The NSA isn't going to be applying that kind of brute force decryption effort on love letters between you and your girlfriend.
I know it's a stale meme and I can hardly believe I'm using it;
[Citation needed]
I'd like to say it is common sense. Think about it for a bit.... and then grin if that secret love letter has been decrypted knowing that you are personally responsible for a billion dollars or so of federal money being spent to have some overweight and aging guy read that letter in the basement of the NSA headquarters. While the NSA may seem like it has unlimited funds, it can only do something that stupid so many times while messages that really matter are sitting in the queue that may be something important.... like Russia plotting with China to invade America or something equally stupid.
BTW, if you are going to use the square brackets, know that is a hyperlink.
Deep space is sort of a question of distance too. Most current mission planning considers anything beyond the Moon as being "real" deep space, although the real accomplishment would be to send something outside of the Solar System as genuinely "deep space". Of course you could say they are still having to deal with magnetic fields, stellar wind, and all sorts of other problems that aren't so common in "real deep space" like the stuff between galaxies.
None the less, it really was a neat accomplishment for Orbital Science and I'm glad that the launch was successful. It was also historic for Orbital and that counts for something too, even if the reporter at the Washington Post wasn't so clueful about the issues involved.
Perhaps Jeff Bezos will help enlighten that reporter. I hear he knows a thing or two about rocketry and orbital spaceflight himself, not to mention being that reporter's boss doesn't hurt either.
The NSA is interested in people using encryption/it/ can break but others cannot. This helps maintain its monopoly on secrets, which is the source of its power (that it may also be useful in protecting American businesses and interests from foreign penetration is a bonus). Therefore it will point you towards stronger tools if it can, so its advice is not totally without merit.
The kinds of people that publish non-classified papers about encryption by the NSA also know damn well that there are other very smart people around the world who do not work for the NSA, the U.S. federal government, or even give a damn about America.
Seriously, where do you come up with this crap?
Yes, if you see something published by the NSA, perhaps take it with a grain of salt and do your own kind of analysis. Learn a bit about mathematics first and understand not just that they have pontificated about some sort of algorithm but understand why they came to those conclusions. If not yourself, then at least find somebody who you can trust.
There are secure encryption methods that are being used, and there is a good reason why the NSA wants to be assisting with the larger cryptographic community in developing secure forms of communication. Don't get into this kind of conspiracy theory bullshit and claim that they have some kind of mystical powers that simply don't exist. The NSA doesn't have any sort of monopoly over the concept, and of course neither did the Germans with the Enigma machine. In fact, it would have helped the Germans in World War II to have at least discussed their design with a few mathematicians prior to spending so much effort building the device rather than being so damn clever that some of the design ideas actually backfired and made it easier to crack that encryption method.... not that the guys at Bletchley Park complained if German engineers made their job easier.
NSA agents aren't gods. They are good at what they do because they are professionals who do encryption on a full time basis and have received advanced training in mathematics. It is sufficient training that some of those people could teach mathematics as a professor at almost any university in the world, yet they choose to use their efforts to understand encryption in regards to the country they serve. That doesn't make them sinister, just patriots... patriots that know there are people just like them in other countries around the world.
Besides, all encryption, from any point in history, has always been an issue of how much effort must be applied in order to break the code, not the question as to if the message can be read at all. If you need the services of a server farm covering a hundred acres working for a month in order to crack a message, you've done your job. The NSA isn't going to be applying that kind of brute force decryption effort on love letters between you and your girlfriend.
If the NSA can get through a Backdoor, how do you know if a competitor or enemy is not getting in though the same backdoor?
You don't. It is as simple as that.
There are some at the NSA who really do try to make encryption which is really good... hence why it would be used for military applications as it can't be as easily decrypted. Still, it doesn't hurt to get the best guys in the business to at least try cracking this stuff.
There are quite a few non-classified papers that have been authored by NSA employees over the years, and their work has been used for improving cryptography tools by people who have a clue about this stuff who also do software development. Simply put, if the NSA thinks that a particular encryption method is vulnerable, you should be paying attention very closely and likely be shifting to something else. If you keep using that same encryption method in spite of the warning, that is your own damn fault for not paying attention.
Of course there are a lot of home grown encryption hobbyists who think they know better than the real pros and try to come up with something better. On a very rare occasion, they might come up with something really good, but far more often they simply repeat mistakes made in the past or simply duplicate encryption concepts that have long since been broken.
Of course you can convince some MBA managers of software teams that double ROT-13 encryption is strong enough for the kinds of things they are doing.
It would help if sometimes some basic fact checking went into summaries. Of course how often are Slashdot summaries even remotely accurate?
The Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport has been used for other launches, but admittedly they have all been either sub-orbital sounding rockets or orbital spacecraft. This is the first "deep space" mission to fly out of this particular spaceport... so I suppose there is a "first" in there somewhere.
I'll also admit that it is nice to see some success from companies other than SpaceX. Kudos on the part of Orbital Sciences for getting this flight to work.... and to get the spacecraft to the Moon. It also doesn't hurt that the launch could be seen by a million or so people due to the proximity of the launch site to Washington DC & Baltimore.
The Space Shuttle was the closest we've come yet to the sci-fi vision of the space plane to which you refer. It still had to drop a lot of stuff before reaching orbit. I've always wondered to what extent our problems there came because we allowed ourselves to be lead astray by the sci-fi vision. Meanwhile, the Russians continued to perfect un-glamorous but relatively reliable rockets and long duration space flight.
The problem with the Space Shuttle is that it was a 1st generation prototype. Not only was it a prototype that never really evolve into subsequent generations, it was a lousy design in the first place which had explicit design constraints to meet missions that were rarely or even never actually used. By far and away the best possible use for the Space Shuttle, to give an example, is to bring heavy objects down from an orbital flight profile back to the Earth. I think that was done precisely twice in the roughly 150+ flights that were made. It was also designed to fly from Vandenberg AFB in a polar orbital configuration.... something it never accomplished at all in practice. Other design compromises were made which basically made the Shuttle into a bastard child of ideas and clearly made by a committee with political motivations other than actually trying to get people into space... and certainly not to make it cheaper to go into space.
I wouldn't write off the concept of the Shuttle, and clearly the fact that it flew at all should be a reason to at least consider some of the aspects of the Space Shuttle for future spacecraft designs. Jeff Greason of XCOR has used some (not all) of the ideas that were developed for the Space Shuttle in the design of the Lynx. None the less, there are reasons why the Shuttle design ought to be full of warnings as well and mistakes that shouldn't be made.
I'll also note that the real innovation in rocket design is happening in America... but not through NASA contracts.
even the rocket fuel is so expensive you probably cant afford it
Not really. For the Space Shuttle launches, the catering budget for the press corps covering the launches was usually more than the cost of the actual fuel that went into that rocket. The cost for the amount of rocket fuel needed to get somebody into orbit is about a thousand dollars or so (or at least that order of magnitude). Essentially the price of a first-class ticket on a trans-continental airliner. In order to get to Mars, round trip, (or just about anywhere else in the Solar System) you need about 4x that fuel... and not much more.
That is clearly something affordable by anybody in a 1st world country... and you wouldn't even need to mortgage your house. Yes, you could even pay for this on a minimum wage salary working part-time but perhaps making a few sacrifices and doing without luxuries... but still something that could be done. You'd be surprised at how cheap you can live if you care. I'm not saying that people from Somalia or Ethiopia are going to be able to afford this, but I would say that likely a majority of the people from around the world could most certainly afford the rocket fuel needed to get into space and actually do stuff once you get up there.
The huge expense for traveling into space is the cost of the vehicle itself, and the fact that it is amortized over exactly one flight each time, not to mention that the launch pad costs are usually covered only by a dozen or so flights as well. On top of that, when you have a full-time and permanent army of about 30k-100k people involved with the prep-work and deployment of that vehicle on every launch (which was true even for the "reusable" Space Shuttle), those salaries start to add up real quick. For the Apollo flights, there were typically not just one but two carrier task forces that were assigned to perform search & rescue (in the event of a mishap) or recovery on every flight including two weeks prior to each flight and even a week following the flight. There is a reason why it cost about a billion dollars for each launch.
No, it isn't the fuel that is the problem. Much cheaper launches can certainly happen and there is at least the possibility that travel into space can be affordable for mere mortals. If you can make the spacecraft reusable and only needing a dozen or so people on the launch pad in order to "turn around" the vehicle from a landing to launch, it would most certainly be affordable. That is the reason why you can afford to travel by air to most places around the world... because British Airways doesn't throw away their aircraft after each flight.
Simple the President has no stomach for boots on the ground. He is also is planning a punishment attack and nothing more. No it is a good gamble and he has Russia and China to keep the UN out of it. Without the UK to back him up President Obama is now just flopping around trying to offload as much blame and responsibility has he can. AKA it isn't his red line it is the world's.
So we should kill a few hundred or thousand Syrian children in a "punishment attack" in retribution for an attack that killed a few hundred Syrian children. Yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense to me.
And they made little fuss when Iran used them back. That is what the Syrian government was hoping for and even if we don't they know we will not take them out so the risk seems worth it.
Why would you say that Assad's government in Syria "knows we will not take them out"? After seeing the armies of Iraq evaporate as the morning dew in the Gulf War (Syria was actually an allay of America in that war and got a front row seat to the full capabilities of the U.S. military), I'm sure they realize that America is more than capable of a full conquest and even annexation of Syria if it was in the interests of the U.S. Congress. It wouldn't even cause a military draft to happen in America or even much in the way of increased taxes.
From the perspective of the U.S. military, Syria is just vermin that needs to be dealt with. Syria damn well knows that too. They also have a neighboring country (Iraq) that serves as a strong example of what can happen to them if they decide to dick around with America.
Perhaps they feel that their relationship with Russia and China can be used as a counter to American military force. The Security Council veto is irrelevant other than that particular justification for going to war isn't an option this time around.... but having Russian ships and marines standing by waiting for a move by the USA is a potential counter.
World War I started for weaker reasons than this, and similar kinds of balancing of powers against each other was attempted.... and all fell apart too. Serbia hasn't been the same since those days when the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated either. It was squished like a bug then forgotten as a backwater issue to the greater war that ended up happening. Syria is in the same danger and I would think Assad is just as knowledgeable about history as I am in that regard.
Seriously. If he had done this dozens (at least the ten time you suggest here), there wouldn't be nearly so much fuss over this most recent usage of those weapons. It would have already been an accepted diplomatic fact among everybody involved and then the question would be if chemical weapons usage rises to any sort of a serious issue that is as bad as somebody using a thermonuclear weapon instead.
That is what is being claimed here.
I also don't buy the fear argument, so far as any military commander (even those commanders in World War I which actually deployed such weapons) knew that it would be an escalation of hostilities and not viewed favorably by the international community as a whole. When Germany used chemical weapons in the Netherlands, their back was up against the wall and their generals were desperate to try any possible action to try and break the log jam that was trench warfare during that war. Having a million corpses of your fellow soldiers tends to make you desperate for some major change.
Assad was in no similar kind of danger and had a great many other options available to get the job done, especially knowing that America and the UK were openly supporting the rebels and would use any possible excuse to ramp up that support even further.... as did happen too. Even total jerks like Stalin avoided things like chemical weapons simply because he wouldn't take the diplomatic loss from their use.
The problem is that the explosives route doesn't command territory, and it doesn't have a high enough body count. It's like the "you have 6 bullets, I have 20 people" equation. You will kill the 6 ( maybe ), but the remaining 14 will get you. Of course, you have to have a mad enough "20". Weapons like gas add to the body count and add to the terror in the minds of the opponents, and might be able to take out the "20".
Bullshit. If you want to build a bigger bomb, you just go ahead and build it. The question isn't 6 bullets and 20 people, but rather 6k bullets and 20 people, wondering if after the first couple hundred bullets into each person should the commander be reprimanded for simply wasting ammunition. Assad has a large enough army and is well supplied enough to hunt down and wipe out each of these rebel groups with vastly superior and overwhelming military force.
That really isn't a problem.
The real problem is that these groups are being supported and supplied with weapons and technical support from other countries, namely the USA, UK, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and other groups (including the infamous Al-Qaeda who is actively recruiting people to help with the Syrian rebels). Since so much in the way of weapons, food, and equipment is being sent to these rebels by other major countries, why not a few canisters of chemical weapons too? It would be stupid to say that these other countries don't have access to chemical weapons and the knowledge in terms of how to build and deploy them.
The only reason why you use chemical weapons in a situation like this is either because you are mentally unbalanced (in which case.... why did the Obama administration and other governments help him out for so many decades?) or if you want to engage mass casualties where killing some of your own supporters and even loyal soldiers will be killed to deliver that final death blow.
You nor anybody else suggesting Assad has done this has given a rational explanation for why his soldiers or officers actually conducted this attack. Certainly it wasn't to increase body counts, as the victims of the Dresden fire bombing campaign can amply account for. Assad is certainly capable of conducting such a bombing campaign against a civilian population he they cared, thus chemical weapons simply aren't needed.
If the goal was to gather and eliminate the current leadership in Washington DC, I think you might find a few supporters even in America itself. I would prefer to do that at a ballot box, but if the armies from around the world are coming anyway there could definitely be some internal domestic support too.
Heck, there are currently some deep divisions within the U.S. military itself. There is a distinct possibility that if military units are ordered to action, they may not follow orders. Then again the Obama administration has been conducting a purge of military leaders over the past couple of years, so there is likely to be some very loyal people at the top.
Same logic could apply to Syria's leadership. What strategic military importance was there to using chemical weapons on a remote village full of civilians Vs the enormous risk of UN invasion by using them? I suspect the most likely suspects behind the attack are third parties that stand to gain by an invasion (i.e. not US, not current Syrian regime either).
This is the one question I keep asking myself too. What possible benefits might be coming to Syria if they actually used the chemical weapons? If their back was against the wall and Assad was saying "eff this, let's throw everything we have at these infidel rebels!".... yeah, I could see that as a reason. Unfortunately Syria has a whole lot to lose and not much to gain by doing this kind of stupid gas attack. For crying out loud, Syria has access to jet fighter-bombers, artillery cannons, and a whole range of explosives of a modern military at their disposal. If the goal was simply to kill a bunch of people, there were literally dozens of ways to get that accomplished without resorting to the "weapons of mass destruction".
The rebel groups, on the other hand, have their backs to the wall and are desperate... where Assad clearly has the upper hand as long as those rebels aren't getting outside assistance from other governments. They have very little to lose and a whole lot to gain if these chemical weapons are used and publicized... especially if that use is blamed upon the Assad government. Having the U.S. Army directly back up your own little band of rebels definitely is a huge boost to both morale and actual firepower.
Something definitely stinks here and this doesn't make the official Obama administration story sound all that accurate. I don't know about details here as the PR spin doctors have really mucked this thing up thus finding "the truth" is nearly impossible right now.
Uh, Syria was until quite recently one of our supporters in the region. We've had generally decent to good relations with the Assad regime. It cooled a bit since he started killing his people, but we tend to take a dim view of those who would kill their people because they started talkng democracy.
A fair point to make. Even more oddly is how Syria was even a military allay during the Gulf War.... where Syria fielded a full division of soldiers and took orders directly from an American general (Schwarzkopf) in that war.
The funny thing about Syria is how there are numerous photos and videos of Assad having dinner with both John Kerry and Barack Obama, not to mention an official state visit by Assad to the White House.... and Obama going to Syria himself. Yeah, it was a close relationship. You wonder what Assad did to piss off the Obama administration?
No I don't think the gas attack, at least by itself, was the act. Heck, the Obama administration has been funding "rebels" in Syria for awhile now... well before that supposed gas attack.
Under threat? Tell me when the last Israeli-Syrian war was again? That's like saying the US is always under threat from Mexico. You realize at one point you have to have neighbors, right?
The last Israeli-Syrian war was in 1973... formally. There have been almost continual exchanges of fire between the two countries since that war, however. During most of the several invasions of Lebanon that happened later, Syria backed one or more of the groups involved (Lebanon has been a total basket case of a country for some time). It also doesn't help that from a Syrian point of view Israel is sitting on some of their land (the Golan Heights specifically) and wouldn't mind taking some of that back if the opportunity presented itself. There isn't really much trade that moves between Israel and Syria as well I might add.
Then again there is talk of the "reconquista" in Mexico too, but that is based off of a claim from a war that happened 170 years ago and isn't really taken all that seriously for a great many reasons.
You really have convinced yourself of that, haven't you? I rather wonder if you realize that there are other countries on this planet besides the Untied States.
Yeah.... funny thing that it was a Communist collective that turned into a private for-profit company (RKK Energia) using the same rocket that was originally built to send the Soviet Union to the Moon was the very first company to actually offer private citizens the opportunity to fly into space on their own dime. Still, you ought to look at the story of Mir Corp, and while you are at it OTRAG as well. Both companies had working hardware, business connections, and the physical capability of being able to put people and stuff into space.
MirCorp in particular not only talked about sending people into space, took deposits for customers who wanted to go, but also sent some Russian cosmonauts entirely at their own expense to prepare Mir for continued use and habitation by future commercial customers. Basically they purchased the Mir space station from the Russian Federation. Due to extreme pressure from NASA (and the Clinton Administration) basically saying they would stop supporting the Russian effort to be involved with the ISS, Russia was forced to cancel the contract with MirCorp and deliberately de-orbited Mir so it could never be used by anybody else.
I'll also point out other examples of how it was made illegal for people to go into space by at least any country who had the technological infrastructure necessary for making the trip into space. Sure, you could perhaps have traveled to Mexico (doubtful) or even Tuvalu and perhaps bribed some official giving you a launch permit to launch a rocket into space. But who would sell you the equipment? Who would be willing to even be a machinist to make the rockets and where would you obtain the Aluminum, Niobium, Titanium, and other basic elemental substances needed for building a rocket?
It has only been pretty much since 2000 that it was legal for private citizens to leave this planet. Study up a little bit on the history of private commercial spaceflight and note that it has been a huge struggle just to be recognized that bureaucrats would even permit the process to happen.
I'll also note that even today, the only private commercial space ports that exist along with a government willing to let you fly into space exist exclusively in the USA. Kazakhstan has a spaceport that has been used for private commercial operations.... a space port operated by the Russian Federation I might add. That is currently your only two choices of countries at the moment. BTW, I should also point out that Capitalism was a criminal offense in the former Soviet Union, thus it was literally impossible for a private citizens to buy a space flight until the Soviet government fell.
The ESA has a launch pad in French Guiana (a part of the European Union that is not in Europe) which could in theory be set up to fly people into space and certainly launches rockets large enough to get the job done. They have not yet done that, and would need to pass legislation through the European Parliament in order to permit that kind of activity to take place.
Care to revise your sentiments here about where else you might be able to get into space?
Black & Decker found a way to put holes in things where you didn't need to drag a cord and a temporary outlet at a construction site. Being able to put holes in things whenever you wanted definitely was a big help... and their cordless drill was better than the hand crank kind of drill as well (the only other "cordless" drill you can get). BTW, I tend to use my drill more as a glorified screw driver rather than something which makes holes, but I suppose that is a further adaptation.
Maytag is a special case all to itself. It prided itself on being the top quality in home appliances and built up an amazing reputation of building devices that would last decades or longer. A 50 year old Maytag that still was in service doing what it was designed to do isn't unheard of, those older machines are easy to repair when they do break down, and there has generally been a high degree of quality assurance as well.... at least there used to be. About the mid 1980's there was a management change (basically a new generation of middle and upper management) which didn't care about this reputation other than as a way to exploit it for marketing purposes. By cutting back on materials (using plastic where previously it had been metal, not spending so much on quality assurance, outsourcing parts, and in general doing stuff that frankly many manufacturers were doing in America at the time) these managers threw away their brand name and became everything their marketing department claimed the other companies had become. It now represents a POS piece of equipment if you ever buy that brand. The bells and whistles as you were talking about were there to mask the fact that the machines wouldn't even do what it was that they originally claimed (washing dishes, cook food, or even microwave your popcorn). I had a Maytag stove that nearly burned down my house.... and would have had I not been there to stop the fire from spreading.
Apple certainly risks doing the same thing now that Steve Jobs is no longer around to bash heads in when needed. The Newton was interesting because it did most of the things that the iPhone does, but it was a little clunkier and slower simply because the technology wasn't quite up to the task at the time. It is an example of an early adopter of technology being well ahead of the curve so bad that they took the arrows and paid a hard price for being so far ahead of the competition that you don't even know what it is that you have in front of you.
I can give some interesting examples: The Diamond Rio was famous for setting the precedent that the RIAA couldn't hold MP3 device manufacturers liable for copyright infringement simply by providing the means to play an MP3 vile. They played a pivotal role in the technology, but ended up being a commercial failure none the less in the long run. Yes, they did make some money, but others (notably Apple in this case) took the idea forward to the next step once the market was established and thus capitalized upon this earlier effort.
The Altair 8800 was the very first microcomputer, and developed quite a huge fan following. They blazed the trail, even help give the reason for a tiny start-up company called Microsoft to be established as well as spawned a whole bunch of other companies. Adding to the pattern, Apple Computer even took advantage of MITS marketing strategy and came up with their own computer... thus while not necessarily being first they did take advantage of this much earlier work.
Going back to even electric automobiles, there were notable electric cars that had been around for quite some time, including the Baker Electrics, which at the time had even seemed as though electric automobiles were the future and the other new technology at the time, gasoline internal combustion engines, seemed as if they were too complex and messy to actual
I think it's time to accept the harsh reality that the era of manned space travel is pretty much over. It was a nice, brief blip in modern history--fueled by the politics of the Cold War. But it's been in decline since the early 70's, and with the end of the Cold War in the early 90's, the writing was on the wall. A few more countries will send men up as a point of national pride (like China), and the ISS and Russian manned program will limp along for a little while longer. But we're never going back to the way it was.
I'll accept that the era of government employees having exclusive access to manned spaceflight resources is over. A big trillion dollar budget to send a team of people to Mars and back is never going to happen (a budget roughly comparable to what NASA got for the Apollo program in the 1960's) no matter how hard some people would like to see that happen.
There are a number of reasons for this, not the least of which is that the effort to go into space was simply not economically sustainable. When the motto literally hanging over every engineer's desk and in most of the contractor's assembly lines was "waste anything but time", you get some really odd skewing of the market for vehicles going into space. If NASA had a budget of roughly that trillion dollar size (to be spent over roughly 2-3 decades) and was launching big heavy payloads at least four to eight times per year (operational tempo is important here), I think the current SLS architecture could work. Unfortunately the support for that kind of effort doesn't seem to be a priority for the current United States Congress.... and those are the people that matter in this case.
The interesting thing is that the total number of people who will have been into space is going to double in the next 2-3 years, and a number of very economical manned spaceflight vehicles are in various stages of development where you will see not only sub-orbital flights but also orbital flights as well that will be done by private individuals as opposed to government programs. Some of them are doing this as a "joyride", but others have very serious financial interests involved with these flights where they plan on making a profit from their flight or doing research that previously was impossible to be done without sending somebody "up there".
It isn't so much that manned spaceflight is ending, it is just entering a very new and different era where the traditional "steely eyed missile men" made of "the right stuff" are going to be historical relics. That era of manned spaceflight is indeed going to expire very soon.
What Tyson also said was, that he didn't think the private sector would do trailblazing space feats, it is way too expensive to do space exploration compared to the economic gains that there simply isn't a business case.
This may be much closer to what Neil deGrasse Tyson actually said, but even that is still not proven in terms of historical examples. Completely private funds paid for the first successful experiments in aviation, and arguable it was private investors who paid for the first trips to Antarctica (they were whaling ships... where American whalers where on shore doing repairs when a British "voyage of discovery" sailed by for the first "official" record of that continent). Private investors also dump huge amounts of money into automotive research.... usually through investments in Formula-1 and NASCAR vehicles as well as other similar efforts. Bell Labs was famous for a nearly constant stream of innovations including many things that make it possible to read these very words.
To say that private individuals won't be trailblazing in space is mainly to note that for a great many years it was actually illegal for private individuals to even try, not to mention that so much money has been dumped into government programs that for the moment it is impossible for private individuals to compete. Robert Goddard and other contemporary experimenters did, however, use private funds to significantly develop their projects at the beginning of rocket development. There are also companies like Copenhagen Suborbitals who are refining the technology on their own without any government backing in their own private attempts to get into space. It isn't like the Danish Space Agency is competing too hard trying to do the same thing.
I'll admit that without government funding of space exploration, it would perhaps take a bit more time for people to build up both the nerve and the financial resources necessary to be able to go into space. On top of that, things done in space would mostly have to turn a profit eventually (even if it is only a very long term objective) for private efforts to be successful. That is happening in other areas too where private commercial spaceflight is finally beginning to be successful beyond GEO satellites and telecom efforts (two huge areas where commercial spaceflight is already very well established). I disagree that it would never be done, but things accomplished would definitely have different priorities when done by commercial entities as opposed to government agencies. A business case can be made for travel into space for a number of things, so I also disagree with the concern that economic gains can't be made.
I bet someone in battery manufacturing is looking as adding capacity now in anticipation of such events. This could be quite an opportunity for some manufacturer with a bit of foresight. As more companies make and sell more electric cars I doubt Tesla will be the only company hunting for more, cheaper, better.
Do you think Elon Musk and Tesla Motors didn't anticipate something like this happening too? While no doubt they have been buying these cells at bulk prices already, with the size of a customer they are right now and the fact Tesla has already sunk a big pile of money into their plant anticipating a huge increase in sales and production (metal fabrication machines aren't cheap), I have no doubt that Tesla is in the thick of things in terms of getting potential long term manufacturing contracts... or at least purchasing futures contracts for these cells in large quantities (essentially the same thing).
In fact, It has been common practice at both Tesla as well as SpaceX that they try to bring as much of their production in-house as possible. If Tesla is consuming so many cells that their consumption is a sizable fraction of world-wide demand, I wouldn't put it past Elon Musk to either buy the manufacturing plant or build one himself simply to ensure a reliable source of supply for his own needs. It isn't like Elon Musk did something like that before. So much so that I wouldn't even put it past Tesla to start selling these cells as well on a consumer level as well (or at least offer cheap cells to Wal-Mart).
The one place that Tesla likely won't be investing money into though is raw bulk Lithium and other materials needed to make the cells. If you want to see where the real entrepreneurs are going to be running around at, look into Lithium mining stocks.
No one argues that because the Articles of Confederation do not have the force of law. They were superseded by the US Constitution.
Here is a point to make about this issue though:
If the U.S. Constitution of 1787 superseded the Articles of Confederation, does that imply this particular basic right, an enumerated right that does not exist in that constitution including subsequent amendments, has been repealed and thus void from Constitutional Law?
My argument is that this was though of enough that the writers of the Articles of Confederation thought to explicitly include it in that document. The Constitution of 1787 simply doesn't address this issue other than in the 9th Amendment which basically points out "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." I would contend this specific previously enumerated right would be one of those rights that the Constitution explicitly did not intend to destroy.
I'll admit this is a bit of a stretch, but at the same time it shows that the right to travel freely is a basic right. The Constitution does provide for laws regarding immigration, naturalization, and for controlling the federal border with other nations outside of the union of states.... but it doesn't provide any constitutional authority for travel within or between states. If a court was to grant that this indeed is a part of the constitutional law of America, it really doesn't open any sort of substantial Pandora's box as the scope of this individual right is quite limited, and the rest of the Articles of Confederation (with very few exceptions) are clearly replicated or replaced with other provisions in the Constitution of 1787.
If American soldiers hit the ground and start taking territory, Russia will get involved. Russia basically said that bombing a few villages and killing tens of thousands of people wouldn't get them involved (as if killing tens of thousands of people is a justified response to the deaths of 1500 or so people killed by somebody else), and they aren't going to give a blank check to Assad yet.
But if Marines start to land, I would say the Russians might step up there too.
Actually, if that had happened we'd be better off no? Less overpopulation. As long as it wasn't a nuclear war the environment would have been better off, less plastic pollution, less destruction of the environment for oil, less agricultural pollution, less contamination of the food supply with gmos, less destruction of the environment for resources, less etc...
You really hate being human that much? Note that any substantial reduction of population will include you.... don't try to set yourself up as somebody special and immune to what would happen. If your goal is suicide, then at least admit it too.
And my point is that it would be nuclear war. It still might be too if this fiasco in Syria isn't dealt with intelligently. Not only will that take out most of mankind, but it will take out most of the rest of the life on the surface of the Earth as well. More contamination, more pollution, much more destruction of the environment than could be done by the worst estimates of any environmentalist over the next 200 years. Screw resources buried in the land, it won't be worth extracting because there won't be anybody to use it either.
Slashdot Mirror
The NSA isn't going to be applying that kind of brute force decryption effort on love letters between you and your girlfriend.
I know it's a stale meme and I can hardly believe I'm using it;
[Citation needed]
I'd like to say it is common sense. Think about it for a bit.... and then grin if that secret love letter has been decrypted knowing that you are personally responsible for a billion dollars or so of federal money being spent to have some overweight and aging guy read that letter in the basement of the NSA headquarters. While the NSA may seem like it has unlimited funds, it can only do something that stupid so many times while messages that really matter are sitting in the queue that may be something important.... like Russia plotting with China to invade America or something equally stupid.
BTW, if you are going to use the square brackets, know that is a hyperlink.
Deep space is sort of a question of distance too. Most current mission planning considers anything beyond the Moon as being "real" deep space, although the real accomplishment would be to send something outside of the Solar System as genuinely "deep space". Of course you could say they are still having to deal with magnetic fields, stellar wind, and all sorts of other problems that aren't so common in "real deep space" like the stuff between galaxies.
None the less, it really was a neat accomplishment for Orbital Science and I'm glad that the launch was successful. It was also historic for Orbital and that counts for something too, even if the reporter at the Washington Post wasn't so clueful about the issues involved.
Perhaps Jeff Bezos will help enlighten that reporter. I hear he knows a thing or two about rocketry and orbital spaceflight himself, not to mention being that reporter's boss doesn't hurt either.
The NSA is interested in people using encryption /it/ can break but others cannot. This helps maintain its monopoly on secrets, which is the source of its power (that it may also be useful in protecting American businesses and interests from foreign penetration is a bonus). Therefore it will point you towards stronger tools if it can, so its advice is not totally without merit.
The kinds of people that publish non-classified papers about encryption by the NSA also know damn well that there are other very smart people around the world who do not work for the NSA, the U.S. federal government, or even give a damn about America.
Seriously, where do you come up with this crap?
Yes, if you see something published by the NSA, perhaps take it with a grain of salt and do your own kind of analysis. Learn a bit about mathematics first and understand not just that they have pontificated about some sort of algorithm but understand why they came to those conclusions. If not yourself, then at least find somebody who you can trust.
There are secure encryption methods that are being used, and there is a good reason why the NSA wants to be assisting with the larger cryptographic community in developing secure forms of communication. Don't get into this kind of conspiracy theory bullshit and claim that they have some kind of mystical powers that simply don't exist. The NSA doesn't have any sort of monopoly over the concept, and of course neither did the Germans with the Enigma machine. In fact, it would have helped the Germans in World War II to have at least discussed their design with a few mathematicians prior to spending so much effort building the device rather than being so damn clever that some of the design ideas actually backfired and made it easier to crack that encryption method.... not that the guys at Bletchley Park complained if German engineers made their job easier.
NSA agents aren't gods. They are good at what they do because they are professionals who do encryption on a full time basis and have received advanced training in mathematics. It is sufficient training that some of those people could teach mathematics as a professor at almost any university in the world, yet they choose to use their efforts to understand encryption in regards to the country they serve. That doesn't make them sinister, just patriots... patriots that know there are people just like them in other countries around the world.
Besides, all encryption, from any point in history, has always been an issue of how much effort must be applied in order to break the code, not the question as to if the message can be read at all. If you need the services of a server farm covering a hundred acres working for a month in order to crack a message, you've done your job. The NSA isn't going to be applying that kind of brute force decryption effort on love letters between you and your girlfriend.
If the NSA can get through a Backdoor, how do you know if a competitor or enemy is not getting in though the same backdoor?
You don't. It is as simple as that.
There are some at the NSA who really do try to make encryption which is really good... hence why it would be used for military applications as it can't be as easily decrypted. Still, it doesn't hurt to get the best guys in the business to at least try cracking this stuff.
There are quite a few non-classified papers that have been authored by NSA employees over the years, and their work has been used for improving cryptography tools by people who have a clue about this stuff who also do software development. Simply put, if the NSA thinks that a particular encryption method is vulnerable, you should be paying attention very closely and likely be shifting to something else. If you keep using that same encryption method in spite of the warning, that is your own damn fault for not paying attention.
Of course there are a lot of home grown encryption hobbyists who think they know better than the real pros and try to come up with something better. On a very rare occasion, they might come up with something really good, but far more often they simply repeat mistakes made in the past or simply duplicate encryption concepts that have long since been broken.
Of course you can convince some MBA managers of software teams that double ROT-13 encryption is strong enough for the kinds of things they are doing.
It would help if sometimes some basic fact checking went into summaries. Of course how often are Slashdot summaries even remotely accurate?
The Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport has been used for other launches, but admittedly they have all been either sub-orbital sounding rockets or orbital spacecraft. This is the first "deep space" mission to fly out of this particular spaceport... so I suppose there is a "first" in there somewhere.
I'll also admit that it is nice to see some success from companies other than SpaceX. Kudos on the part of Orbital Sciences for getting this flight to work.... and to get the spacecraft to the Moon. It also doesn't hurt that the launch could be seen by a million or so people due to the proximity of the launch site to Washington DC & Baltimore.
The Space Shuttle was the closest we've come yet to the sci-fi vision of the space plane to which you refer. It still had to drop a lot of stuff before reaching orbit. I've always wondered to what extent our problems there came because we allowed ourselves to be lead astray by the sci-fi vision. Meanwhile, the Russians continued to perfect un-glamorous but relatively reliable rockets and long duration space flight.
The problem with the Space Shuttle is that it was a 1st generation prototype. Not only was it a prototype that never really evolve into subsequent generations, it was a lousy design in the first place which had explicit design constraints to meet missions that were rarely or even never actually used. By far and away the best possible use for the Space Shuttle, to give an example, is to bring heavy objects down from an orbital flight profile back to the Earth. I think that was done precisely twice in the roughly 150+ flights that were made. It was also designed to fly from Vandenberg AFB in a polar orbital configuration.... something it never accomplished at all in practice. Other design compromises were made which basically made the Shuttle into a bastard child of ideas and clearly made by a committee with political motivations other than actually trying to get people into space... and certainly not to make it cheaper to go into space.
I wouldn't write off the concept of the Shuttle, and clearly the fact that it flew at all should be a reason to at least consider some of the aspects of the Space Shuttle for future spacecraft designs. Jeff Greason of XCOR has used some (not all) of the ideas that were developed for the Space Shuttle in the design of the Lynx. None the less, there are reasons why the Shuttle design ought to be full of warnings as well and mistakes that shouldn't be made.
I'll also note that the real innovation in rocket design is happening in America... but not through NASA contracts.
even the rocket fuel is so expensive you probably cant afford it
Not really. For the Space Shuttle launches, the catering budget for the press corps covering the launches was usually more than the cost of the actual fuel that went into that rocket. The cost for the amount of rocket fuel needed to get somebody into orbit is about a thousand dollars or so (or at least that order of magnitude). Essentially the price of a first-class ticket on a trans-continental airliner. In order to get to Mars, round trip, (or just about anywhere else in the Solar System) you need about 4x that fuel... and not much more.
That is clearly something affordable by anybody in a 1st world country... and you wouldn't even need to mortgage your house. Yes, you could even pay for this on a minimum wage salary working part-time but perhaps making a few sacrifices and doing without luxuries... but still something that could be done. You'd be surprised at how cheap you can live if you care. I'm not saying that people from Somalia or Ethiopia are going to be able to afford this, but I would say that likely a majority of the people from around the world could most certainly afford the rocket fuel needed to get into space and actually do stuff once you get up there.
The huge expense for traveling into space is the cost of the vehicle itself, and the fact that it is amortized over exactly one flight each time, not to mention that the launch pad costs are usually covered only by a dozen or so flights as well. On top of that, when you have a full-time and permanent army of about 30k-100k people involved with the prep-work and deployment of that vehicle on every launch (which was true even for the "reusable" Space Shuttle), those salaries start to add up real quick. For the Apollo flights, there were typically not just one but two carrier task forces that were assigned to perform search & rescue (in the event of a mishap) or recovery on every flight including two weeks prior to each flight and even a week following the flight. There is a reason why it cost about a billion dollars for each launch.
No, it isn't the fuel that is the problem. Much cheaper launches can certainly happen and there is at least the possibility that travel into space can be affordable for mere mortals. If you can make the spacecraft reusable and only needing a dozen or so people on the launch pad in order to "turn around" the vehicle from a landing to launch, it would most certainly be affordable. That is the reason why you can afford to travel by air to most places around the world... because British Airways doesn't throw away their aircraft after each flight.
Simple the President has no stomach for boots on the ground. He is also is planning a punishment attack and nothing more. No it is a good gamble and he has Russia and China to keep the UN out of it. Without the UK to back him up President Obama is now just flopping around trying to offload as much blame and responsibility has he can. AKA it isn't his red line it is the world's.
So we should kill a few hundred or thousand Syrian children in a "punishment attack" in retribution for an attack that killed a few hundred Syrian children. Yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense to me.
And they made little fuss when Iran used them back. That is what the Syrian government was hoping for and even if we don't they know we will not take them out so the risk seems worth it.
Why would you say that Assad's government in Syria "knows we will not take them out"? After seeing the armies of Iraq evaporate as the morning dew in the Gulf War (Syria was actually an allay of America in that war and got a front row seat to the full capabilities of the U.S. military), I'm sure they realize that America is more than capable of a full conquest and even annexation of Syria if it was in the interests of the U.S. Congress. It wouldn't even cause a military draft to happen in America or even much in the way of increased taxes.
From the perspective of the U.S. military, Syria is just vermin that needs to be dealt with. Syria damn well knows that too. They also have a neighboring country (Iraq) that serves as a strong example of what can happen to them if they decide to dick around with America.
Perhaps they feel that their relationship with Russia and China can be used as a counter to American military force. The Security Council veto is irrelevant other than that particular justification for going to war isn't an option this time around.... but having Russian ships and marines standing by waiting for a move by the USA is a potential counter.
World War I started for weaker reasons than this, and similar kinds of balancing of powers against each other was attempted.... and all fell apart too. Serbia hasn't been the same since those days when the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated either. It was squished like a bug then forgotten as a backwater issue to the greater war that ended up happening. Syria is in the same danger and I would think Assad is just as knowledgeable about history as I am in that regard.
{{Citation needed}}
Seriously. If he had done this dozens (at least the ten time you suggest here), there wouldn't be nearly so much fuss over this most recent usage of those weapons. It would have already been an accepted diplomatic fact among everybody involved and then the question would be if chemical weapons usage rises to any sort of a serious issue that is as bad as somebody using a thermonuclear weapon instead.
That is what is being claimed here.
I also don't buy the fear argument, so far as any military commander (even those commanders in World War I which actually deployed such weapons) knew that it would be an escalation of hostilities and not viewed favorably by the international community as a whole. When Germany used chemical weapons in the Netherlands, their back was up against the wall and their generals were desperate to try any possible action to try and break the log jam that was trench warfare during that war. Having a million corpses of your fellow soldiers tends to make you desperate for some major change.
Assad was in no similar kind of danger and had a great many other options available to get the job done, especially knowing that America and the UK were openly supporting the rebels and would use any possible excuse to ramp up that support even further.... as did happen too. Even total jerks like Stalin avoided things like chemical weapons simply because he wouldn't take the diplomatic loss from their use.
The problem is that the explosives route doesn't command territory, and it doesn't have a high enough body count.
It's like the "you have 6 bullets, I have 20 people" equation. You will kill the 6 ( maybe ), but the remaining 14 will get you.
Of course, you have to have a mad enough "20".
Weapons like gas add to the body count and add to the terror in the minds of the opponents, and might be able to take out the "20".
Bullshit. If you want to build a bigger bomb, you just go ahead and build it. The question isn't 6 bullets and 20 people, but rather 6k bullets and 20 people, wondering if after the first couple hundred bullets into each person should the commander be reprimanded for simply wasting ammunition. Assad has a large enough army and is well supplied enough to hunt down and wipe out each of these rebel groups with vastly superior and overwhelming military force.
That really isn't a problem.
The real problem is that these groups are being supported and supplied with weapons and technical support from other countries, namely the USA, UK, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and other groups (including the infamous Al-Qaeda who is actively recruiting people to help with the Syrian rebels). Since so much in the way of weapons, food, and equipment is being sent to these rebels by other major countries, why not a few canisters of chemical weapons too? It would be stupid to say that these other countries don't have access to chemical weapons and the knowledge in terms of how to build and deploy them.
The only reason why you use chemical weapons in a situation like this is either because you are mentally unbalanced (in which case.... why did the Obama administration and other governments help him out for so many decades?) or if you want to engage mass casualties where killing some of your own supporters and even loyal soldiers will be killed to deliver that final death blow.
You nor anybody else suggesting Assad has done this has given a rational explanation for why his soldiers or officers actually conducted this attack. Certainly it wasn't to increase body counts, as the victims of the Dresden fire bombing campaign can amply account for. Assad is certainly capable of conducting such a bombing campaign against a civilian population he they cared, thus chemical weapons simply aren't needed.
If the goal was to gather and eliminate the current leadership in Washington DC, I think you might find a few supporters even in America itself. I would prefer to do that at a ballot box, but if the armies from around the world are coming anyway there could definitely be some internal domestic support too.
Heck, there are currently some deep divisions within the U.S. military itself. There is a distinct possibility that if military units are ordered to action, they may not follow orders. Then again the Obama administration has been conducting a purge of military leaders over the past couple of years, so there is likely to be some very loyal people at the top.
Not unlike pithy and anal comments sometimes made on Slashdot?
It doesn't sound like you've been around here much.
Same logic could apply to Syria's leadership. What strategic military importance was there to using chemical weapons on a remote village full of civilians Vs the enormous risk of UN invasion by using them? I suspect the most likely suspects behind the attack are third parties that stand to gain by an invasion (i.e. not US, not current Syrian regime either).
This is the one question I keep asking myself too. What possible benefits might be coming to Syria if they actually used the chemical weapons? If their back was against the wall and Assad was saying "eff this, let's throw everything we have at these infidel rebels!".... yeah, I could see that as a reason. Unfortunately Syria has a whole lot to lose and not much to gain by doing this kind of stupid gas attack. For crying out loud, Syria has access to jet fighter-bombers, artillery cannons, and a whole range of explosives of a modern military at their disposal. If the goal was simply to kill a bunch of people, there were literally dozens of ways to get that accomplished without resorting to the "weapons of mass destruction".
The rebel groups, on the other hand, have their backs to the wall and are desperate... where Assad clearly has the upper hand as long as those rebels aren't getting outside assistance from other governments. They have very little to lose and a whole lot to gain if these chemical weapons are used and publicized... especially if that use is blamed upon the Assad government. Having the U.S. Army directly back up your own little band of rebels definitely is a huge boost to both morale and actual firepower.
Something definitely stinks here and this doesn't make the official Obama administration story sound all that accurate. I don't know about details here as the PR spin doctors have really mucked this thing up thus finding "the truth" is nearly impossible right now.
Uh, Syria was until quite recently one of our supporters in the region. We've had generally decent to good relations with the Assad regime. It cooled a bit since he started killing his people, but we tend to take a dim view of those who would kill their people because they started talkng democracy.
A fair point to make. Even more oddly is how Syria was even a military allay during the Gulf War.... where Syria fielded a full division of soldiers and took orders directly from an American general (Schwarzkopf) in that war.
The funny thing about Syria is how there are numerous photos and videos of Assad having dinner with both John Kerry and Barack Obama, not to mention an official state visit by Assad to the White House.... and Obama going to Syria himself. Yeah, it was a close relationship. You wonder what Assad did to piss off the Obama administration?
No I don't think the gas attack, at least by itself, was the act. Heck, the Obama administration has been funding "rebels" in Syria for awhile now... well before that supposed gas attack.
Under threat? Tell me when the last Israeli-Syrian war was again? That's like saying the US is always under threat from Mexico. You realize at one point you have to have neighbors, right?
The last Israeli-Syrian war was in 1973... formally. There have been almost continual exchanges of fire between the two countries since that war, however. During most of the several invasions of Lebanon that happened later, Syria backed one or more of the groups involved (Lebanon has been a total basket case of a country for some time). It also doesn't help that from a Syrian point of view Israel is sitting on some of their land (the Golan Heights specifically) and wouldn't mind taking some of that back if the opportunity presented itself. There isn't really much trade that moves between Israel and Syria as well I might add.
Then again there is talk of the "reconquista" in Mexico too, but that is based off of a claim from a war that happened 170 years ago and isn't really taken all that seriously for a great many reasons.
You really have convinced yourself of that, haven't you? I rather wonder if you realize that there are other countries on this planet besides the Untied States.
Yeah.... funny thing that it was a Communist collective that turned into a private for-profit company (RKK Energia) using the same rocket that was originally built to send the Soviet Union to the Moon was the very first company to actually offer private citizens the opportunity to fly into space on their own dime. Still, you ought to look at the story of Mir Corp, and while you are at it OTRAG as well. Both companies had working hardware, business connections, and the physical capability of being able to put people and stuff into space.
MirCorp in particular not only talked about sending people into space, took deposits for customers who wanted to go, but also sent some Russian cosmonauts entirely at their own expense to prepare Mir for continued use and habitation by future commercial customers. Basically they purchased the Mir space station from the Russian Federation. Due to extreme pressure from NASA (and the Clinton Administration) basically saying they would stop supporting the Russian effort to be involved with the ISS, Russia was forced to cancel the contract with MirCorp and deliberately de-orbited Mir so it could never be used by anybody else.
I'll also point out other examples of how it was made illegal for people to go into space by at least any country who had the technological infrastructure necessary for making the trip into space. Sure, you could perhaps have traveled to Mexico (doubtful) or even Tuvalu and perhaps bribed some official giving you a launch permit to launch a rocket into space. But who would sell you the equipment? Who would be willing to even be a machinist to make the rockets and where would you obtain the Aluminum, Niobium, Titanium, and other basic elemental substances needed for building a rocket?
It has only been pretty much since 2000 that it was legal for private citizens to leave this planet. Study up a little bit on the history of private commercial spaceflight and note that it has been a huge struggle just to be recognized that bureaucrats would even permit the process to happen.
I'll also note that even today, the only private commercial space ports that exist along with a government willing to let you fly into space exist exclusively in the USA. Kazakhstan has a spaceport that has been used for private commercial operations.... a space port operated by the Russian Federation I might add. That is currently your only two choices of countries at the moment. BTW, I should also point out that Capitalism was a criminal offense in the former Soviet Union, thus it was literally impossible for a private citizens to buy a space flight until the Soviet government fell.
The ESA has a launch pad in French Guiana (a part of the European Union that is not in Europe) which could in theory be set up to fly people into space and certainly launches rockets large enough to get the job done. They have not yet done that, and would need to pass legislation through the European Parliament in order to permit that kind of activity to take place.
Care to revise your sentiments here about where else you might be able to get into space?
Black & Decker found a way to put holes in things where you didn't need to drag a cord and a temporary outlet at a construction site. Being able to put holes in things whenever you wanted definitely was a big help... and their cordless drill was better than the hand crank kind of drill as well (the only other "cordless" drill you can get). BTW, I tend to use my drill more as a glorified screw driver rather than something which makes holes, but I suppose that is a further adaptation.
Maytag is a special case all to itself. It prided itself on being the top quality in home appliances and built up an amazing reputation of building devices that would last decades or longer. A 50 year old Maytag that still was in service doing what it was designed to do isn't unheard of, those older machines are easy to repair when they do break down, and there has generally been a high degree of quality assurance as well.... at least there used to be. About the mid 1980's there was a management change (basically a new generation of middle and upper management) which didn't care about this reputation other than as a way to exploit it for marketing purposes. By cutting back on materials (using plastic where previously it had been metal, not spending so much on quality assurance, outsourcing parts, and in general doing stuff that frankly many manufacturers were doing in America at the time) these managers threw away their brand name and became everything their marketing department claimed the other companies had become. It now represents a POS piece of equipment if you ever buy that brand. The bells and whistles as you were talking about were there to mask the fact that the machines wouldn't even do what it was that they originally claimed (washing dishes, cook food, or even microwave your popcorn). I had a Maytag stove that nearly burned down my house.... and would have had I not been there to stop the fire from spreading.
Apple certainly risks doing the same thing now that Steve Jobs is no longer around to bash heads in when needed. The Newton was interesting because it did most of the things that the iPhone does, but it was a little clunkier and slower simply because the technology wasn't quite up to the task at the time. It is an example of an early adopter of technology being well ahead of the curve so bad that they took the arrows and paid a hard price for being so far ahead of the competition that you don't even know what it is that you have in front of you.
I can give some interesting examples: The Diamond Rio was famous for setting the precedent that the RIAA couldn't hold MP3 device manufacturers liable for copyright infringement simply by providing the means to play an MP3 vile. They played a pivotal role in the technology, but ended up being a commercial failure none the less in the long run. Yes, they did make some money, but others (notably Apple in this case) took the idea forward to the next step once the market was established and thus capitalized upon this earlier effort.
The Altair 8800 was the very first microcomputer, and developed quite a huge fan following. They blazed the trail, even help give the reason for a tiny start-up company called Microsoft to be established as well as spawned a whole bunch of other companies. Adding to the pattern, Apple Computer even took advantage of MITS marketing strategy and came up with their own computer... thus while not necessarily being first they did take advantage of this much earlier work.
Going back to even electric automobiles, there were notable electric cars that had been around for quite some time, including the Baker Electrics, which at the time had even seemed as though electric automobiles were the future and the other new technology at the time, gasoline internal combustion engines, seemed as if they were too complex and messy to actual
I think it's time to accept the harsh reality that the era of manned space travel is pretty much over. It was a nice, brief blip in modern history--fueled by the politics of the Cold War. But it's been in decline since the early 70's, and with the end of the Cold War in the early 90's, the writing was on the wall. A few more countries will send men up as a point of national pride (like China), and the ISS and Russian manned program will limp along for a little while longer. But we're never going back to the way it was.
I'll accept that the era of government employees having exclusive access to manned spaceflight resources is over. A big trillion dollar budget to send a team of people to Mars and back is never going to happen (a budget roughly comparable to what NASA got for the Apollo program in the 1960's) no matter how hard some people would like to see that happen.
There are a number of reasons for this, not the least of which is that the effort to go into space was simply not economically sustainable. When the motto literally hanging over every engineer's desk and in most of the contractor's assembly lines was "waste anything but time", you get some really odd skewing of the market for vehicles going into space. If NASA had a budget of roughly that trillion dollar size (to be spent over roughly 2-3 decades) and was launching big heavy payloads at least four to eight times per year (operational tempo is important here), I think the current SLS architecture could work. Unfortunately the support for that kind of effort doesn't seem to be a priority for the current United States Congress.... and those are the people that matter in this case.
The interesting thing is that the total number of people who will have been into space is going to double in the next 2-3 years, and a number of very economical manned spaceflight vehicles are in various stages of development where you will see not only sub-orbital flights but also orbital flights as well that will be done by private individuals as opposed to government programs. Some of them are doing this as a "joyride", but others have very serious financial interests involved with these flights where they plan on making a profit from their flight or doing research that previously was impossible to be done without sending somebody "up there".
It isn't so much that manned spaceflight is ending, it is just entering a very new and different era where the traditional "steely eyed missile men" made of "the right stuff" are going to be historical relics. That era of manned spaceflight is indeed going to expire very soon.
What Tyson also said was, that he didn't think the private sector would do trailblazing space feats, it is way too expensive to do space exploration compared to the economic gains that there simply isn't a business case.
This may be much closer to what Neil deGrasse Tyson actually said, but even that is still not proven in terms of historical examples. Completely private funds paid for the first successful experiments in aviation, and arguable it was private investors who paid for the first trips to Antarctica (they were whaling ships... where American whalers where on shore doing repairs when a British "voyage of discovery" sailed by for the first "official" record of that continent). Private investors also dump huge amounts of money into automotive research.... usually through investments in Formula-1 and NASCAR vehicles as well as other similar efforts. Bell Labs was famous for a nearly constant stream of innovations including many things that make it possible to read these very words.
To say that private individuals won't be trailblazing in space is mainly to note that for a great many years it was actually illegal for private individuals to even try, not to mention that so much money has been dumped into government programs that for the moment it is impossible for private individuals to compete. Robert Goddard and other contemporary experimenters did, however, use private funds to significantly develop their projects at the beginning of rocket development. There are also companies like Copenhagen Suborbitals who are refining the technology on their own without any government backing in their own private attempts to get into space. It isn't like the Danish Space Agency is competing too hard trying to do the same thing.
I'll admit that without government funding of space exploration, it would perhaps take a bit more time for people to build up both the nerve and the financial resources necessary to be able to go into space. On top of that, things done in space would mostly have to turn a profit eventually (even if it is only a very long term objective) for private efforts to be successful. That is happening in other areas too where private commercial spaceflight is finally beginning to be successful beyond GEO satellites and telecom efforts (two huge areas where commercial spaceflight is already very well established). I disagree that it would never be done, but things accomplished would definitely have different priorities when done by commercial entities as opposed to government agencies. A business case can be made for travel into space for a number of things, so I also disagree with the concern that economic gains can't be made.
I bet someone in battery manufacturing is looking as adding capacity now in anticipation of such events. This could be quite an opportunity for some manufacturer with a bit of foresight. As more companies make and sell more electric cars I doubt Tesla will be the only company hunting for more, cheaper, better.
Do you think Elon Musk and Tesla Motors didn't anticipate something like this happening too? While no doubt they have been buying these cells at bulk prices already, with the size of a customer they are right now and the fact Tesla has already sunk a big pile of money into their plant anticipating a huge increase in sales and production (metal fabrication machines aren't cheap), I have no doubt that Tesla is in the thick of things in terms of getting potential long term manufacturing contracts... or at least purchasing futures contracts for these cells in large quantities (essentially the same thing).
In fact, It has been common practice at both Tesla as well as SpaceX that they try to bring as much of their production in-house as possible. If Tesla is consuming so many cells that their consumption is a sizable fraction of world-wide demand, I wouldn't put it past Elon Musk to either buy the manufacturing plant or build one himself simply to ensure a reliable source of supply for his own needs. It isn't like Elon Musk did something like that before. So much so that I wouldn't even put it past Tesla to start selling these cells as well on a consumer level as well (or at least offer cheap cells to Wal-Mart).
The one place that Tesla likely won't be investing money into though is raw bulk Lithium and other materials needed to make the cells. If you want to see where the real entrepreneurs are going to be running around at, look into Lithium mining stocks.
He is confusing the iPhone for the Newton. Then again, look what happened to the Newton.
No one argues that because the Articles of Confederation do not have the force of law. They were superseded by the US Constitution.
Here is a point to make about this issue though:
If the U.S. Constitution of 1787 superseded the Articles of Confederation, does that imply this particular basic right, an enumerated right that does not exist in that constitution including subsequent amendments, has been repealed and thus void from Constitutional Law?
My argument is that this was though of enough that the writers of the Articles of Confederation thought to explicitly include it in that document. The Constitution of 1787 simply doesn't address this issue other than in the 9th Amendment which basically points out "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." I would contend this specific previously enumerated right would be one of those rights that the Constitution explicitly did not intend to destroy.
I'll admit this is a bit of a stretch, but at the same time it shows that the right to travel freely is a basic right. The Constitution does provide for laws regarding immigration, naturalization, and for controlling the federal border with other nations outside of the union of states.... but it doesn't provide any constitutional authority for travel within or between states. If a court was to grant that this indeed is a part of the constitutional law of America, it really doesn't open any sort of substantial Pandora's box as the scope of this individual right is quite limited, and the rest of the Articles of Confederation (with very few exceptions) are clearly replicated or replaced with other provisions in the Constitution of 1787.
If American soldiers hit the ground and start taking territory, Russia will get involved. Russia basically said that bombing a few villages and killing tens of thousands of people wouldn't get them involved (as if killing tens of thousands of people is a justified response to the deaths of 1500 or so people killed by somebody else), and they aren't going to give a blank check to Assad yet.
But if Marines start to land, I would say the Russians might step up there too.
Actually, if that had happened we'd be better off no? Less overpopulation. As long as it wasn't a nuclear war the environment would have been better off, less plastic pollution, less destruction of the environment for oil, less agricultural pollution, less contamination of the food supply with gmos, less destruction of the environment for resources, less etc...
You really hate being human that much? Note that any substantial reduction of population will include you.... don't try to set yourself up as somebody special and immune to what would happen. If your goal is suicide, then at least admit it too.
And my point is that it would be nuclear war. It still might be too if this fiasco in Syria isn't dealt with intelligently. Not only will that take out most of mankind, but it will take out most of the rest of the life on the surface of the Earth as well. More contamination, more pollution, much more destruction of the environment than could be done by the worst estimates of any environmentalist over the next 200 years. Screw resources buried in the land, it won't be worth extracting because there won't be anybody to use it either.