary operating systems are not a problem in that industry either, and even largely expected.
While I will agree that none of the suborbital companies are currently looking at intercontinental travel, there is no mistaking that it isn't something being considered as a future area of expansion.
I'll hit each objection in detail:
Cost: Not really that much more that a simple up and down flight. All that really changes is the flight profile rather than any really new technical challenges, and you sacrifice a little bit of altitude for a horizontal vector to get you someplace else.
Capacity: Pretty much the same "spaceships" as with pure up and down. For more distance you may need a larger fuel tank and an engine rated for a longer burn time, or a larger engine. Still, not significantly more so.
Landing Areas: Again, not really that much different. Space Ship One is able to take-off and land on a conventional runway. With large bodies of water found around the world, a sea-borne landing would also be reasonably possible. Vertical landing like Armadillo Aerospace could also use existing airports.
Air Space: This is interesting because international law does govern spaceflight slightly differently than air travel, so it would be interesting to see which would take precedence. Spaceflight allows you to ignore international boundaries in terms of passage, while air travel requires permission of the nation you are traveling over. Obviously when you are low enough in altitude for take-off and landing you would have to deal with more conventional air corridor clearance, which is done anyway even for straight up and down launches. Even NASA needs to get FAA clearance when it launches or lands any spacecraft, so again, this isn't anything new. And is totally identical to what would be needed for orbital spacecraft to launch and land. Indeed, ballistic trajectories would be easier to predict where it was going to land than would an orbital path where you could in theory land anywhere in the orbital inclination pattern you are traveling in.
Regulation: This is indeed the hardest part of the whole thing. Intercontinental means that you would have to deal with multiple governments (unless you are talking New York City to Guam), and that would have to get permission from both governments in order for a flight to take place. While the U.S. Government is seriously considering what regulatory issues need to occur within U.S. boundaries, other countries like England or Australia havn't even worried about the issues yet or who would even be in charge. The will to allow it to happen at all is much more of an issue, like the lack of willingness to have airports in the USA to be able to land the Concorde. There were only a couple of airports in the USA where the Concorde could land in non-emergency conditions.
Basically, the current hurdle to be crossed is simply getting the spaceship to go up, and it does simplify that task by having only one place and set of regulations to worry about. Once they are successful and have demonstrated a series of flights without incident is the notion that intercontinental flights can even be entertained. And even then with working spacecraft it is much easier to convince a government to allow flights to occur than if it is still in an experimental stage.
This is no different than many of the issues that faced early aircraft builders, and for many of the same reasons.
God forbid if an American spacecraft by mistake ever had to crash-land in North Korea, but it is still something that does have to be at least thought of, and is no different between sub-orbital and orbital spacecraft.
Well, to start with Zero-G Corporation has been booked up so solid that they are raising their prices. And enough people have been up that even some regular/. posters have photos to show their experience.
There will be considerable interest in suborbital flight, and if they get the bugs worked out so that it includes intercontintal flight as well (Los Angeles to Sydney or Auckland to London), there will be solid economic reasons to get booked on these flights besides being a raw thrill ride.
I don't know what the exact numbers will be, but there was even interest in the Concorde in terms of rapid travel between cities. There were numerous problems with the operations of the Concorde, but it was not a lack of paying passengers. Far more it was just raw politics that has discontinued the service.
BTW, I think real controlled space travel to LEO and beyond is much closer than you are suggesting. I would have to agree that there are people who are holding out for going into space and spending days there, not just a few minutes of weighlessness.
The current "going rate" for getting a seat on a Soyuz spacecraft is right now about $20 million USD. And that appears to be going up slightly due to interest by would-be space tourists, as well as the fact that NASA is now buying as many slots as they can until the shuttle program gets going again to keep the ISS up and running.
In comparison, the Falcon V by SpaceX is going to have a price tag of about $16 million USD, which is going to be man-rated. Assuming that an amortized manned payload vehicle is going to cost about that same amount, for the sake of this discussion the total will be about $30 million USD for a manned spaceflight on the Falcon V. With the current discussion that it will be in a configuration of one pilot and four passengers, that ends up being about $8 million USD per passenger.
I think that is a price point that people will be shooting for in the near-term for actual spaceflight to LEO. I don't know what increase in space tourism will result when the cost is lowered by only $10 million, but the key here is that neither NASA nor the Russian government will be able to turn down passengers in this situation.
BTW, $10 million is a figure that is within reason for lottery systems to get a chance to fly in space, as well as for major promotional advertising campaigns. Or four minutes of commercial advertising with the Super Bowl. This is a bit high, but not unreasonbly so, for a corporate research budget, especially if coupled with private space stations that don't have to go through NASA scrutiny and materials with processes that get patent protection.
Mind you, this is for people to be able to get into LEO, not just sub-orbital flight. If Scaled Composites or Armadillo Aerospace can shave the $10 million per passenger per flight figure down even more, there is a huge group of people that could afford to go up for much less. The cost for traveling to the moon would be about double this cost. As Robert A. Heinlein put it, getting to Low-Earth Orbit is halfway to the rest of the solar system.
Assuming huge economies of scale kick in so that a trip to the moon will cost roughly $1 million. That is the amount that an ordinary working person in a 1st world country makes in a lifetime, and the value of some rather ordinary homes in California. If you compared that to what people spent to pay for colonization efforts to the Americas in the 15th & 16th Centuries vs. what ordinary people could afford to pay to travel to the Americas back then, this is very comparable. All that is left for Lunar colonization to be self-sufficient is political will to allow it to happen. And once you have cities on the Moon it will be all but impossible to keep people away from Mars and the asteroids.
This is not just the realm of multi-millionaires, and certainly well within the reach of billionaires just wanting to take an exotic vacation.
One of the things that is going to be driving at least the LEO space launchers will be the fact that getting out of the gravity well of the Earth is so difficult that there must be near perfection of the equipment just to be able to get up at all.
There is also a manned spaceflight tradition that is now close to 60 years old, with roughly 200+ manned spaceflight missions between the USA and Russia to draw upon, including the deaths of close to 50 people in some very tragic and for 14 televised live on television world-wide. That is a body of experience to draw upon for some rule making, and indeed it is largely that experience that is driving the industry and is in the back of the minds of people like Oberstar and the regulators at the FAA-AST. (BTW, I think Oberstar is going too far.) For unmanned space launches, the number of launches is close to 100,000 (just off the top of my head, and based on figures for the number of satellites that both the former USSR and the USA have sent up) that have reached orbital velocities, and there have been a number of tragic losses of life in that number as well.
Where the real learning curve is going to come is when industry is established in LEO with several private space stations doing tourism and research platforms much more efficient than the ISS. At that point you will start to see space vehicles that are design to be flown exclusivly in space only, not for re-entry or traveling through atmospheric flight.
So far there has only been two spacecraft ever designed in a serious manner to perform this task: The Lunar Landers of both the USA and the USSR. And only one of them has ever even flown in space. And that for only a total of 10 missions. That is hardly a body of knowledge to go up against, and is much more likely to be the realm of tinkerers and back-yard mechanics than anything currently being done in commercial space.
Even a modestly efficient rocket engine like what Armadillo Aerospace has already used would be sufficient for space-to-space destinations. There is also considerable unexplored territory for new propulsion methods, including Ion propulsion, solar sails, nuclear engines, and more that leave a lot of room for imagination. Except for the design and implementation of a nuclear reactor (for a real space-ship rather than space craft), there is hardly any real engineering knowledge about what is needed at all. And even the nuclear reactors would have to rely upon knowledge gained from operating nuclear submarines, which won't totally translate to a space environment.
It will be exciting to see just what commercial space will come up with in the next few decades.
About 2010 when the shuttle is retired the U.S. will have NO manned presence in space unless its at the good will of the Russians. The U.S. will have no manned launch vehicle until the CEV in 2014 at the earliest. Committed indeed.
You are assuming that the CEV will even be built. The U.S. Constitution absolutely guarentees that there will be two more Presidential administrations between now and then, possibly more, and requirements that Congress will have to do annual budgetary approval on the project simply add to the issues. That and the recent history NASA has shown toward developing new manned spaceflight vehicles would seem to indicate that the CEV is doomed to almost certain failure.
The only glimmer of hope that it might succeed is indeed the fact that the Shuttles are being forced into retirement, and I don't see any movement in Congress to change that, particularly when even the strongest supporters of manned spaceflight are trying to kill the Shuttle program. Being without a manned space vehicle would essentially make NASA a museum caretaker, and an aviation research agency. I think you would find public support for NASA to drop almost completely if the manned spaceflight program were disbanded, and most people at NASA seem to realize that as well.
I do support the development of the CEV at the moment, but there are competitive pressures put on NASA contractors now that have never been in the government space arena before. If the CEV starts to show the kinds of failures in management that the Shuttle program is [in]famous for, there are several other groups in private industry that might just be able to provide a cheaper alternative to getting crews up to the ISS and LEO in general. Five or six years from now (when the Shuttles get hopfully sent to the Smithsonian) it will be a lot more clear just who is a major contender in manned spaceflight and what launch options are going to be available. It would be ironic if NASA astronauts had to book a flight on Virgin Galactic to get to the ISS. I pray that NASA doesn't screw up that bad.
I know people who have businesses in Russia (with American financing), and right now the political situation in Russia is such that it isn't a very reliable idea to make much of any business investment into Russia at the moment. Even for a very sure thing (like selling Coca-Cola in Russia) you aren't very sure that you will get your money back.
It is much better than when the Soviets were in power, but the Russian court system may still end up taking property and business investments away from you even if you have done a good job of running a bussiness in Russia profitably. I do hope that Russia gets their act together, and I think 50-100 years from now Russia is still going to be a major economic and political leader in the world. The next couple of decades are going to be a wild ride, however.
In short, it would be much safer for somebody like Paul Allen or some other billionaire to invest in American companies instead where the legal system is more stable and predictable. Or even a business in the EU for that matter, especially when there is inherant risk to the whole concept even working in the first place.
While Carmack may not have made a successful X-Prize flight up to 100 km, he certainly was one of the major contenters with actual working hardware. Indeed, I would call his efforts much more believeable than what I've seen so far from many of the other X-Prize teams, including DiVinci (which looks largely like a scam in progress IMHO).
Carmack, Rutan, and Musk are certainly reasonable to group together as peers for a group like this, even though they are all following very different approaches to developing manned spacecraft. Of the three efforts (Armadillo, Scaled Composites, and SpaceX respectively), Carmack's is perhaps the most economical approach, although I think SpaceX is going to achieve manned orbital spaceflight first. The Falcon V is being designed from the beginning as a man-rated vehicle even though its business plan is successful if it only launches unmanned cargo. All three companies have a reasonable shot at getting LEO vehicles up and going in the next 20 years, and will likely be major players in the space tourism business. I'm sure that Boeing is also paying attention very closely.
As has been pointed out in congressional testimony as well as by many of the people forming this "federation", if the regulations become too much tighter, there is a very high likelyhood that you will see other countries take over from the USA in terms of leadership in the development in space.
Indeed, this is largely happening even now, with Russia as the only country (not even the USA at the moment) with a proven and currently available manned spaceflight capability. And China is very close to having that same ability, along with India not too much further behind.
And just about anybody who follows the space industry would note that in order for NASA to develop a replacement spacecraft for the Shuttle, it would be a 10-year ordeal costing clost to $50 Billion dollars... even for an Apollo-type crash program to get something working. That is neither money nor time that NASA has available to them. It would likely cost more and take even longer than these crude estimates if the bureaucracies within NASA get their hands on the project as well.
Basically, the only "salvation" that NASA has is that they will have to go with privately built spacecraft for astronauts to get into LEO in the 2020's. Or swallow a whole lot of national pride and go with foreign launch systems for critical military and classified space activities. That isn't really an option either. I don't see the current Space Shuttles being in operation in 2020, and no politician is going to support having them around if it doesn't get them too many votes.
Once there is an established commercial space launch business (including manned spaceflight), this may be more of a problem. Even then, there isn't anything particularly important about going into space from US soil, as any launch for the next century will have to be scheduled at least several weeks or months in advance, making it reasonable for a U.S. citizen to travel to Diego Garcia if needed to go into space. Especially if going up from the Indian Ocean is half or 1/10th the cost. Basically, there will be huge competitive pressures to keep costs down.
The main reason to form a group like this is to counter the heirs of Senator Proxmire (D-WI) who seem to seek the dismantling of the U.S. space industry. Notably Representative Oberstar is one of those congressmen who want to see private space go away.
When the military "turns off" the high precision GPS data, what they do is put in a scrambling code that uses a pseudo-random number generator to throw the precision off. This makes the numbers less accurate for civilian (and supposedly enemy combatants) using GPS for coordinates. This algorithm changes (or did change) regularly, but was published through classified channels and could be compensated for with military equipment.
What the military did a few years ago was shut down the scrambling operation, so as a result the numbers are considerably more accurate.
There is the potential of "turning off GPS" as well, but that is much more extreme.... probably to be done only on a situation like 9/11/2001. You would know about it as a civilian because it would be advertised all over the place and commercial flights would be grounded... ships told to stay put where they just happened to be at, and a total grinding to a halt of the U.S. economy. Basically not a trivial thing that would be done lightly. Even the scrambling system being turned back on would be a time to start investing strongly in gold and other precious metals.
Having been involved with retail sales, the design and engineering of electronic components, as well as having lived in 3rd World slums (all at different times in my life), I think I can speak for all of these things.
A homeless person in Africa or some other war-ravaged area (like Gaza or even Kosovo) is struggling from day to day largely because of political issues, and often they have difficulty surviving from day to day merely because the resources are not available. My own ancestors (great-great grandparents) were in this position due to the wars in Central Europe during the 18th & 19th Centuries, and choose to relocate to America largely to avoid the problems resulting from these wars. It is particuarly harsh when there are not countries willing to take on the refugees from these messes.
There are also some issues that result from people moving from an agririan society to a manufacturing economy, and the huge population and cultural shifts that occur with that sort of shift. Most of these shifts occured either in the late 19th Century and up through most of the 1930's in Europe and North America (a little bit later in Mexico). This did result in huge amounts of poverty as a by-product, and the creation of large slums where hoards of unskilled laborers showed up to work in the manufacturing plants. Just as Europe, the USA, and Japan had to deal with these issues early in the 20th Century, countries like India and China are dealing them them now. Political instability is keeping the countries in Africa from even beginning to make a dent in these issue, which is why there is so much widespread poverty in Africa. This has also been a problem in South America, but the governments in South America have largely resolved the messes that resulted in the political coups that occured during the 1960's and 1970's, except in regions like southern Columbia. As a result, you don't find nearly the problems in South America as you do in Africa.
Homeless people in the USA have many other deeper problems, especially the cronic homeless, either due to mental illness that goes untreated, a world-view that emotionally prevents them from moving on in their lives, or the fact that they are involved with aspects of organized crime (including very strong illegal drugs they can't stop using because of dependancy reasons). I'm not saying that life isn't tough, but for any person who can't pull themselves up from a homeless position is somebody not ambitious, and not willing to relocate. Or they simply enjoy on some perverse viewpoint not having to worry about the issues of trying to come up with rent or a house payment each month.
There is a certain unwillingness of computer manufacturers from having a sub $100 computer, and it is not just due to depressed economies. From a marketing/PR viewpoint, once you drop prices down or have competition below a certain point, it can blow away a whole industry. I've seen this with certain specialized farm implements where a small machine shop decides to make the very best item, like a potato harvester, and sell it cheap. They sell a whole bunch for a few years, but very soon it saturates the market. Because they did such a good job making it in the first place, it seldom breaks down, or is easily repaired. Quickly the market disappears simply because everybody who needed it already has one, or can buy a used one fairly cheap. As a result, that manufacturing company goes out of business. This is exactly what computer manufacturers are almost deathly afraid would happen if a reliable sub $100 PC were to be developed.
Also, the #1 expense in most electronic components manufacturing companies is the construction and maintainence of the chip fab. This is a very highly specialized process that requires people with advanced university-level eduation, and reliable 1st world quality utilities and political stability, as well as an up-front capital expendature of millions of dollars. You can pay for this indirectly by purchasing commodity chips, but th
The problem with describing what is a "moon" is that there is the current philosophy that a planet must be involved in order to call it a moon.
I think that is wrong, and it fails to deal with objects that orbit only the galactic core, which includes many items much smaller than brown dwarfs that we can't see right now with telescopes. It also doesn't deal with things like Ida/Gaspra which is a dual asteroid system, although you can in theory call Gaspra the "moon" of Ida in the sense that its mass is substantially smaller.
The term "moon" applied to other objects comes up from Gallileo trying to apply a term to the objects he saw going around Jupiter. It turns out that the universe is far more complex than he ever could have imagined, and that is where the difficulty arises. In this sense, if you want to call the Earth's Moon a moon, similar objects can also be caracterized as such.
Then the next question is if you base that classification on what they orbit (the galactic core, a star, or a planet), or merely on their mass and general manefestations related to that (if they have an atmosphere, are spherical, and have an escape velocity > 0.0001 m/s).
Re:Why only for 'developing' countries?
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The Sub-$100 Laptop?
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I would beg to differ on that. The distribution costs in developed countries can be surprisingly low. I mean, the distribution costs for moving a ton of bannans from Central America to New York City or Kansas can keep the cost of down to less than a 50 cents a pound.
The distribution infrastruction in many developing countries is almost non-existant, and I think you would find that the labor costs associated with selling items like this computer would be much more in Gambia or Rwanda than it would be in London, Paris, or St. Louis. The distribution costs are not the big issue here, but rather identifing what commodity CPU and memory chips could be had to make this a truly cheap computer.
Re:Why only for 'developing' countries?
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You miss the point of the parent post. There are many situations where it would be nice to have a new (not refurbished computer from a thrift store--often there because several things are broken) computer that may be slightly underpowered but cheap, even in 1st World countries.
And the point here is that not only would it be useful to make available in sub-Saharan Africa or rural India, but to inner-city youth of Liverpool or Los Angeles.
As well, the point here is that you can make something like this available as a cheap commodity computer (avoid the feature bloat... this is to make a very cheap mass-produced computer), it will drive the price down even more simply due to economies of scale. Electronic components are particularly sensitive to volumes of production.
In addition to simply having these computers around at the check-out stands of your local Wal-Mart, there will be a community of developers and tinkerers that will be using the equipment...many of which could translate and port some of the tools and concepts from more expensive equipment to a very cheap platform like this.
There have been some amazing things done with some of the old 8-bit platforms, like the Comodore 64 and the Apple ][, including TCP/IP stacks and web browsers that would have been unheard of when they were originally put together.
An example of a projct made for "an initiative only making sense in desparate circumstances" that has practical application in 1st World countries, The Freeplay Wind-up Radio is one of the most innovative projects to come up. This is a device that doesn't need an external power source, is very rugged, and works in areas of the world like Rwanda or Congo. It is also sold in the USA and Canada to people who want to keep an emergency radio available during a disaster, so you don't have to constantly check and see if the batteries are working.
How come a laptop computer couldn't be any different?
Or to paraphrase your Bill Maher quote a little differently, why not go from 10 to 11 when we can also help a country go from 0 to 1? It doesn't have to be a zero-sum game.
Slashdot Mirror
While I will beg to differ that the well has dried up for the Star Trek universe, I would have to agree that putting the series into hiatus would be a good idea.
When I hear director commentaries of Star Trek movies, or listen to actors make comments regarding their involvement with Star Trek, they seemingly have a universal theme: "I never saw Star Trek before I was hired by Paramount."
It makes me wonder about the writers as well. It is one thing to try and bring in some people from outside the Trekkies fan base to add some new and fresh ideas, but the near universality of the people producing and creating both the movies and the series doing it just as another job speaks volumes about how committed Paramount is to maintaining quality in the series.
Basically none.
One of the reasons why the Lord of the Rings was so absolutely fantastic was that the people involved with making those movies were some major fans of the work. Sure, a couple of actors may not have been as familiar with the story as die-hard fanatics, but with the rest of the production team really pulling to make it something special, those actors "caught the vision" and even added more to the passion to get it done.
I could even use the "Passion of the Christ" produced by Mel Gibson as an example of how somebody with in this case a deep religious conviction bringing something extra to the production that turned what could have been an ordinary movie into something extra ordinary.
I just don't see that kind of fire coming from Paramount these days. The attitude of William Shatner comments of "Get a Life" to fans is more typical. Star Trek has simply become a cash cow for studio executives, and they really don't care at all about the fan base other than trying to figure out how to get more money from what they percieve as a bunch of suckers. The Trek-based fan web pages legal mess is more proof of how stupid Paramount doesn't really know what they are doing other than trying to make a quick buck.
Thanks for clarifying that.
One of the casualties of this mis-use of SSNs and birth dates is that it is now incredibly difficult to obtain birth certificates, and a depreciation of birth certificates as documentation of citizenship.
I also think it is incredibly stupid to have SSNs issued at birth... indeed you have to apply for them at the hospital when you are signing the discharge papers, and are usually processed jointly with the birth certificates now. Very different than when I got my SSN (which was when I was 16, and that was because I had to fill out a W-4 form for a new job... to pay Social Security taxes).
I do think we are on the same page here for what should be done, and why banks are being stupid legally for using a SSN as a password. Evenutally it will catch up to banks, to their demise.
I don't think you need to worry about blatent ways to take over Wikipedia like from Google.
More likely the ways that Wikipedia will be "taken over" is through grants to the Wikimedia Foundation where to get the money there will be so many strings tied to how the money must be spent that it will be doing things that ordinary Wikipedians won't be supportive of.
The current board has shown some extraordinary restraint in accepting grant money, even with the recent $30,000 grant they just recieved. Several grant proposals were flatly turned down simply because it was felt that they were contrary to the goals of Wikipedia and the foundation in general.
At the moment the foundation is very approchable, and Jimbo has been a very good supporter of the Wikipedia, with quite a bit coming out of his own pocket. This project has grown beyond what he can reasonably pay for himself, but the Foundation is getting established in a way that I believe will be more of a model on how similar kinds of projects should be handled in the future. In general, I have nothing but admiration for the current Trustees. E-mail Anthere and Angela if you really want to know the dirt about this proposal. I guarentee they will reply (they are simply that kind of people). I will leave finding those e-mail address as an exercise as I don't want them to get spammed.
While I don't speak for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, I am a regular follower and poster of the events on the Wikimedia Foundation mailing list where this proposal has taken on a bit of urgancy.
/. articles as well as references in news media. All of this crushing demand to view content (where Wikipedia could produce a slashdot effect on /. itself) is taking up bandwidth that simply requires money just to be able to serve up the content.
The main point that needs to be looked at is the fact that Wikipedia has been experiencing some absolutely explosive growth in demand from people both trying to add articles, as well as people simply accessing it, like numerous cross-links to Wikipedia mentioned in various
The current proposed budget for maintaining the servers is on the order of $130,000 and all of that comes from voluntary donations of the community. (BTW, please give some $$$ if you are a regular user of Wikipedia).
Google has quietly given an offer to not only co-locate some Wikimedia servers at their facilities, but also to pay for the servers themselves as part of the general Google server farm.
From what I've seen, nothing in the proposal is to have Google "take over" the Google content. Just like Google uses data in the Open Directory Project for their google website directory, they are free to use the content of Wikipedia as long as they comply with the terms of the Gnu Free Documentation License.
This is not a way to "lock up" the content, but rather a way to browse Wikipedia in a way where you can be assured that the bandwidth is available to view the content. Basically, a mirror of the Wikipedia project. This is not even a new idea.
I would imagine that the fine points of negotiation right now are that links to add content would be folded back into the main-line Wikipedia database. This is just like the Open Directory Project has been doing for a number of years, so the preceedence is definitely there, even for Google. I don't deny that there is a valid business rationale for Google to host Wikipedia, but don't read more into it than is there: Google offering to host Wikipedia content.
John Dvorak absolutely does not speak for the Wikimedia Foundation, or even as a member of the community in general, and his comments are just to inflame issues from an otherwise uninterested technology journalist just trying to improve the sales of the publications he works for. Having been through similar publicity flare-ups in the past with other "open source" groups, Mr. Dvorak is not showing behavior consistant with even mediocre journalists that would at least contact members of the community he is reporting about. He is just doing raw speculation and that is it.
This article is disingenuous and I hope that Dvorak gets taken to task for the comments that he has made. I also hope that people like him don't kill the good-faith proposal that frankly the Wikipedia could really use, nor "poison" the water of other potential offers to help out in relieving the crushing bandwidth needs of the Wikipedia and other related projects. It is articles like this that give journalists an awful name and destroy what is left of credibility to their profession.
The problem here is that the SSN (Social Security Number) is just an "account number" that has been heavily abused.
The fact that the number is legally unique (it is illegal to apply for more than one SSN...and verified that you havn't recieved another one by the Social Security Administration), and widely used (you must have an SSN if you work in most jobs in the USA, and also if you pay taxes to the IRS) make it a very useful identifier. Because of this, it is also used in other U.S. Federal Government organizations like the Passport Bureau (forming part of your passport ID number) and by the military for the identification number required by the Geneva Convention (replacing the military serial numbers issueed during WWI and WWII).
The problem lies in the fact that too many people (including the IRS) use the SSN for things that they shouldn't. Banks are required by law to ask for an SSN due to tax reporting issues. The problem here is that the bank then links the SSN with other information to that SSN rather than just your name, because they don't want to bother with a unique customer identification number. As pointed out in the previous post, it is an identifying piece of information like your name or birth date to describe you as a unique individual. It is not a way to identify that you are who you say you are.
That really is the clinching thing here. How do you identify that you are John Q. Public with SSN# 555-55-5555 born July 20th, 1969? (or any other similar set of identifying figures) I may be able to provide a full set of information that Mr. Public would know in his lifetime, but all of that can be researched to some extent or another.
A picture ID or other biometrics like finger prints or DNA are useful because it can be used to establish that at the time the identification device was created the person who issued it had a strong reason to legally believe the other information on the ID device is correlated with the biometrics information.
While that information can be useful because it is difficult to fast talk a DMV officer that you are somebody other than who you really are. Still, even that can be defeated through social engineering methods just like any other social hack.
The only "fool proof" system would be to take a DNA sample at birth, tied into the SSN application also done at birth, and even that has problems with identical twins or clones.
The #1 problem with all of this paranoia over identification is that biometrics data is very difficult to transmit electronically. State Legislatures (with strong lobbying from banks and other businesses) have passed laws to permit commercial transactions electronically and there are efforts to make the information transmitted in binding electronic tranactions (like a purchase on E-bay) simple to perform. In addition, the identification verification must be done with an automated process, and advanced AI architechture generally isn't available, nor legally required, to compare biometrics data to confirm you are indeed the person you claim you are.
So how do you confirm identify in an electronic arena? Crytographic methods are much more secure in the sense that if your identity has been previously decided it can be used to say the cryptographic ID has been used consistantly by the same individual for some period of time, and has not been reported as compromised. This can stop some classes of identify theft, especially since most people who steal a credit card and other related items only use them for a short period of time.
In short, using a SSN in a way other than as you would your name is just silly and should absolutely never be used as a password. Banks and other organizations should simply treat the string of characters that is your SSN as if it were another part of your name.
My god... just what is that place.
I love this link on the the website you listed that refered to The University of Nigeria: Home of the Advanced Fee Methodology
This is just too good to be true...and it is.
Frankly, one of the best parody sites I have ever seen. Thank you, thank you for a good chuckle, and something I'm going to have to make sure gets spread around.
This is almost as good as the Microsoft Linux Distro Definitely a bookmark site.
IANAL. (full-disclosure) I do know, however, that there are anti-identify theft laws and businesses that through neglect contribute to identify theft can be held liable for damages resulting from that theft of information.
/. selling the subscriber e-mail lists to a bunch of spammers). The problem is that people involved with collecting this information (like grocery stores and the "club discount cards" or even a telephone opinion survey... they got your phone number and usually name if you answer the questions even if you don't directly tell them) are very sloppy with the information that they collect, and if somebody offers even a very modest amount of money they are willing to share just about everything they have collected, with basically no strings attached.
The major problems are:
1) You are indeed a victim of the identify theft (not something you necessarily want to have happen to you). Merely the potential to become a victim is not enough.
2) You have not been notified that you may be a potential victim of identify theft from an action that the company is aware of occuring.
3) Even if you have been notified, you must take reasonable steps (changing bank accounts, putting a hold on credit cards, ect., all at your expense) and problems still occur.
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I would have to agree that these consumer information bureaus should be held to some potentially high liability standards should the information they possess get to people who use it for fraud or illegal purposes. Laws that govern the collection of personal information into databases should be as strict, generally, as credit bureau regulations, particularly if that data is in turn sold on a commercial basis (such as
If these businesses who have personal information had liability issues to worry about, they would be more inclined to get rid of personal user information as fast as they could, unless it was a critical function of their business (like billing records). And even then that information would be a guarded secret like most reasonable people expect that data should be kept. Mind you, this is a totally seperate issue to wheither the government should maintain databases on individuals, but rather governance of databases by private companies.
The one critical issue regarding apps under Mono is the GUI development issues for cross-platform development.
There is the Windows.Forms implementation, and then a similar effort under Linux, but the portability between the two platforms is difficult at best, primarily because the two environments have such a huge difference in basic API archetechture, especially at the component level.
That said, there are efforts to try and overcome these issues, and for non-GUI applications (command-line or content servers) Mono works equally well in both Linux and Windows.
No wonder the deadline is slipping. That just shows yet more of the cruft that they are dealing with, and I guess they are making a commitment to backward compatability with "undocumented" API calls as well? (where you directly access core kernel functions normally used for strictly internal and usually low-level access)
I hate most of the brand new features anyway. I just want a very clean OS that doesn't interfere with the applications that I am developing, but allows me ease of trying to access equipment peripherals in a convienint and consistant manner. In other words, Microsoft doesn't know the heck of what they are doing.
I actually had this problem happen to me unintentionally.
There was a porn 1-800 number that was identical to my phone number, except that my phone number was located in the Salt Lake City (UT) area code---801.
Needless to say, I got some very interesting phone calls, especially when the number appears in a German magazine. Generally it was a little bit of fun, and a chance to embarass the callers, especially when I put my three-year-old son on the line.
The phone calls ended when my area code changed due to redrawing the phone district and adding a new area code to my state, and the fact that I moved to a new telephone exchange neighborhood.
At the moment my phone number is identical escept for one digit to a local grocery store, where I get phone calls for grocery delivery and occasionally some kids trying to call their friends while they are at work. The senior citizens who can't seem to dial the correct number is kinda sad, and I try to be patient with them and not piss them off.
There was one time, however, that this one person call up and wanted to give a customer complaint. My wife answered it and tried to explain she called the wrong number. This lady who called was so irate that she insisted my wife transfer me to her "supervisor". I ended up talking to the lady and saying "How can I help you?" and took the complaint. I then tried to assure her that the problem would not happen again, and she shut up.
I get about 2-3 calls per week due to this phone number similarity, but I try to avoid really making fun up the people calling up.
The #1 core business that Microsoft has been most successful at even from the beginning is software development tools, and in particular compilers. Writing an operating system is a very natural outgrowth of this activity, as well as an incredible series of good luck when they secured the IBM contract for PC-DOS.
Office software, at least at the initial stages, really isn't too much different than writing a good user interface for a compiler text editor. Microsoft wasn't even the first company to try and integrate office automation software packages, but there were natural advantages of selling this sort of software where you could tweak the operating system itself to boost performance of this sort of software. Even now, many parts of Windows are built to make it easier for MS-Office developers to get their product working, and it is often difficult to describe where MS-Office ends and Windows begins.
Silly projects like MSN and MSNBC are some major tangents that are sucking the lifeblood out, as well as the host of small companies MS has bought out over the years.
And now with Bill Gates trying to make computers for 3rd world countries, as well as trying to figure out how to get China to pay for its copies of Windows. Very definitely way out of dealing with their core business.
I agree that MS won't collapse right away, unless Bill Gates simply wants to shut the whole thing down, take the money, and run. At the moment Microsoft is still a profitable company, so even if the return on the money isn't that great it isn't a sinking hole like Enron or Tycho.
This article mentions the fact that Longhorn is slipping on its shipping schedule.
There are a number of reasons for this, perhaps most importantly is that Microsoft is trying to do a true X.0 full-rewrite release of the core operating system, with a bunch of "new" features. It is dubious that their "customers" (aka independent software developers and small businesses).
I will also say that for any major software project, when you do a genuine X.0 full code-base rewrite (cleaning out the cruft hopefully and redesigning the base archetechture) it is a major gamble. It is also a situation that tests the mettle of the management to see if the resources are properly applied and available, and if you got a small group of excellent developers or a large group of ordinary developers. This is often what makes or breaks any software company.
From my own perspective, even though I've been using Microsoft operating systems now for close to 20 years (gee.... has it been that long?) I will never personally own a copy of Longhorn willingly. I may even quit a job that forces me into using it, I feel so strongly about avoiding it. I was pushed into using XP, and I've since reverted back to Windows 2000 because I can't stand the direction XP has gone. Transitioning from Windows to Linux (or other Unix-based operating systems) is a huge jump, especially since skill sets are so much different, but it appears as though Longhorn is going to be just as big of a jump so I might as well simply ignore what Microsoft is going to do. My preference would be to go back to VMS, but that isn't an option as a major OS platform for new development.
The only projects I hear that might move onto Longhorn are from die-hard Microsoft computer development groups, and that is more because of "*Rah* *Rah* Microsoft can't do wrong" fans who have an MSDN Universal subscription and have been doing this for some time. Genuine new software development is not being planned in that direction. This situation is far worse than the relutance of moving on to Windows 95 or Windows NT (which had real slow acceptance when it first came out). Or even the fiasco that Microsoft had with Windows 3.0 that somehow they pulled out of when Windows 3.1 came out and fixed many of the 3.0 bugs.
My kids are still abuzz over the X-Box, and if Microsoft is going to have any legs, it probably will be in the electronic gaming industry... where it is largely a hegonomy anyway and difficult for small independent developers to get involved. Propritary operating systems are not a problem in that industry either, and even largely expected.
While I will agree that none of the suborbital companies are currently looking at intercontinental travel, there is no mistaking that it isn't something being considered as a future area of expansion.
I'll hit each objection in detail:
Cost: Not really that much more that a simple up and down flight. All that really changes is the flight profile rather than any really new technical challenges, and you sacrifice a little bit of altitude for a horizontal vector to get you someplace else.
Capacity: Pretty much the same "spaceships" as with pure up and down. For more distance you may need a larger fuel tank and an engine rated for a longer burn time, or a larger engine. Still, not significantly more so.
Landing Areas: Again, not really that much different. Space Ship One is able to take-off and land on a conventional runway. With large bodies of water found around the world, a sea-borne landing would also be reasonably possible. Vertical landing like Armadillo Aerospace could also use existing airports.
Air Space: This is interesting because international law does govern spaceflight slightly differently than air travel, so it would be interesting to see which would take precedence. Spaceflight allows you to ignore international boundaries in terms of passage, while air travel requires permission of the nation you are traveling over. Obviously when you are low enough in altitude for take-off and landing you would have to deal with more conventional air corridor clearance, which is done anyway even for straight up and down launches. Even NASA needs to get FAA clearance when it launches or lands any spacecraft, so again, this isn't anything new. And is totally identical to what would be needed for orbital spacecraft to launch and land. Indeed, ballistic trajectories would be easier to predict where it was going to land than would an orbital path where you could in theory land anywhere in the orbital inclination pattern you are traveling in.
Regulation: This is indeed the hardest part of the whole thing. Intercontinental means that you would have to deal with multiple governments (unless you are talking New York City to Guam), and that would have to get permission from both governments in order for a flight to take place. While the U.S. Government is seriously considering what regulatory issues need to occur within U.S. boundaries, other countries like England or Australia havn't even worried about the issues yet or who would even be in charge. The will to allow it to happen at all is much more of an issue, like the lack of willingness to have airports in the USA to be able to land the Concorde. There were only a couple of airports in the USA where the Concorde could land in non-emergency conditions.
Basically, the current hurdle to be crossed is simply getting the spaceship to go up, and it does simplify that task by having only one place and set of regulations to worry about. Once they are successful and have demonstrated a series of flights without incident is the notion that intercontinental flights can even be entertained. And even then with working spacecraft it is much easier to convince a government to allow flights to occur than if it is still in an experimental stage.
This is no different than many of the issues that faced early aircraft builders, and for many of the same reasons.
God forbid if an American spacecraft by mistake ever had to crash-land in North Korea, but it is still something that does have to be at least thought of, and is no different between sub-orbital and orbital spacecraft.
Well, to start with Zero-G Corporation has been booked up so solid that they are raising their prices. And enough people have been up that even some regular /. posters have photos to show their experience.
There will be considerable interest in suborbital flight, and if they get the bugs worked out so that it includes intercontintal flight as well (Los Angeles to Sydney or Auckland to London), there will be solid economic reasons to get booked on these flights besides being a raw thrill ride.
I don't know what the exact numbers will be, but there was even interest in the Concorde in terms of rapid travel between cities. There were numerous problems with the operations of the Concorde, but it was not a lack of paying passengers. Far more it was just raw politics that has discontinued the service.
BTW, I think real controlled space travel to LEO and beyond is much closer than you are suggesting. I would have to agree that there are people who are holding out for going into space and spending days there, not just a few minutes of weighlessness.
The current "going rate" for getting a seat on a Soyuz spacecraft is right now about $20 million USD. And that appears to be going up slightly due to interest by would-be space tourists, as well as the fact that NASA is now buying as many slots as they can until the shuttle program gets going again to keep the ISS up and running.
In comparison, the Falcon V by SpaceX is going to have a price tag of about $16 million USD, which is going to be man-rated. Assuming that an amortized manned payload vehicle is going to cost about that same amount, for the sake of this discussion the total will be about $30 million USD for a manned spaceflight on the Falcon V. With the current discussion that it will be in a configuration of one pilot and four passengers, that ends up being about $8 million USD per passenger.
I think that is a price point that people will be shooting for in the near-term for actual spaceflight to LEO. I don't know what increase in space tourism will result when the cost is lowered by only $10 million, but the key here is that neither NASA nor the Russian government will be able to turn down passengers in this situation.
BTW, $10 million is a figure that is within reason for lottery systems to get a chance to fly in space, as well as for major promotional advertising campaigns. Or four minutes of commercial advertising with the Super Bowl. This is a bit high, but not unreasonbly so, for a corporate research budget, especially if coupled with private space stations that don't have to go through NASA scrutiny and materials with processes that get patent protection.
Mind you, this is for people to be able to get into LEO, not just sub-orbital flight. If Scaled Composites or Armadillo Aerospace can shave the $10 million per passenger per flight figure down even more, there is a huge group of people that could afford to go up for much less. The cost for traveling to the moon would be about double this cost. As Robert A. Heinlein put it, getting to Low-Earth Orbit is halfway to the rest of the solar system.
Assuming huge economies of scale kick in so that a trip to the moon will cost roughly $1 million. That is the amount that an ordinary working person in a 1st world country makes in a lifetime, and the value of some rather ordinary homes in California. If you compared that to what people spent to pay for colonization efforts to the Americas in the 15th & 16th Centuries vs. what ordinary people could afford to pay to travel to the Americas back then, this is very comparable. All that is left for Lunar colonization to be self-sufficient is political will to allow it to happen. And once you have cities on the Moon it will be all but impossible to keep people away from Mars and the asteroids.
This is not just the realm of multi-millionaires, and certainly well within the reach of billionaires just wanting to take an exotic vacation.
One of the things that is going to be driving at least the LEO space launchers will be the fact that getting out of the gravity well of the Earth is so difficult that there must be near perfection of the equipment just to be able to get up at all.
There is also a manned spaceflight tradition that is now close to 60 years old, with roughly 200+ manned spaceflight missions between the USA and Russia to draw upon, including the deaths of close to 50 people in some very tragic and for 14 televised live on television world-wide. That is a body of experience to draw upon for some rule making, and indeed it is largely that experience that is driving the industry and is in the back of the minds of people like Oberstar and the regulators at the FAA-AST. (BTW, I think Oberstar is going too far.) For unmanned space launches, the number of launches is close to 100,000 (just off the top of my head, and based on figures for the number of satellites that both the former USSR and the USA have sent up) that have reached orbital velocities, and there have been a number of tragic losses of life in that number as well.
Where the real learning curve is going to come is when industry is established in LEO with several private space stations doing tourism and research platforms much more efficient than the ISS. At that point you will start to see space vehicles that are design to be flown exclusivly in space only, not for re-entry or traveling through atmospheric flight.
So far there has only been two spacecraft ever designed in a serious manner to perform this task: The Lunar Landers of both the USA and the USSR. And only one of them has ever even flown in space. And that for only a total of 10 missions. That is hardly a body of knowledge to go up against, and is much more likely to be the realm of tinkerers and back-yard mechanics than anything currently being done in commercial space.
Even a modestly efficient rocket engine like what Armadillo Aerospace has already used would be sufficient for space-to-space destinations. There is also considerable unexplored territory for new propulsion methods, including Ion propulsion, solar sails, nuclear engines, and more that leave a lot of room for imagination. Except for the design and implementation of a nuclear reactor (for a real space-ship rather than space craft), there is hardly any real engineering knowledge about what is needed at all. And even the nuclear reactors would have to rely upon knowledge gained from operating nuclear submarines, which won't totally translate to a space environment.
It will be exciting to see just what commercial space will come up with in the next few decades.
You are assuming that the CEV will even be built. The U.S. Constitution absolutely guarentees that there will be two more Presidential administrations between now and then, possibly more, and requirements that Congress will have to do annual budgetary approval on the project simply add to the issues. That and the recent history NASA has shown toward developing new manned spaceflight vehicles would seem to indicate that the CEV is doomed to almost certain failure.
The only glimmer of hope that it might succeed is indeed the fact that the Shuttles are being forced into retirement, and I don't see any movement in Congress to change that, particularly when even the strongest supporters of manned spaceflight are trying to kill the Shuttle program. Being without a manned space vehicle would essentially make NASA a museum caretaker, and an aviation research agency. I think you would find public support for NASA to drop almost completely if the manned spaceflight program were disbanded, and most people at NASA seem to realize that as well.
I do support the development of the CEV at the moment, but there are competitive pressures put on NASA contractors now that have never been in the government space arena before. If the CEV starts to show the kinds of failures in management that the Shuttle program is [in]famous for, there are several other groups in private industry that might just be able to provide a cheaper alternative to getting crews up to the ISS and LEO in general. Five or six years from now (when the Shuttles get hopfully sent to the Smithsonian) it will be a lot more clear just who is a major contender in manned spaceflight and what launch options are going to be available. It would be ironic if NASA astronauts had to book a flight on Virgin Galactic to get to the ISS. I pray that NASA doesn't screw up that bad.
I know people who have businesses in Russia (with American financing), and right now the political situation in Russia is such that it isn't a very reliable idea to make much of any business investment into Russia at the moment. Even for a very sure thing (like selling Coca-Cola in Russia) you aren't very sure that you will get your money back.
It is much better than when the Soviets were in power, but the Russian court system may still end up taking property and business investments away from you even if you have done a good job of running a bussiness in Russia profitably. I do hope that Russia gets their act together, and I think 50-100 years from now Russia is still going to be a major economic and political leader in the world. The next couple of decades are going to be a wild ride, however.
In short, it would be much safer for somebody like Paul Allen or some other billionaire to invest in American companies instead where the legal system is more stable and predictable. Or even a business in the EU for that matter, especially when there is inherant risk to the whole concept even working in the first place.
While Carmack may not have made a successful X-Prize flight up to 100 km, he certainly was one of the major contenters with actual working hardware. Indeed, I would call his efforts much more believeable than what I've seen so far from many of the other X-Prize teams, including DiVinci (which looks largely like a scam in progress IMHO).
Carmack, Rutan, and Musk are certainly reasonable to group together as peers for a group like this, even though they are all following very different approaches to developing manned spacecraft. Of the three efforts (Armadillo, Scaled Composites, and SpaceX respectively), Carmack's is perhaps the most economical approach, although I think SpaceX is going to achieve manned orbital spaceflight first. The Falcon V is being designed from the beginning as a man-rated vehicle even though its business plan is successful if it only launches unmanned cargo. All three companies have a reasonable shot at getting LEO vehicles up and going in the next 20 years, and will likely be major players in the space tourism business. I'm sure that Boeing is also paying attention very closely.
As has been pointed out in congressional testimony as well as by many of the people forming this "federation", if the regulations become too much tighter, there is a very high likelyhood that you will see other countries take over from the USA in terms of leadership in the development in space.
Indeed, this is largely happening even now, with Russia as the only country (not even the USA at the moment) with a proven and currently available manned spaceflight capability. And China is very close to having that same ability, along with India not too much further behind.
And just about anybody who follows the space industry would note that in order for NASA to develop a replacement spacecraft for the Shuttle, it would be a 10-year ordeal costing clost to $50 Billion dollars... even for an Apollo-type crash program to get something working. That is neither money nor time that NASA has available to them. It would likely cost more and take even longer than these crude estimates if the bureaucracies within NASA get their hands on the project as well.
Basically, the only "salvation" that NASA has is that they will have to go with privately built spacecraft for astronauts to get into LEO in the 2020's. Or swallow a whole lot of national pride and go with foreign launch systems for critical military and classified space activities. That isn't really an option either. I don't see the current Space Shuttles being in operation in 2020, and no politician is going to support having them around if it doesn't get them too many votes.
Once there is an established commercial space launch business (including manned spaceflight), this may be more of a problem. Even then, there isn't anything particularly important about going into space from US soil, as any launch for the next century will have to be scheduled at least several weeks or months in advance, making it reasonable for a U.S. citizen to travel to Diego Garcia if needed to go into space. Especially if going up from the Indian Ocean is half or 1/10th the cost. Basically, there will be huge competitive pressures to keep costs down.
The main reason to form a group like this is to counter the heirs of Senator Proxmire (D-WI) who seem to seek the dismantling of the U.S. space industry. Notably Representative Oberstar is one of those congressmen who want to see private space go away.
When the military "turns off" the high precision GPS data, what they do is put in a scrambling code that uses a pseudo-random number generator to throw the precision off. This makes the numbers less accurate for civilian (and supposedly enemy combatants) using GPS for coordinates. This algorithm changes (or did change) regularly, but was published through classified channels and could be compensated for with military equipment.
What the military did a few years ago was shut down the scrambling operation, so as a result the numbers are considerably more accurate.
There is the potential of "turning off GPS" as well, but that is much more extreme.... probably to be done only on a situation like 9/11/2001. You would know about it as a civilian because it would be advertised all over the place and commercial flights would be grounded... ships told to stay put where they just happened to be at, and a total grinding to a halt of the U.S. economy. Basically not a trivial thing that would be done lightly. Even the scrambling system being turned back on would be a time to start investing strongly in gold and other precious metals.
Having been involved with retail sales, the design and engineering of electronic components, as well as having lived in 3rd World slums (all at different times in my life), I think I can speak for all of these things.
A homeless person in Africa or some other war-ravaged area (like Gaza or even Kosovo) is struggling from day to day largely because of political issues, and often they have difficulty surviving from day to day merely because the resources are not available. My own ancestors (great-great grandparents) were in this position due to the wars in Central Europe during the 18th & 19th Centuries, and choose to relocate to America largely to avoid the problems resulting from these wars. It is particuarly harsh when there are not countries willing to take on the refugees from these messes.
There are also some issues that result from people moving from an agririan society to a manufacturing economy, and the huge population and cultural shifts that occur with that sort of shift. Most of these shifts occured either in the late 19th Century and up through most of the 1930's in Europe and North America (a little bit later in Mexico). This did result in huge amounts of poverty as a by-product, and the creation of large slums where hoards of unskilled laborers showed up to work in the manufacturing plants. Just as Europe, the USA, and Japan had to deal with these issues early in the 20th Century, countries like India and China are dealing them them now. Political instability is keeping the countries in Africa from even beginning to make a dent in these issue, which is why there is so much widespread poverty in Africa. This has also been a problem in South America, but the governments in South America have largely resolved the messes that resulted in the political coups that occured during the 1960's and 1970's, except in regions like southern Columbia. As a result, you don't find nearly the problems in South America as you do in Africa.
Homeless people in the USA have many other deeper problems, especially the cronic homeless, either due to mental illness that goes untreated, a world-view that emotionally prevents them from moving on in their lives, or the fact that they are involved with aspects of organized crime (including very strong illegal drugs they can't stop using because of dependancy reasons). I'm not saying that life isn't tough, but for any person who can't pull themselves up from a homeless position is somebody not ambitious, and not willing to relocate. Or they simply enjoy on some perverse viewpoint not having to worry about the issues of trying to come up with rent or a house payment each month.
There is a certain unwillingness of computer manufacturers from having a sub $100 computer, and it is not just due to depressed economies. From a marketing/PR viewpoint, once you drop prices down or have competition below a certain point, it can blow away a whole industry. I've seen this with certain specialized farm implements where a small machine shop decides to make the very best item, like a potato harvester, and sell it cheap. They sell a whole bunch for a few years, but very soon it saturates the market. Because they did such a good job making it in the first place, it seldom breaks down, or is easily repaired. Quickly the market disappears simply because everybody who needed it already has one, or can buy a used one fairly cheap. As a result, that manufacturing company goes out of business. This is exactly what computer manufacturers are almost deathly afraid would happen if a reliable sub $100 PC were to be developed.
Also, the #1 expense in most electronic components manufacturing companies is the construction and maintainence of the chip fab. This is a very highly specialized process that requires people with advanced university-level eduation, and reliable 1st world quality utilities and political stability, as well as an up-front capital expendature of millions of dollars. You can pay for this indirectly by purchasing commodity chips, but th
The problem with describing what is a "moon" is that there is the current philosophy that a planet must be involved in order to call it a moon.
I think that is wrong, and it fails to deal with objects that orbit only the galactic core, which includes many items much smaller than brown dwarfs that we can't see right now with telescopes. It also doesn't deal with things like Ida/Gaspra which is a dual asteroid system, although you can in theory call Gaspra the "moon" of Ida in the sense that its mass is substantially smaller.
The term "moon" applied to other objects comes up from Gallileo trying to apply a term to the objects he saw going around Jupiter. It turns out that the universe is far more complex than he ever could have imagined, and that is where the difficulty arises. In this sense, if you want to call the Earth's Moon a moon, similar objects can also be caracterized as such.
Then the next question is if you base that classification on what they orbit (the galactic core, a star, or a planet), or merely on their mass and general manefestations related to that (if they have an atmosphere, are spherical, and have an escape velocity > 0.0001 m/s).
I would beg to differ on that. The distribution costs in developed countries can be surprisingly low. I mean, the distribution costs for moving a ton of bannans from Central America to New York City or Kansas can keep the cost of down to less than a 50 cents a pound.
The distribution infrastruction in many developing countries is almost non-existant, and I think you would find that the labor costs associated with selling items like this computer would be much more in Gambia or Rwanda than it would be in London, Paris, or St. Louis. The distribution costs are not the big issue here, but rather identifing what commodity CPU and memory chips could be had to make this a truly cheap computer.
You miss the point of the parent post. There are many situations where it would be nice to have a new (not refurbished computer from a thrift store--often there because several things are broken) computer that may be slightly underpowered but cheap, even in 1st World countries.
And the point here is that not only would it be useful to make available in sub-Saharan Africa or rural India, but to inner-city youth of Liverpool or Los Angeles.
As well, the point here is that you can make something like this available as a cheap commodity computer (avoid the feature bloat... this is to make a very cheap mass-produced computer), it will drive the price down even more simply due to economies of scale. Electronic components are particularly sensitive to volumes of production.
In addition to simply having these computers around at the check-out stands of your local Wal-Mart, there will be a community of developers and tinkerers that will be using the equipment...many of which could translate and port some of the tools and concepts from more expensive equipment to a very cheap platform like this.
There have been some amazing things done with some of the old 8-bit platforms, like the Comodore 64 and the Apple ][, including TCP/IP stacks and web browsers that would have been unheard of when they were originally put together.
An example of a projct made for "an initiative only making sense in desparate circumstances" that has practical application in 1st World countries, The Freeplay Wind-up Radio is one of the most innovative projects to come up. This is a device that doesn't need an external power source, is very rugged, and works in areas of the world like Rwanda or Congo. It is also sold in the USA and Canada to people who want to keep an emergency radio available during a disaster, so you don't have to constantly check and see if the batteries are working.
How come a laptop computer couldn't be any different?
Or to paraphrase your Bill Maher quote a little differently, why not go from 10 to 11 when we can also help a country go from 0 to 1? It doesn't have to be a zero-sum game.