I'm not totally sure where you got your world history lessons from, but Iraq was the Soviet ally and Iran was the U.S. ally. For the Iran-Iraq war it was pretty much a field test of Soviet weapons vs. American weapons, with Iran possessing many U.S. made weapons bought primarily by the Shah.
Keep in mind that before 1979 Iran had a very strong working relationship with the USA. Most major multi-national companies had some sort of branch office in Iran, and there was substantial "westernizing" activities like radio stations playing American music, shopping malls, and even missionaries from American churches running around converting people to Christianity. I personally know some people who were civilians working in Iran when the U.S. embassy was sacked, and they have some very interesting stories about how they got out of the country...some by the skin of their teeth.
Iraq has been largely equiped with Soviet equipment including MiG aircraft and Russian built tanks that were even used in the Iraq war, with many Russian RPGs that are still being used against the U.S. Army even today. Saddam Hussein also had several pictures of Stalin around his palaces, and considered Stalin to be his "hero" of what a good leader should be like. Saddam did a pretty good job of following his example, didn't he?
I will admit that during the Reagan administration there were some minor attempts to become friendlier to Iraq, but to call Iraq a U.S.-backed country totally misses the mark. Up until the fall of the Berlin Wall were there substantial number of Soviet advisors in Iraq, and Iraq was always influenced by Soviet policy much more than American. Keep in mind that there was an East German embassy in Iraqi occupied Kuwait, to give a historical timeline to events in Soviet Russia. And clearly Iraq after the Gulf War was never a U.S. client state by any stretch of the imagination.
Soviet Russia did try to support Iran, but keep in mind that while the USA was the "Great Satan", the USSR was called and considered the "Lesser Satan", according to the Iranian government under Kohmenni, and to kill a Soviet soldier was just as worthy as killing an American. While somewhat diminished, Iran still has this same attitude, even about the Russian Republic.
The battery issue is really THE issue that has kept electric cars from becoming dominent for the past century. Yes, century, because several auto makers over 100 years ago built electric cars. The problem was the energy storage methods, as most electric vehicles are either diesel-electric (like most modern locomotives) or grab their electricity from a 3rd rail or overhead wires. This includes urban bus systems that are sometimes electrified, as well as light rail systems.
It would be impractical for personal vehicles to grab onto a power grid, not to mention how the tolls would levied for personal use of the energy.
The potential for a fuel-cell based vehicle gives the ability to have an efficent electricity generator source to be coupled with an electric motor. The side-effect of such a device is that it is trivial to take a fuel cell that can be used for automobiles and then put it in your home. That would be a major disruptive force with the power generation utilities.
Iraqi space efforts would be NASA via Halliburton for 150% of what NASA would charge.
The country that would get some real attention would be an Iranian Space Program. The ability to put a nuke into New York City from Terhan by air delivery would certainly wake up the U.S. government. That is precisely why Sputnik was taken so seriously back in the 1950's.
The FAA has "matured" due to issues dealing with aviation hucksters and con artists who try to come up with all kinds of new ways to build airplanes, as well as "fly-by-night" aviation schools that teach you how to fly with poor techniques and really are just there to scam you out of some more money. With FAA regulations you have an independent testing authority for pilot certification as well as a methodology for "approval" of equipment that flies through the sky.
Also, the AST has been bouncing around the Federal Government as an agency in search of a home. This position that they are in right now with the FAA is a much better fit than most other places I could think of. Would you rather they be a branch of the USAF? NASA? Neither of those alternatives seems appealing to me, and only NASA even remotely seems close.
What is funny is that the public goals of NASA when NASA was originally set up seem to be what the AST is actually accomplishing, or at least what the public perception of what NASA was supposed to do. NASA was supposed to be "The Space Agency", and offer a civilian role to spaceflight, as opposed to efforts of the Army or Air Force. A good question would be: What happened?
It will be a sad day when the AST has a larger budget and more personnel than NASA, although that will only happen if the commercial space industry really takes off and becomes the multi-trillion dollar industry it has the potential of becomming.
One huge benefit from this "space law" activity is that the FCC is being told to stay away from commercial regulation of space activities.
Yes, the FCC, not the FAA. It appears as though the FCC is trying to step into the act of approving vehicles that are sent into space, due to the fact that they contain components or are often exclusivly designed to relay radio frequencies. The question that congress needs to address here is if the FCC authority ends with the transmitter itself, or if they also can regulate any other equipment connected to the transmitter, including the launcher that put the transmitter in orbit, and the rocket fuel company that helped put that rocket up as well.
At least this way the FAA can step in and say they have primary juristiction regarding what regulations happen with the rocket fuel company, as it is more tied to spaceflight operations rather than communications issues, and a judge can step in with FCC regulations for fuel requirements and say that the FCC has oversteped its congressional or constutional authority.
I am sorry that you've never heard of my country, dispite the fact that it is clearly marked on many maps and is the 4th largest country in the world geographically and 3rd largest in terms of population, unless you count the European Union as a country, which makes it the 4th largest.
America is the land located between Canada and Mexico, just as Columbia is the name of the country on the north end of South America.
The reason I call myself an American is because the name of my country is America, and the issues about North and South America as continents is a seperate naming issue. When I see the term USAian, I think that the speaker or writer is not only trying to be insulting, but is also suffering from a severe inferiority complex from being from either a European country that is trying to emulate America in being a part of a greater Europe, or from another country in "The Americas" that doesn't totally understand what my country is about and what the name of my country is. I also find the term "North American" to be equally insulting, but at least technically accurate when talking with citizens of some South American countries, unlike USAian.
Another way to look at it is that the USA is also the "American Union" just like there is the "European Union", and the government of America is open to any country that wants to join. That the American Congress has screwed up the procedure for doing so and made joining the American Union more of a liability than an asset at the moment is a seperate issue.
Yeah, just find a federal judge and say the following sentance:
"I hereby renounce my citizenship of the United States of America." That's it, and you don't technically have to sign anything even. I think you can also do this to a U.S. consul or diplomat for the same effect, or scribble something to that effect and send it to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC. A postcard would do just fine that way as well.
BTW, I am not a USA-ian, I am an American and damn proud of it. Thank you swv3752 for pointing that out. I live in America and am a citizen of one of its states. Unfortunately there are many people who can't figure out that the country of America even exists.
Who knows? Perhaps the Viking probes, the Mars Rovers, and all of the other dozen or so spacecraft that have crashed on Mars have released all of that pollution and nuclear waste to start damaging the environment on Mars as well.
There are a number of things that could be causing substantial changes in the Earth's global climate picture, and man-made pollution is only one of them.
I conceed that there are local environments that have changed substantially from 10,000 years ago, or even 200 years ago, and that local environment is different directly due to human influence. Witness Los Angeles, where the first settlement in that location died off to the last person due to a lack of water, and now there is a city of over 10 million people living there (with suburbs, etc.) It is a city that wouldn't exist except for modern (20th century+) technology. Cities like Ur and Basra have also changed their local environment, and in those cases the changes are positively ancient in nature, because the original changes happened several thousand years ago.
There are also some very notable situations where the local environment has not only improved, but improved so substantially that criticisms are totally unwarrented. Most notable in this regard is Pittsburg, PA, where in 1880 the smoke was so thick that you couldn't see more than 1/2 a city block anywhere within city limits. And the Ohio river was so polluted that every fish in it was dead, with oil slicks a very common sight, and almost no plant life at all along the banks of the river. If you go to that same city today, with many more people living there than in 1880, the skies are almost always clear except when it rains, and the rivers are clean enough to fish in (I'm not sure I'd try to eat them, but at least the fish are living there now). I could give similar stories about Minneapolis, NYC, Liverpool, and other 19th Century industrial centers where the environment is in much better shape on a local basis now than in the late 19th Century. And this is stuff we have data on, unlike the 19th Centry satellite telemetry monitoring the ozone hole in Antartica.
Or, it could have just been one of those "jokes" you keep hearing about (and apparently not getting).
I didn't say I didn't chuckle, but after some time of such repeated jokes, including on supposedly "news" sources and opinion pages, some people really start to believe this junk.
The problem most people have with George W. Bush is that he stutters and has a speech impediment. That he somehow became President of the USA over that very huge obsticle is IMHO a huge accomplishment, over and above even becoming President itself. If he were in a wheelchair he would have been held up as a poster child for handicaped rights, but instead people take this very serious disability and turn it into his being stupid and moronic. I'm also impressed that he doesn't even claim "victimhood" over the whole thing, and surprised that there hasn't even been one news story about the whole thing. If you know people who stutter personally, listen sometime to one of W's speeches, and you will see that he does have a problem in that area as well.
Who needs to grow skin here? I mod myself down on a silly comment, and you can't give it a rest. I almost wouldn't reply except that the point I'm trying to make is that through saterical comments, you and those that think like you are going after the President as a person, and in this case that was all that started this thread, when you try to criticize him over things I know for a fact you couldn't possibly know anything about, because if you did know Mr. George Walker Bush in a very personal way there is no way that you would be saying things of that nature. These are out right lies and I'm holding them up as such. It obviously struck such a chord with you that you want to rehash the Iraq War all over again.
I am trying to seperate criticism of his policies and his person, and apparently you can't overcome that point.
If you want to get into some more substantive discussions, I suppose I could, including the "Mission Complete" banner, which I thought was very appropriate and accurate. I don't care to elaborate more at the moment.
I guess you just like to be personnally insulting. I can understand you may not agree with a policy or an issue, and think he is doing something that you would do better at, but to directly assult his character when you have no reason to believe it is just downright ignorant on your part.
Mind you, I'm not defending the President's policy here, just defending his personna and suggesting that he may be a slightly more intelligent person than you seem to be making out.
On a side note regarding the President, he was originally going to be doing some e-mail with his daughters while they were in college. He was even going to get some msn/aol/yahoo account that would seperate out personal e-mail from official correspondance from "THE PRESIDENT", but some lawyers steped in and were able to prove it would actually be illegal for him to do so, since all electronic communications have to go into an official record that is kept by the national archives.
Strangely enough, snail-mail doesn't have the same problems, and can be seperated out between personal correspondance and official communication from the Oval Office.
BTW, if you think that G.W. Bush is really that stupid, I feel sorry for you. Yes, he uses computers. It really isn't that new of an invention, and for some things I'm sure electronic correspondance can be quite effective, not to mention a whole IT team just to take care of everything you can think about doing.
I know this is going off topic, but when folks try to mirror stuff, know the reasons behind it./. doesn't mirror images and websites mainly for legal reasons, not technical. While some sites would more than likely enjoy having a 3rd party do the mirrors (and this story about the elevator is perhaps one of them), it gets really iffy in a legal sense when you are linking to copyrighted content and you provide a mirror of that content. If another group wants to take that legal risk,/. and OSTG certainly won't be complaining too much. User comments can certainly "spread the word" if you provide such a mirror.
There are times, BTW, that/. has been slashdotted. Most notably during 9/11, and on November 2nd of this year (with all of the election stuff spilling over from the politics subsection). Other similar events overwhelmed not just/. but most internet news websites in general. That is a time you would perhpas NOT want to be a mirror, but that is only a guess.
While I would agree that designing airplanes is pretty much a dead end except for some very radical approaches like skyhooks and most of Burt Rutan's designs, the designs for spacecraft are just beginning. Indeed, there has only been one, yes count them one, manned spacecraft for pure point to point travel beyond the earth. And that is the Lunar Excursion Module, or the Lunar Lander. There is so much room for improvement on that design alone, not to mention many other more specialized spacecraft designs that will make the number of kinds of motor vehicles pale by comparison. That includes things like tractors, combines, mining equipment, ore hauling ships, and more.
And besides science fiction authors and movie studios, almost nobody has given any real thought about true spaceSHIPS. If Burt Rutan is to be believed that he wants to have affordable travel to the moon within his lifetime, there will have to be a space liner that travels from LEO to lunar orbit, and is manned with a crew comparable to at least current aircraft designs, if not with berths and potentially staterooms. While naval contractors can give some feeling for what would be needed, the only real comparison I can give are the old hydrogen/helium airships from the 1930's.
I also don't think tragic accidents are going to kill the current drive to get into space. There is too much pent-up demand that simply won't evaporate. While a couple of spectacular failures might slow things down a little bit, it won't be anything like the current pause in U.S. manned spaceflight after Columbia or as it was after Challenger. The real key is to get more than one company putting stuff into space besides Scaled Composites, and it looks like there are about a dozen companies that are going to really start to put things up. Some of them didn't even bother with trying to enter the X-Prize, because it would have distracted their attention from what they really want to do: Get into orbit.
Remember, the bottom fell out of the areospace industry in the mid 1970's because the Vietnam War was winding down, as well as the virtual dismantling of NASA and the layoff of engineers due to both military as well as civilian space contractors. Even the major aircraft companies were going with more stable designs, and most of the aircraft flying in airports had at least their origins from the 1960's, including the 737 and 747 aircraft, or even the DC-10. Only some of the Airbus or Embrair designs are more recent than 1975, and those were all done outside the USA. The only real new Boeing design that is in production is the 757 and 767 series, which are streamlined modifications to the 737 and 747 designs, slightly updated with new avionics and new materials, but clearly no radical change of philosophy or even engine propulsion plant than earlier aircraft. In short, a very stangnet industry. As for even rocket design, Boeing had to bring back a bunch of retired engineers to help update the latest Delta 4 rocket, as litterally they couldn't get anybody with the necessary skill sets to design an actual rocket.
The difference now is that all of the demand is from private citizens or industrial groups, and that is a source of revenue that doesn't have to follow the 4-year cycles of American political spending. They don't have to pay too much attention to stupid Senators like Proximire who tried and almost succeeded to kill space travel for almost 100 years. If regulatory issues become a serious factor, you will find Mexico becoming the next major spacefaring nation in the world. Right now there is intense pressure on the U.S. government to make this happen, and to keep the regulations down to an absolute minimum to keep otherwise innocent people (like the folks in Los Angeles if a mistake happens in Mojave) from getting injured or killed. And keeping silly things like a 4-door Gremlin from becoming a spacecraft when launched from a very huge slingshot or Catapult, even if from "Superman: The Ride".
So all you write is software that connect to databases? That is only one part of a much larger picture of what is expected from software developers. I would generally say that if you are trying to write a user interface into a database, that most of the operations that you will be doing will not have that much of a time critical nature.
On the other hand, if you are writing a word processor, an image processing engine, or dealing with multimedia resources like combining video with embedded data, by its very nature it has to be very time critical. I had to deal with a process that I wanted to make the damn mouse cursor in Windows wait while some very critical processing took place once every 30th of a second (video related). Microsoft in their infinite wisdom put the cursor at priority level 32 in Windows. Time critical process with a time-critical thread. For many tasks that makes sense, but why should the only thing working on a computer be the stupid mouse cursor, because the rest of it is locked up?
Also, if you are working on a pure embedded system, often the kinds of software that you are writing have some very time critical tasks that have to be dealt with. That is why some engineering shops even write their own custom operating system, because an off-the-shelf solution just doesn't seem to work all of the time. Real-Time operating systems is a significant segment of the computer industry, and is used in many things you use routinely, like cell phones or even the door on a hotel room.
I also get very frustrated with many "wigets" or "components" used in a GUI environment. (If you can't tell by here, I've done quite a bit of Win32 API development) The "TreeView" component that is native to Windows works reasonably for modest sided number of items, but as soon as you start getting to several thousand items it really starts to bog down. Also, every button, panel, checkbox, and slider is a "Window" which needs its own handle, gets put into the event queue, and essentially is almost like its own thread in the sense that each window has to sit in the event queue and process all of the events getting thrown around in Windows. All of this processing takes up a considerable amount of CPU time and is for the most part a very sloppy bit of programming. Borland figured out some neat tricks to reduce some of the Windowing overhead, but even with their compilers it still can be a nightmare, simply due to system resources getting bogged down.
There are some very valid reasons to "Do It Yourself" in regards to software development. If you have a very time critical section of code, it is far better to reimplement software, even stuff you've written before, than stick with a more generic library routine. Library routines are by their nature much more bulky from both the standpoint of compiler impact as well from actually running and using the software.
There is also a limit to how many routines you can simply keep track of. If you need a specialty library (such as decompression of an OGG audio stream), that is one thing. To do general software development assistance routines such as even a simple floor function, there are litterally thousands of functions you need to know. Even for common functions that I've used before, I often have to dig up a help file just to remember what arguments I need to use to put into the function. Some compiler tools help (like auto-completion and in-editor argument parsing and hinting), but you still need to understand the subtle changes that can happen when a boolean argument is true or false, and sometimes the meaning isn't all that clear.
Also, every API library I've ever worked with has their own unique flavor and even culture behind how and why they set things up like they do. The Win32 API library comes to mind particularly, and I'm always discovering new things about it. DOS-based systems went a totally different route being very heaving on software interrupts. And Borland Object Pascal standards are quite a bit different from Microsoft MFC. I don't have quite so much experience with Linux, but kernel APIs into Linux are just as rough, and come from a completely different backgroud that takes a bit of time to learn. Even software developers who have been exposed to several environments sometimes have a hard time shifting mentally from one environment to another.
BTW, there are several "plug-in" GPL'd (and non-GPL'd) standards. CORBA, Bonabo, and even Mono (to a small extent... more like class inheritance and interface reuse, but capable of doing real "plug-ins" if you care to) come to mind. Each has its strength and weakness, and it is the weakness of each approach that causes many problems that prevent wider use of the technologies.
And you want to understand where the creative forces and the appeal to young people has gone out of ham radio?
I would also like to mention that even ten years ago there weren't nearly so many legal obsticles to software development. Certainly 30 years ago. There has been some recent legislation that has made software development a profession that almost needs a 1:1 ratio of software developers to lawyers, if not more lawyers than programmers. I don't think it is even possible now to write a serious application (> approx. 10,000 lines of code) without having violated some patent of some sort. And the larger and more versitile the software becomes, the more likly you will have at least one or more companies trying to stop you from distributing that software.
Also, the #1 thing that a computer programmer has to hold up for "certification": A B.S. (or B.A.) in Computer Science or similar specality. To be honest that is much harder to get than a Technician license from the FCC. While it is in theory possible to be a professional software developer without a formal degree, it is quite difficult and most companies won't hire you, even with years of experience. If instead you are working in another industry and just "dabbling" in computers, you really won't be able to compete with the professionals in terms of keeping up with trends in the computer industry or being exposed to a multiple number of coding techniques. Even many of the "Open Source" software projects have at least one full-time programmer doing some development on it, if they have become somewhat useful.
Also, besides the B.S. degree, if a 16 year old wants to get a personal computer and hack up a boot loader, write his very own operating system, and write a compiler for that OS, I say more power to them. I also hope they get a full tuition paid scholarship to just about any college or university that they care to attend.
There are some problems right now in the computer industry, and unfortunately they aren't being addressed right now. I think you need to compare software engineering to nuclear engineering, and see how that now the current crop of high school students who want to get into computer science and software engineering are encountering some incredible barriers to being able to truly understand and work with computers from a hobbyiest viewpoint.
The growth of Linux certainly is counteracting that influence, but there are some things to worry about besides closed API's. It concerns me when CPUs are so incredibly complex that you get a crop of even seasoned software developers who are simply incapable of hand-assembling a piece of software. I'm not talking about doing this for the latest copy of DOOM III, but if you don't know how to hand assemble a simple "for" loop that does a quick bubble sort, you really don't understand the hardware that you are working on.
Also, while abstraction is useful, it is also important to have at least _SOMEBODY_ on a medium sized development team that can go all the way down to the gate level and understand just what is going on in the CPU, and to understand that while computer are fairly consistant, there are still time delays and quantum fluctuations that can affect a piece of software, sometimes even at the wrong time. If you look through the SETI@Home website, they mention that they have to on a daily basis reject some work-units simply because an add operation missed a bit in the carry network or some other similar random fault of the CPU occured. At some point software does have to directly interact with the physical level, and sometimes that happens just in RAM and the CPU itself.
While the above points might show some bias toward how I learned to program computers: On early mainframe computers and early 8-bit micros (where hand assembly was really the only way to do thing unless you had a few $$$ or took the time to write your own assembler), I would have to add that since the collapse of the internet bubble, I would also strongly discourage young people to even get into the industry right now. With significant numbers of software developers still out of work, incredibly intense competition to gettting what few jobs are around, and the outsourcing problems that are plaguing the industry shrinking the current number of jobs down even more, it is getting tougher to really break in. Essentially what I'm saying is that the computer industry right now is burning intelletual capital rather than trying to invest into its future.
If you are smart and want to get into a hot new industry that feels like the computer industry did 20 years ago, I would strongly suggest going into aeronautical engineering and try to join up with Bigelow Aerospace, Scaled Composites, or Armidillo Aerospace. Them and a dozen other companies right now are getting ready to boom, and that is going to further take away the creative types that earlier fueled the computer industry.
This is perhaps the #1 analogy that I can use with ham radio, which is struggling right now trying to attract the young smart minds that have the talent and the slightly off-axis humor to be able to build things like radio frequency jammers, blue and black boxes, or even computer virii. From doing those irreverent and potentially illegal in some context applications, many young people formed the skill sets that makes many of the advanced technology applications that we see today. I fear that the computer industry is losing that group in particular, and now all that is left are folks who can follow a recipie (script kiddies), but are incapable of coming up with anything like that on their own. Some of that is still left, but many school and university administrators are now beating out any creative urge in most schools in regards to computers.
I'm speaking now to the creative 1% of humanity who really makes things happen. They aren't missed right away when they are gone, but you eventually
I know that he is from Bangladesh, but here is a quote that threw me for a loop:
"The new system will be based on open source codes. Many of the developers on the 30-member development team, led by Shamsuddoha Ranju, senior executive engineer of Siemens Bangladesh Ltd, are based in the US and work at IBM, Microsoft and Linux." -- The Daily Star (URL quoted manytimes elsewhere)
I don't know what to think of that, and the fact that many "developers" are based in the good ol' USA would certainly put a dampner on things... unless he is counting the ReactOS team as his group of developers. In which case, he also needs a head check to note that there are many other countries represented in the ReactOS group.
Also, claiming affiliation with Siemens is not a good way to keep your job with a multi-national company. They would not like the fact that one of their engineers is dragging their name through mud right now, and regardless of any other affiliation he may have, he is likely not to have his job next week just off the bad press that this is generating alone. It largely depends on how much the corporate offices want to crack down on one of their employees in Bangladesh.
As long as he is not selling the software in the United States or Europe (where the copyright terms of the GPL will be enforced), nor generating any money of any kind, nor having any assets of any sort go through Europe or the USA, yeah, you are probably correct.
It is just that I doubt he will collect too much money by trying to sell it in China or Ghana. And he had better make very sure to send back all money that comes his way from the USA.
Since it appears that he is physically in the USA, that could be a little bit of a problem.
It could be argued that the Portuguese already knew about the Americas before Columbus, and certain there is evidence that Irish monks and Viking sailors made it to North America before 1500 A.D. There is even a Viking settlement in Newfoundland that seems to be authenticated pretty well, and is now a U.N. World Cultural Heritage site.
The Portuguese were more likely to take advantage of trade with the Americas, but it wasn't until Columbus started to publicize what he found that they finally decided to go to Brazil and claim at least part of the territory. In this case exploration was helped considerably when two major world powers decided to go head to head in a non-military way... just as the competition between the USSR and the USA paved the way for the Apollo program. When France and England decided to get into the game things really took off, followed by colonial grabs by Russian, Germany, and Italy.
I think it is no small part with some new nations entering the space race (China and India for now) that things are starting to shake loose again for major space exploration (and not just space transportation systems). That together with a much better understanding of the issued involved with getting into space in the first place.
Keep in mind there were other parties besides the USSR and the USA, although you are correct that it was the USSR and USA that were the primary signers and the people who really had anything substantial to do with the treaty when it was written.
There is also, BTW, a provision to withdraw from the treaty, which requires the nation who is withdrawing to send formal notice to all signatory nations that they are going to withdraw, wait a year, then you can act as though you had never signed it in the first place. I guess the Bush Administration is giving notice that they are formally withdrawing from the treaty?
While this may seem like a rip-off, everything is much more open than a typical commercial R&D subcontract. Those are usually done like NASA has done things, or worse, especially for the sub-contractor.
At least in this situation everything is going to be out in the open, you don't have to worry about missing deadlines, because the deadlines are something that you set personally. It may be influenced by competition, but even then it is quite straight forward, and if you miss the prize because somebody else beat you to that... that is simply the rules of the game. Normally if this were an R&D subcontract like you were implying, there would be the primary contractor or customer who would be breathing down your neck asking for status reports every couple of days, if not daily or hourly (depending on how anal the customer is and mission critical the project is).
On the other hand, I agree that this is a very cost-effective solution in terms of getting needed components on a very visible project. It would be impressive if GM or Ford did something similar in terms of building a hydrogen-fueled engine or even a major utility company in regards to highly efficient power generation. Set the specific requirements and guarentee a certain minimum buy of the power generated from such a facility, such as a wind farm, geothermal vents, or even a nuclear power plant with an established maximum of nuclear waste generation. There is some real engineering that could be accomplished using this model that would be incredibly effective.
This could even be done for software components that implement a certain technology. Just for instance, if you set up a contest to pay for the first implementation of a new audio or video codec that also has features X,Y,Z (like a plug-in to winamp, and LGPL libraries, etc).
The main requirement here to do such a contest is that 1) the discussion of the project can be done publicly and 2) the resulting product while complimentary to your product line, does not directly compete with what you do for your main line business or with the industry (when a large number of corporate sponsors are involved).
In this case with Bigelow Aerospace, they really need to have these spacecrafts available, but don't really intend to build and fly them.
Not every engineering challenge can be solved this way, but there are a number than can be done. This is also why Thiokol won't be a sponsor (although perhaps a competitor?), because this does directly compete with what they do for a business.
One of the problems with garbage disposal is that most garbage is the result of inefficient use of resources. Sometimes people can use the "dumps" to get extra resources that the original people who threw the stuff away never thought about.
A classic example of this was the gold mines in Virginia City, Nevada. For about 10-15 years miners spent quite a bit of time (and very dangerous effort) trying to extract gold out of the mountains around the city. They started to dump the tailings from the gold mining into one area, when one very enterprising individual discovered that the talings were very high in silver. Very quietly he ended up buying the tailings (they were already out of the ground, so he didn't have to buy the mines or pay miners in the same way), and made a huge fortune off of silver.
The same thing can be said about some modern municipal landfills, many of which have a serious problem that they have to deal with: The production of methane. Uncontrolled, it becomes a major pollution issue, but if you tap into it you can turn many "city dumps" into substantial natural gas producing fields.
Perhaps the most misunderstood problem is with nuclear waste. Most nuclear waste is due to the fact that the production centers are very ineffeciently using uranium and the by-products of nuclear power plants can't in turn be reused. In theory they can, and in fact with highly effecient breeder-reactor facilities you can totally dispose of most nuclear waste by "reburning" the waste in the plant itself. The political problem from this is that a facility that can completely dispose of nuclear waste in this manner also has the ability to produce large quantities of Plutonium, in quantities pure enough that it needs to be dilluted in order to make bombs out of it. I am not kidding here either. Yucca Mountain is not a technological issue, it is a political decision to deliberately make innefficient nuclear power plants to stall off a considerably worse political problem if the technology becomes widespread for breeder reactors.
Locally where I live, an aggressive recycling program has brought about an extended lifetime to the "city dump", and pushed its lifetime to be usable for another 20-30 years. The #1 thing they did was to do seperate processing of "green waste", including a seperate collection system with its own "garbage cans" and collection trucks that collect only plant materials, like grass clippings, leaves, branches, etc. The city then processes and mulches this green waste and then in turn sells it as quality topsoil or garden mulch. The sale of these materials almost pays for the whole collection of the stuff in the first place, and the garbage rates the city charges encourage citizens to participate.
There certainly is a small amount of "waste" that somehow has to be dealt with, but the point I'm making here is that there is considerable room for improvement, and we are no where near the limits you seem to be implying.
An interesting issue that you can deal with as well if you are going to write this paper you described is the expanding realm of what we call our environment systems. At first most people worried about the environment of their home, then their local community. Nomadic people dealt with this issue by simply moving when the local resources gave out. When people started to build cities it became considerably harder to abandon a city, but sometimes that has happened, and still does happen every once in a while. Now you have cities acting as specialists, like Delta, Utah, where they have one of the largest coal-fired electric power plants in the world, because they are "importing" air pollution from Los Angeles, who is the primary buyer of their electricity. BTW, the stats for that plant are staggering, especially since the plant itself is in a town of just a couple thousand in a very rural part of Utah. Right now there is considerable awareness of the fact that we no longer can deal with environ
When you are talking about where to get some extra watts of power, there are a couple of source to consider:
Horsepower - I'm not kidding here either. This is why the term is still used for power measurements, because it was commonly used in the past. The neat thing about horses is that horse begat more horses, and all you need is a little grass and water. Oats and salt help to make healthier horses, as does good vetinary care, but that is just a refinement of the basics. If you are talking trying to bootstrap industrial processes, a good horse is not something to ignore.
Mills - A good mill can be constructed from only wood and rough stone, and very common sources of power to turn the mill came from water (the traditional water wheel) and wind. In fact, wind mills are coming back into vogue, but in the case of water (hydropower plants) and wind, the trick is to get the energy away from the areas where it is found to where you need it. Many early factories used belts to turn lathes or other equipment, with the energy derived from the turning water wheel. It was finally after the steam engine was invented that you could build a factory far from a reliable water "power source". Still, even in the late 19th Century it was still easier to build a dam and tap water energy from a river for basic mechanical energy needs (like grinding up wheat for flour) than it was to try and import a steam engine, at least if you lived in frontier areas.
Slaves - While I am not advocating this directly, one of the major economic incentives for slavery was due to the fact that if you needed lots of people to accomplish a simple task, you had slaves do it for you. In ancient times they were usually conquored enemies. With the invention of the modern horse harness, it became cheaper to use horses instead of slaves for most tasks (like plowing agriculture fields and pulling or pushing a bar connected to a turnshaft). I will say, however, that if you go this route times must be very desperate indeed.
Still, just as you've mentioned, you can trade technology for labor, and you quickly discover why manufacturing processes in the past were so labor intensive for comparatively little actual product being produced.
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I'm not totally sure where you got your world history lessons from, but Iraq was the Soviet ally and Iran was the U.S. ally. For the Iran-Iraq war it was pretty much a field test of Soviet weapons vs. American weapons, with Iran possessing many U.S. made weapons bought primarily by the Shah.
Keep in mind that before 1979 Iran had a very strong working relationship with the USA. Most major multi-national companies had some sort of branch office in Iran, and there was substantial "westernizing" activities like radio stations playing American music, shopping malls, and even missionaries from American churches running around converting people to Christianity. I personally know some people who were civilians working in Iran when the U.S. embassy was sacked, and they have some very interesting stories about how they got out of the country...some by the skin of their teeth.
Iraq has been largely equiped with Soviet equipment including MiG aircraft and Russian built tanks that were even used in the Iraq war, with many Russian RPGs that are still being used against the U.S. Army even today. Saddam Hussein also had several pictures of Stalin around his palaces, and considered Stalin to be his "hero" of what a good leader should be like. Saddam did a pretty good job of following his example, didn't he?
I will admit that during the Reagan administration there were some minor attempts to become friendlier to Iraq, but to call Iraq a U.S.-backed country totally misses the mark. Up until the fall of the Berlin Wall were there substantial number of Soviet advisors in Iraq, and Iraq was always influenced by Soviet policy much more than American. Keep in mind that there was an East German embassy in Iraqi occupied Kuwait, to give a historical timeline to events in Soviet Russia. And clearly Iraq after the Gulf War was never a U.S. client state by any stretch of the imagination.
Soviet Russia did try to support Iran, but keep in mind that while the USA was the "Great Satan", the USSR was called and considered the "Lesser Satan", according to the Iranian government under Kohmenni, and to kill a Soviet soldier was just as worthy as killing an American. While somewhat diminished, Iran still has this same attitude, even about the Russian Republic.
The battery issue is really THE issue that has kept electric cars from becoming dominent for the past century. Yes, century, because several auto makers over 100 years ago built electric cars. The problem was the energy storage methods, as most electric vehicles are either diesel-electric (like most modern locomotives) or grab their electricity from a 3rd rail or overhead wires. This includes urban bus systems that are sometimes electrified, as well as light rail systems.
It would be impractical for personal vehicles to grab onto a power grid, not to mention how the tolls would levied for personal use of the energy.
The potential for a fuel-cell based vehicle gives the ability to have an efficent electricity generator source to be coupled with an electric motor. The side-effect of such a device is that it is trivial to take a fuel cell that can be used for automobiles and then put it in your home. That would be a major disruptive force with the power generation utilities.
Iraqi space efforts would be NASA via Halliburton for 150% of what NASA would charge.
The country that would get some real attention would be an Iranian Space Program. The ability to put a nuke into New York City from Terhan by air delivery would certainly wake up the U.S. government. That is precisely why Sputnik was taken so seriously back in the 1950's.
I would strongly suggest that you visit the FAA website for commercial spaceflight before you go too far with the critcisms.
The FAA has "matured" due to issues dealing with aviation hucksters and con artists who try to come up with all kinds of new ways to build airplanes, as well as "fly-by-night" aviation schools that teach you how to fly with poor techniques and really are just there to scam you out of some more money. With FAA regulations you have an independent testing authority for pilot certification as well as a methodology for "approval" of equipment that flies through the sky.
Also, the AST has been bouncing around the Federal Government as an agency in search of a home. This position that they are in right now with the FAA is a much better fit than most other places I could think of. Would you rather they be a branch of the USAF? NASA? Neither of those alternatives seems appealing to me, and only NASA even remotely seems close.
What is funny is that the public goals of NASA when NASA was originally set up seem to be what the AST is actually accomplishing, or at least what the public perception of what NASA was supposed to do. NASA was supposed to be "The Space Agency", and offer a civilian role to spaceflight, as opposed to efforts of the Army or Air Force. A good question would be: What happened?
It will be a sad day when the AST has a larger budget and more personnel than NASA, although that will only happen if the commercial space industry really takes off and becomes the multi-trillion dollar industry it has the potential of becomming.
One huge benefit from this "space law" activity is that the FCC is being told to stay away from commercial regulation of space activities.
Yes, the FCC, not the FAA. It appears as though the FCC is trying to step into the act of approving vehicles that are sent into space, due to the fact that they contain components or are often exclusivly designed to relay radio frequencies. The question that congress needs to address here is if the FCC authority ends with the transmitter itself, or if they also can regulate any other equipment connected to the transmitter, including the launcher that put the transmitter in orbit, and the rocket fuel company that helped put that rocket up as well.
At least this way the FAA can step in and say they have primary juristiction regarding what regulations happen with the rocket fuel company, as it is more tied to spaceflight operations rather than communications issues, and a judge can step in with FCC regulations for fuel requirements and say that the FCC has oversteped its congressional or constutional authority.
I am sorry that you've never heard of my country, dispite the fact that it is clearly marked on many maps and is the 4th largest country in the world geographically and 3rd largest in terms of population, unless you count the European Union as a country, which makes it the 4th largest.
America is the land located between Canada and Mexico, just as Columbia is the name of the country on the north end of South America.
The reason I call myself an American is because the name of my country is America, and the issues about North and South America as continents is a seperate naming issue. When I see the term USAian, I think that the speaker or writer is not only trying to be insulting, but is also suffering from a severe inferiority complex from being from either a European country that is trying to emulate America in being a part of a greater Europe, or from another country in "The Americas" that doesn't totally understand what my country is about and what the name of my country is. I also find the term "North American" to be equally insulting, but at least technically accurate when talking with citizens of some South American countries, unlike USAian.
Another way to look at it is that the USA is also the "American Union" just like there is the "European Union", and the government of America is open to any country that wants to join. That the American Congress has screwed up the procedure for doing so and made joining the American Union more of a liability than an asset at the moment is a seperate issue.
Yeah, just find a federal judge and say the following sentance:
"I hereby renounce my citizenship of the United States of America." That's it, and you don't technically have to sign anything even. I think you can also do this to a U.S. consul or diplomat for the same effect, or scribble something to that effect and send it to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC. A postcard would do just fine that way as well.
BTW, I am not a USA-ian, I am an American and damn proud of it. Thank you swv3752 for pointing that out. I live in America and am a citizen of one of its states. Unfortunately there are many people who can't figure out that the country of America even exists.
Who knows? Perhaps the Viking probes, the Mars Rovers, and all of the other dozen or so spacecraft that have crashed on Mars have released all of that pollution and nuclear waste to start damaging the environment on Mars as well.
There are a number of things that could be causing substantial changes in the Earth's global climate picture, and man-made pollution is only one of them.
I conceed that there are local environments that have changed substantially from 10,000 years ago, or even 200 years ago, and that local environment is different directly due to human influence. Witness Los Angeles, where the first settlement in that location died off to the last person due to a lack of water, and now there is a city of over 10 million people living there (with suburbs, etc.) It is a city that wouldn't exist except for modern (20th century+) technology. Cities like Ur and Basra have also changed their local environment, and in those cases the changes are positively ancient in nature, because the original changes happened several thousand years ago.
There are also some very notable situations where the local environment has not only improved, but improved so substantially that criticisms are totally unwarrented. Most notable in this regard is Pittsburg, PA, where in 1880 the smoke was so thick that you couldn't see more than 1/2 a city block anywhere within city limits. And the Ohio river was so polluted that every fish in it was dead, with oil slicks a very common sight, and almost no plant life at all along the banks of the river. If you go to that same city today, with many more people living there than in 1880, the skies are almost always clear except when it rains, and the rivers are clean enough to fish in (I'm not sure I'd try to eat them, but at least the fish are living there now). I could give similar stories about Minneapolis, NYC, Liverpool, and other 19th Century industrial centers where the environment is in much better shape on a local basis now than in the late 19th Century. And this is stuff we have data on, unlike the 19th Centry satellite telemetry monitoring the ozone hole in Antartica.
I didn't say I didn't chuckle, but after some time of such repeated jokes, including on supposedly "news" sources and opinion pages, some people really start to believe this junk.
The problem most people have with George W. Bush is that he stutters and has a speech impediment. That he somehow became President of the USA over that very huge obsticle is IMHO a huge accomplishment, over and above even becoming President itself. If he were in a wheelchair he would have been held up as a poster child for handicaped rights, but instead people take this very serious disability and turn it into his being stupid and moronic. I'm also impressed that he doesn't even claim "victimhood" over the whole thing, and surprised that there hasn't even been one news story about the whole thing. If you know people who stutter personally, listen sometime to one of W's speeches, and you will see that he does have a problem in that area as well.
Who needs to grow skin here? I mod myself down on a silly comment, and you can't give it a rest. I almost wouldn't reply except that the point I'm trying to make is that through saterical comments, you and those that think like you are going after the President as a person, and in this case that was all that started this thread, when you try to criticize him over things I know for a fact you couldn't possibly know anything about, because if you did know Mr. George Walker Bush in a very personal way there is no way that you would be saying things of that nature. These are out right lies and I'm holding them up as such. It obviously struck such a chord with you that you want to rehash the Iraq War all over again.
I am trying to seperate criticism of his policies and his person, and apparently you can't overcome that point.
If you want to get into some more substantive discussions, I suppose I could, including the "Mission Complete" banner, which I thought was very appropriate and accurate. I don't care to elaborate more at the moment.
I guess you just like to be personnally insulting. I can understand you may not agree with a policy or an issue, and think he is doing something that you would do better at, but to directly assult his character when you have no reason to believe it is just downright ignorant on your part.
Mind you, I'm not defending the President's policy here, just defending his personna and suggesting that he may be a slightly more intelligent person than you seem to be making out.
On a side note regarding the President, he was originally going to be doing some e-mail with his daughters while they were in college. He was even going to get some msn/aol/yahoo account that would seperate out personal e-mail from official correspondance from "THE PRESIDENT", but some lawyers steped in and were able to prove it would actually be illegal for him to do so, since all electronic communications have to go into an official record that is kept by the national archives.
Strangely enough, snail-mail doesn't have the same problems, and can be seperated out between personal correspondance and official communication from the Oval Office.
BTW, if you think that G.W. Bush is really that stupid, I feel sorry for you. Yes, he uses computers. It really isn't that new of an invention, and for some things I'm sure electronic correspondance can be quite effective, not to mention a whole IT team just to take care of everything you can think about doing.
I know this is going off topic, but when folks try to mirror stuff, know the reasons behind it. /. doesn't mirror images and websites mainly for legal reasons, not technical. While some sites would more than likely enjoy having a 3rd party do the mirrors (and this story about the elevator is perhaps one of them), it gets really iffy in a legal sense when you are linking to copyrighted content and you provide a mirror of that content. If another group wants to take that legal risk, /. and OSTG certainly won't be complaining too much. User comments can certainly "spread the word" if you provide such a mirror.
/. has been slashdotted. Most notably during 9/11, and on November 2nd of this year (with all of the election stuff spilling over from the politics subsection). Other similar events overwhelmed not just /. but most internet news websites in general. That is a time you would perhpas NOT want to be a mirror, but that is only a guess.
There are times, BTW, that
While I would agree that designing airplanes is pretty much a dead end except for some very radical approaches like skyhooks and most of Burt Rutan's designs, the designs for spacecraft are just beginning. Indeed, there has only been one, yes count them one, manned spacecraft for pure point to point travel beyond the earth. And that is the Lunar Excursion Module, or the Lunar Lander. There is so much room for improvement on that design alone, not to mention many other more specialized spacecraft designs that will make the number of kinds of motor vehicles pale by comparison. That includes things like tractors, combines, mining equipment, ore hauling ships, and more.
And besides science fiction authors and movie studios, almost nobody has given any real thought about true spaceSHIPS. If Burt Rutan is to be believed that he wants to have affordable travel to the moon within his lifetime, there will have to be a space liner that travels from LEO to lunar orbit, and is manned with a crew comparable to at least current aircraft designs, if not with berths and potentially staterooms. While naval contractors can give some feeling for what would be needed, the only real comparison I can give are the old hydrogen/helium airships from the 1930's.
I also don't think tragic accidents are going to kill the current drive to get into space. There is too much pent-up demand that simply won't evaporate. While a couple of spectacular failures might slow things down a little bit, it won't be anything like the current pause in U.S. manned spaceflight after Columbia or as it was after Challenger. The real key is to get more than one company putting stuff into space besides Scaled Composites, and it looks like there are about a dozen companies that are going to really start to put things up. Some of them didn't even bother with trying to enter the X-Prize, because it would have distracted their attention from what they really want to do: Get into orbit.
Remember, the bottom fell out of the areospace industry in the mid 1970's because the Vietnam War was winding down, as well as the virtual dismantling of NASA and the layoff of engineers due to both military as well as civilian space contractors. Even the major aircraft companies were going with more stable designs, and most of the aircraft flying in airports had at least their origins from the 1960's, including the 737 and 747 aircraft, or even the DC-10. Only some of the Airbus or Embrair designs are more recent than 1975, and those were all done outside the USA. The only real new Boeing design that is in production is the 757 and 767 series, which are streamlined modifications to the 737 and 747 designs, slightly updated with new avionics and new materials, but clearly no radical change of philosophy or even engine propulsion plant than earlier aircraft. In short, a very stangnet industry. As for even rocket design, Boeing had to bring back a bunch of retired engineers to help update the latest Delta 4 rocket, as litterally they couldn't get anybody with the necessary skill sets to design an actual rocket.
The difference now is that all of the demand is from private citizens or industrial groups, and that is a source of revenue that doesn't have to follow the 4-year cycles of American political spending. They don't have to pay too much attention to stupid Senators like Proximire who tried and almost succeeded to kill space travel for almost 100 years. If regulatory issues become a serious factor, you will find Mexico becoming the next major spacefaring nation in the world. Right now there is intense pressure on the U.S. government to make this happen, and to keep the regulations down to an absolute minimum to keep otherwise innocent people (like the folks in Los Angeles if a mistake happens in Mojave) from getting injured or killed. And keeping silly things like a 4-door Gremlin from becoming a spacecraft when launched from a very huge slingshot or Catapult, even if from "Superman: The Ride".
So all you write is software that connect to databases? That is only one part of a much larger picture of what is expected from software developers. I would generally say that if you are trying to write a user interface into a database, that most of the operations that you will be doing will not have that much of a time critical nature.
On the other hand, if you are writing a word processor, an image processing engine, or dealing with multimedia resources like combining video with embedded data, by its very nature it has to be very time critical. I had to deal with a process that I wanted to make the damn mouse cursor in Windows wait while some very critical processing took place once every 30th of a second (video related). Microsoft in their infinite wisdom put the cursor at priority level 32 in Windows. Time critical process with a time-critical thread. For many tasks that makes sense, but why should the only thing working on a computer be the stupid mouse cursor, because the rest of it is locked up?
Also, if you are working on a pure embedded system, often the kinds of software that you are writing have some very time critical tasks that have to be dealt with. That is why some engineering shops even write their own custom operating system, because an off-the-shelf solution just doesn't seem to work all of the time. Real-Time operating systems is a significant segment of the computer industry, and is used in many things you use routinely, like cell phones or even the door on a hotel room.
I also get very frustrated with many "wigets" or "components" used in a GUI environment. (If you can't tell by here, I've done quite a bit of Win32 API development) The "TreeView" component that is native to Windows works reasonably for modest sided number of items, but as soon as you start getting to several thousand items it really starts to bog down. Also, every button, panel, checkbox, and slider is a "Window" which needs its own handle, gets put into the event queue, and essentially is almost like its own thread in the sense that each window has to sit in the event queue and process all of the events getting thrown around in Windows. All of this processing takes up a considerable amount of CPU time and is for the most part a very sloppy bit of programming. Borland figured out some neat tricks to reduce some of the Windowing overhead, but even with their compilers it still can be a nightmare, simply due to system resources getting bogged down.
There are some very valid reasons to "Do It Yourself" in regards to software development. If you have a very time critical section of code, it is far better to reimplement software, even stuff you've written before, than stick with a more generic library routine. Library routines are by their nature much more bulky from both the standpoint of compiler impact as well from actually running and using the software.
There is also a limit to how many routines you can simply keep track of. If you need a specialty library (such as decompression of an OGG audio stream), that is one thing. To do general software development assistance routines such as even a simple floor function, there are litterally thousands of functions you need to know. Even for common functions that I've used before, I often have to dig up a help file just to remember what arguments I need to use to put into the function. Some compiler tools help (like auto-completion and in-editor argument parsing and hinting), but you still need to understand the subtle changes that can happen when a boolean argument is true or false, and sometimes the meaning isn't all that clear.
Also, every API library I've ever worked with has their own unique flavor and even culture behind how and why they set things up like they do. The Win32 API library comes to mind particularly, and I'm always discovering new things about it. DOS-based systems went a totally different route being very heaving on software interrupts. And Borland Object Pascal standards are quite a bit different from Microsoft MFC. I don't have quite so much experience with Linux, but kernel APIs into Linux are just as rough, and come from a completely different backgroud that takes a bit of time to learn. Even software developers who have been exposed to several environments sometimes have a hard time shifting mentally from one environment to another.
BTW, there are several "plug-in" GPL'd (and non-GPL'd) standards. CORBA, Bonabo, and even Mono (to a small extent... more like class inheritance and interface reuse, but capable of doing real "plug-ins" if you care to) come to mind. Each has its strength and weakness, and it is the weakness of each approach that causes many problems that prevent wider use of the technologies.
And you want to understand where the creative forces and the appeal to young people has gone out of ham radio?
I would also like to mention that even ten years ago there weren't nearly so many legal obsticles to software development. Certainly 30 years ago. There has been some recent legislation that has made software development a profession that almost needs a 1:1 ratio of software developers to lawyers, if not more lawyers than programmers. I don't think it is even possible now to write a serious application (> approx. 10,000 lines of code) without having violated some patent of some sort. And the larger and more versitile the software becomes, the more likly you will have at least one or more companies trying to stop you from distributing that software.
Also, the #1 thing that a computer programmer has to hold up for "certification": A B.S. (or B.A.) in Computer Science or similar specality. To be honest that is much harder to get than a Technician license from the FCC. While it is in theory possible to be a professional software developer without a formal degree, it is quite difficult and most companies won't hire you, even with years of experience. If instead you are working in another industry and just "dabbling" in computers, you really won't be able to compete with the professionals in terms of keeping up with trends in the computer industry or being exposed to a multiple number of coding techniques. Even many of the "Open Source" software projects have at least one full-time programmer doing some development on it, if they have become somewhat useful.
Also, besides the B.S. degree, if a 16 year old wants to get a personal computer and hack up a boot loader, write his very own operating system, and write a compiler for that OS, I say more power to them. I also hope they get a full tuition paid scholarship to just about any college or university that they care to attend.
There are some problems right now in the computer industry, and unfortunately they aren't being addressed right now. I think you need to compare software engineering to nuclear engineering, and see how that now the current crop of high school students who want to get into computer science and software engineering are encountering some incredible barriers to being able to truly understand and work with computers from a hobbyiest viewpoint.
The growth of Linux certainly is counteracting that influence, but there are some things to worry about besides closed API's. It concerns me when CPUs are so incredibly complex that you get a crop of even seasoned software developers who are simply incapable of hand-assembling a piece of software. I'm not talking about doing this for the latest copy of DOOM III, but if you don't know how to hand assemble a simple "for" loop that does a quick bubble sort, you really don't understand the hardware that you are working on.
Also, while abstraction is useful, it is also important to have at least _SOMEBODY_ on a medium sized development team that can go all the way down to the gate level and understand just what is going on in the CPU, and to understand that while computer are fairly consistant, there are still time delays and quantum fluctuations that can affect a piece of software, sometimes even at the wrong time. If you look through the SETI@Home website, they mention that they have to on a daily basis reject some work-units simply because an add operation missed a bit in the carry network or some other similar random fault of the CPU occured. At some point software does have to directly interact with the physical level, and sometimes that happens just in RAM and the CPU itself.
While the above points might show some bias toward how I learned to program computers: On early mainframe computers and early 8-bit micros (where hand assembly was really the only way to do thing unless you had a few $$$ or took the time to write your own assembler), I would have to add that since the collapse of the internet bubble, I would also strongly discourage young people to even get into the industry right now. With significant numbers of software developers still out of work, incredibly intense competition to gettting what few jobs are around, and the outsourcing problems that are plaguing the industry shrinking the current number of jobs down even more, it is getting tougher to really break in. Essentially what I'm saying is that the computer industry right now is burning intelletual capital rather than trying to invest into its future.
If you are smart and want to get into a hot new industry that feels like the computer industry did 20 years ago, I would strongly suggest going into aeronautical engineering and try to join up with Bigelow Aerospace, Scaled Composites, or Armidillo Aerospace. Them and a dozen other companies right now are getting ready to boom, and that is going to further take away the creative types that earlier fueled the computer industry.
This is perhaps the #1 analogy that I can use with ham radio, which is struggling right now trying to attract the young smart minds that have the talent and the slightly off-axis humor to be able to build things like radio frequency jammers, blue and black boxes, or even computer virii. From doing those irreverent and potentially illegal in some context applications, many young people formed the skill sets that makes many of the advanced technology applications that we see today. I fear that the computer industry is losing that group in particular, and now all that is left are folks who can follow a recipie (script kiddies), but are incapable of coming up with anything like that on their own. Some of that is still left, but many school and university administrators are now beating out any creative urge in most schools in regards to computers.
I'm speaking now to the creative 1% of humanity who really makes things happen. They aren't missed right away when they are gone, but you eventually
I don't know what to think of that, and the fact that many "developers" are based in the good ol' USA would certainly put a dampner on things... unless he is counting the ReactOS team as his group of developers. In which case, he also needs a head check to note that there are many other countries represented in the ReactOS group.
Also, claiming affiliation with Siemens is not a good way to keep your job with a multi-national company. They would not like the fact that one of their engineers is dragging their name through mud right now, and regardless of any other affiliation he may have, he is likely not to have his job next week just off the bad press that this is generating alone. It largely depends on how much the corporate offices want to crack down on one of their employees in Bangladesh.
As long as he is not selling the software in the United States or Europe (where the copyright terms of the GPL will be enforced), nor generating any money of any kind, nor having any assets of any sort go through Europe or the USA, yeah, you are probably correct.
It is just that I doubt he will collect too much money by trying to sell it in China or Ghana. And he had better make very sure to send back all money that comes his way from the USA.
Since it appears that he is physically in the USA, that could be a little bit of a problem.
It could be argued that the Portuguese already knew about the Americas before Columbus, and certain there is evidence that Irish monks and Viking sailors made it to North America before 1500 A.D. There is even a Viking settlement in Newfoundland that seems to be authenticated pretty well, and is now a U.N. World Cultural Heritage site.
The Portuguese were more likely to take advantage of trade with the Americas, but it wasn't until Columbus started to publicize what he found that they finally decided to go to Brazil and claim at least part of the territory. In this case exploration was helped considerably when two major world powers decided to go head to head in a non-military way... just as the competition between the USSR and the USA paved the way for the Apollo program. When France and England decided to get into the game things really took off, followed by colonial grabs by Russian, Germany, and Italy.
I think it is no small part with some new nations entering the space race (China and India for now) that things are starting to shake loose again for major space exploration (and not just space transportation systems). That together with a much better understanding of the issued involved with getting into space in the first place.
Keep in mind there were other parties besides the USSR and the USA, although you are correct that it was the USSR and USA that were the primary signers and the people who really had anything substantial to do with the treaty when it was written.
There is also, BTW, a provision to withdraw from the treaty, which requires the nation who is withdrawing to send formal notice to all signatory nations that they are going to withdraw, wait a year, then you can act as though you had never signed it in the first place. I guess the Bush Administration is giving notice that they are formally withdrawing from the treaty?
While this may seem like a rip-off, everything is much more open than a typical commercial R&D subcontract. Those are usually done like NASA has done things, or worse, especially for the sub-contractor.
At least in this situation everything is going to be out in the open, you don't have to worry about missing deadlines, because the deadlines are something that you set personally. It may be influenced by competition, but even then it is quite straight forward, and if you miss the prize because somebody else beat you to that... that is simply the rules of the game. Normally if this were an R&D subcontract like you were implying, there would be the primary contractor or customer who would be breathing down your neck asking for status reports every couple of days, if not daily or hourly (depending on how anal the customer is and mission critical the project is).
On the other hand, I agree that this is a very cost-effective solution in terms of getting needed components on a very visible project. It would be impressive if GM or Ford did something similar in terms of building a hydrogen-fueled engine or even a major utility company in regards to highly efficient power generation. Set the specific requirements and guarentee a certain minimum buy of the power generated from such a facility, such as a wind farm, geothermal vents, or even a nuclear power plant with an established maximum of nuclear waste generation. There is some real engineering that could be accomplished using this model that would be incredibly effective.
This could even be done for software components that implement a certain technology. Just for instance, if you set up a contest to pay for the first implementation of a new audio or video codec that also has features X,Y,Z (like a plug-in to winamp, and LGPL libraries, etc).
The main requirement here to do such a contest is that 1) the discussion of the project can be done publicly and 2) the resulting product while complimentary to your product line, does not directly compete with what you do for your main line business or with the industry (when a large number of corporate sponsors are involved).
In this case with Bigelow Aerospace, they really need to have these spacecrafts available, but don't really intend to build and fly them.
Not every engineering challenge can be solved this way, but there are a number than can be done. This is also why Thiokol won't be a sponsor (although perhaps a competitor?), because this does directly compete with what they do for a business.
One of the problems with garbage disposal is that most garbage is the result of inefficient use of resources. Sometimes people can use the "dumps" to get extra resources that the original people who threw the stuff away never thought about.
A classic example of this was the gold mines in Virginia City, Nevada. For about 10-15 years miners spent quite a bit of time (and very dangerous effort) trying to extract gold out of the mountains around the city. They started to dump the tailings from the gold mining into one area, when one very enterprising individual discovered that the talings were very high in silver. Very quietly he ended up buying the tailings (they were already out of the ground, so he didn't have to buy the mines or pay miners in the same way), and made a huge fortune off of silver.
The same thing can be said about some modern municipal landfills, many of which have a serious problem that they have to deal with: The production of methane. Uncontrolled, it becomes a major pollution issue, but if you tap into it you can turn many "city dumps" into substantial natural gas producing fields.
Perhaps the most misunderstood problem is with nuclear waste. Most nuclear waste is due to the fact that the production centers are very ineffeciently using uranium and the by-products of nuclear power plants can't in turn be reused. In theory they can, and in fact with highly effecient breeder-reactor facilities you can totally dispose of most nuclear waste by "reburning" the waste in the plant itself. The political problem from this is that a facility that can completely dispose of nuclear waste in this manner also has the ability to produce large quantities of Plutonium, in quantities pure enough that it needs to be dilluted in order to make bombs out of it. I am not kidding here either. Yucca Mountain is not a technological issue, it is a political decision to deliberately make innefficient nuclear power plants to stall off a considerably worse political problem if the technology becomes widespread for breeder reactors.
Locally where I live, an aggressive recycling program has brought about an extended lifetime to the "city dump", and pushed its lifetime to be usable for another 20-30 years. The #1 thing they did was to do seperate processing of "green waste", including a seperate collection system with its own "garbage cans" and collection trucks that collect only plant materials, like grass clippings, leaves, branches, etc. The city then processes and mulches this green waste and then in turn sells it as quality topsoil or garden mulch. The sale of these materials almost pays for the whole collection of the stuff in the first place, and the garbage rates the city charges encourage citizens to participate.
There certainly is a small amount of "waste" that somehow has to be dealt with, but the point I'm making here is that there is considerable room for improvement, and we are no where near the limits you seem to be implying.
An interesting issue that you can deal with as well if you are going to write this paper you described is the expanding realm of what we call our environment systems. At first most people worried about the environment of their home, then their local community. Nomadic people dealt with this issue by simply moving when the local resources gave out. When people started to build cities it became considerably harder to abandon a city, but sometimes that has happened, and still does happen every once in a while. Now you have cities acting as specialists, like Delta, Utah, where they have one of the largest coal-fired electric power plants in the world, because they are "importing" air pollution from Los Angeles, who is the primary buyer of their electricity. BTW, the stats for that plant are staggering, especially since the plant itself is in a town of just a couple thousand in a very rural part of Utah. Right now there is considerable awareness of the fact that we no longer can deal with environ
Still, just as you've mentioned, you can trade technology for labor, and you quickly discover why manufacturing processes in the past were so labor intensive for comparatively little actual product being produced.