How much of that added safety is something that was added by the federal government (and other government regulatory agencies like those in Japan and Europe) and how much of that was demanded by customers? What other options were made available to ordinary consumers that may not have wanted to spend that kind of money?
There is a reason why Scaled Composites is jettisoning its foray into hybrid rocket motors. They are temperamental and cause all sort of problems. Unfortunately Scaled Composites also lost some good people to those tests.... something that sort of tempers you view as well when you are trying to evaluate the viability of a particular technology (regardless of what you may think about its use).
I may be misinformed on this as well, but SpaceShip One did use a hybrid motor for its flights into space.
Probably one of the best indy film "series" that I've ever seen was Pioneer One. It is telling that they are now trying to substantially raise the amount of money that they need to continue the series... as the producers ran up huge debts and as they've said on their Season 2 web page that they simply need more money to do the job right. You might be able to spend less than the roughly $1 billion spent on the production of the Lord of the Rings + Hobbit and still do a polished job of the whole production, but it won't be so easy to do either. Most of the time you are cutting corners and it shows.
Sometimes you can trade time & favors for cost... as they've done with Pioneer One. While an episodic TV series, it has months between episodes and they only have six episodes to work with. I give kudos to these guys for what they've done, but it does take more.
There are several other on-line groups which are trying to make their own videos... many with Hollywood connections in terms of actual talent and knowledge of how to do this kind of thing in terms of knowing more than the raw mechanics of the whole thing. It isn't easy though. The big change is really distribution as the internet has completely changed how content is getting delivered. The actual production of video content hasn't really changed all that much.
You mean a union like this one? BTW, it happens to be the same union that Ronald Reagan (yes that same guy) was previously president over. Standard contracts do exist, but the lousy pay for journeymen actors isn't for a lack of a decent union.
Actually, I don't really see the difference. I used to do 8mm films back years ago, and even did a fairly good job of editing. It cost a little bit more to get that kind of equipment (the editor was about $500-$1000 and the camera was about $300 plus film stock & processing).
By far and away the largest changes that have happened are the things that take the tediousness out of the process, the quality of the "film stock" (you can now shoot HD format videos as opposed to grainy 8mm film), and the cost has gone down somewhat. Even more significant is the distribution channels, where the 8mm films I used to shoot might have been seen by my immediate family and a few friends (perhaps a church group or a school club as well), but real opportunities to distribute the stuff didn't exist before. Now you have YouTube where you can literally show the world something you've made and lightning does strike some people with a few million views for what is utter nonsense.
Quality films made by true film artists that tell a compelling story on the other hand are not something that can easily be made by rank amateurs. It has been cheap for some time to buy some canvas and a bunch of oil paints, yet how many people can duplicate Rembrandt? Copy his work, perhaps, but they can't make a masterpiece that looks like it was made by one of the old masters unless they really are that good themselves. And that says nothing about extending the art form itself into something genuinely innovative. That does take real skill.
I'd like to see you try. I know there are some people who think they can do something like that.... which is why You Tube is filled with things like Minecraft videos.
There still is an element of skill that is applied to these videos though, and I don't think Moore's Law is going to completely compensate for the total lack of talent that some people may have.
I should have noted that some of these actors really can do their craft and make a very compelling portrayal of their characters where you tend to forget who they are and look instead at the character rather than the actor. Bill Murry with the portrayal of FDR in Hyde Park on the Hudson is an excellent example of what a quality actor can do.... where as even Bill Murry's earlier portrayals mostly seemed like himself (in Ghost Busters, Groundhog Day, and even Stripes) but this one really made me lose the sense it was the actor and got me thinking about FDR instead.
There are some actors who really do hone their craft. I really like Eddie Murphy as I've never seen an actor play a white Jewish barber like him. I really had to do a double take to even notice it was him at all. There is real skill in acting, and there are certainly several actors who simply can't act even if their life depended on it. William Shatner comes to mind on that point (or maybe it is deliberately bad acting.... it may be with this particular comedian).
Actors aren't paid "millions of dollars" for their skills. They are paid for their names. Generally a "Tom Cruise" movie is going to bring in a lot more people to see it than an unknown actor. Tom gets to charge his rates based, quite a bit, on _that_.
Actors are paid big money because people are willing to go see films made by actors who they like. Tom Cruise, Harrison Ford, and Jack Nicholson are noted for nearly consistently being in films that are quite popular and from a studio perspective are all actors who have been in successful projects. Actors like Bruce Willis on the other hand are noted for being in a series of box office bombs that seem to consistently lose money (except for the Die Hard series). If you are associated with successful projects, you will be worth more than somebody who stays in fringe films or films that do poorly.
When was the last time you saw a Kevin Costner film? I didn't think so. Getting successive Raspberry Awards in a row tends to do that to an actor. And yes, he still is doing stuff.... just that nobody sees them anymore.
There were thousands of computers and tens of thousands of computer hours.
By Moore's Law, this is 20 years away from being an overnight job for a home PC. Home production of modern-big-budget-film quality will happen in the not-too-distant future. We should be thinking now about how to optimise the laws to allow society to benefit from it.
There is a whole lot to making movies that can't be automated... or at least it shows as a low quality film if people try. Compare Xtranormal videos to even something like a video shot with a $50 camera and somebody who took time to actually edit a film with something like Microsoft Movie Studio. It simply takes time and a whole lot of talent to get the job done.
There certainly have been many movie making tasks that have been automated or things like a digital non-linear editing system that used to be literally impossible to perform in the past that can now be downloaded for free (both beer and in freedom depending on the software) that do a really good job. That might get rid of about half of the jobs on a typical big budget film today compared to about 30 years ago. It isn't going to be an "overnight job" for a home PC any time soon regardless of what miracles you think Moore's Law brings.
Try this: Stand outside the front of my house and tell me that I suck.
Then stand directly in front of my door and tell me that I suck. As long as you are on the sidewalk or on "public ways" you can go ahead and do that. Step onto my own private property and I'll have you arrested for trespassing (assuming you stick around for any length of time) and possibly other charges.
If IBM does the same thing at their HQ, I don't have a problem with that and the same issues apply. You can stand in front of the entrance to the IBM property (which does have public access) and protest saying that IBM sucks. If you want to be a jerk and rush inside of IBM property and do the same thing, you deserve to be treated like a jerk just as somebody standing directly at my front door should be treated too.
Oh... were you saying that an IBM employee getting fired because he tells his boss that the boss sucks is not grounds to be terminated? If you really don't want to work for the company or be a part of that company, why are you sticking around? You are free to form your own corporation and do whatever it is that you want to do for employment. You aren't, however, as free to form your own country and do whatever it is that you want to do.... there is a little bit of a difference there.
First, if touch gestures annoy you, you can turn them off.
The point you are missing is that the video producer (he really isn't an author) tried to do just as you said.... and couldn't figure out how to do the thing you are saying he should try to do.
Perhaps the laptop hardware developer should have written their own operating system so he didn't need to figure out how to turn the bloody thing off. Oh.... that is what Microsoft was supposed to be doing in the first place for that company, wasn't it? More to the point, Windows 8 should never have been installed onto that laptop in the first place by the manufacturer. Windows 7 might have worked just fine, but note that wasn't even an option because of Microsoft's contracts with the various manufacturers.
Windows 8 simply isn't the right tool for the job, but unfortunately some suits at Microsoft simply don't give a damn about stuff like that and think this is the one operating system to "rule them all". It is likely that Linux will be installed on this particular computer by the time the reviewer is through.... but why the hell did he have to pay for an operating system he wasn't even going to use in the first place?
Who said it had to happen in a human lifetime, or that a human lifetime was limited to about 100 years with a million years of technological progress? 10k years ago engineers in Egypt were still trying to figure out how to build the pyramids and the typical lifespan of most people was about 30 years. It was nearly that bad 500 years ago and the technologies needed to cross oceans were by comparison worse than what we have to cross between planets in the Solar System today (and comparatively expensive by standards of ordinary working people of the era too).
I'm not saying that it will be easy to travel between stars, and I'm not really certain that you will be able to do something like drop-ship a package by FedEx to Tau Ceti or Alpha Centauri in the next few hundred years, but human travel between stars is just on the inside of practical physics and it could happen. It will take energy densities approaching that of a matter-antimatter engine and as a practical matter today's engineering certainly isn't up to the challenge, but it isn't really impossible provided somebody really wants to come up with a plan for how to get it to happen.
... or by Generation 8 they may simply not want to stop. The notion of living on a planet is so old fashion that they may not want it. The only reason they would want to stop is to get supplies needed to continue the trip... so they would be looking for asteroids and not planets like the Earth.
That isn't exactly true. There have been some real innovations in propulsion technology, but the real issue is that those systems which really advance technology need to be nuclear powered rather than powered with chemical energy. It really is just a matter of energy density, and mixing chemicals simply doesn't work very well beyond going to the Moon or perhaps out the outside going to Mars in about a year.
Things that have been proposed, besides the "nuclear pulse rocket" (aka literally detonating nuclear bombs as a propulsion system) include the VASMR engine, ion propulsion, solar sails, and the discovery of the Interplanetary Transport Network (really just a bunch of equations to find very low energy transfers to other places in the Solar System).
The Dawn spacecraft is using the ion propulsion system, and it seems to be working out very well. It has the thrust of perhaps a whisper or a gentle breath, but if that is sustained over the period of months as continuous thrust it can add up to quite a bit.
Some serious work on new ideas has been done, the trick is simply getting some of those crazy ideas built and out of the hands of rocket scientists and into the hands of engineers who can actually make them work.
Even traveling at just 0.1c, humanity can literally fill up the Milky Way Galaxy and move on to the rest of the local group of stars in less than a million years. From the perspective of the age of the universe that is an incredibly short period of time. Assuming that only 1% of all stars in the galaxy have habitable planets (meaning "habitable" like Mars... something that takes effort to get resources but is still doable by mere mortals), that is still more planets than there are people on the Earth right now.
I don't know what would get that initial spark of people moving out to the rest of the stars of the galaxy, but once it starts happening, it won't stop.
Ceti Alpha is not a proper stellar designation. That must have been a script writer like the one who thought a parsec was a unit of time. Alpha Ceti is a proper designation, which usually comes in the form: [ Greek letter ] [ constellation ] (the Greek letter is often spelled out in Latin, but sometimes abbreviated with just the Greek letter instead). Transposing the constellation and letter might be considered a twist of the name, but it is still identifiable.
A slightly more famous star name is Alpha Centauri.... the first star (usually the brightest) designated in the Centaur constellation. Tau Ceti is thus a rather dim star in Cetus, but none the less one you can still see without a telescope if you really try to search for it.
That is Alpha Ceti, not Tau Ceti..... different star systems. None the less, it is the same constellation (Cetus the Whale), thus in the same general direction in the sky from the Earth.
Some people at NASA aren't at fault. There is a huge divide going on in NASA right now between those who want to encourage private commercial spaceflight and those who don't. Lori Garver received a cold shoulder when she first visited NASA centers while she was on a "fact finding tour" for the Obama administration.... then she became their boss. I've also heard in those same congressional hearings some very negative things about private spaceflight efforts coming from NASA center chiefs and other prominent people within NASA.... not just dissenting congressmen.
The saddest one was trying to get Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan to essentially tell congress that it was a waste of money to even support commercial spaceflight efforts. This is a battle of ideas that has been happening for some time. The funny thing about that particular hearing is that Buzz Aldrin and Harrison Schmitt (ship-mates of these two other astronauts) were saying nearly the exact opposite things. This has nothing to do with political affiliation, but it does represent a huge reluctance on the part of many entrenched interests to even consider commercial spaceflight as a legitimate option for future spaceflight needs.
SpaceX is not where the action is happening. If you think the only private spaceflight is SpaceX, you simply don't know what is going on.
Check out Armadillo Aerospace, Masten Space Systems, Scaled Composites, Bigelow Aerospace, Blur Origin, and XCor (just to name a few... I know I'm missing a bunch). Even with SpaceX their flight manifest has a majority of the flights booked for commercial projects that have nothing to do with the federal government.
I guess the saying goes that if it is raining money, you haul out the buckets and grab what you can, so doing business with the government is a prudent thing if they are throwing money about. None the less it isn't even the government that is the concern.
I'd also have you listen in on hearings with the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. There are a number of members of congress that are incredibly hostile to commercial spaceflight and are openly trying to stop commercial enterprises from happening at all in space or are incredulous that commercial activities could even happen at all. Quite literally the owners of these private enterprises are telling the government to get out of their way and not mess with their businesses.
NASA is not the only "space agency" in the U.S. federal government, and it isn't even the largest (which would arguably be the National Reconnaissance Office), and the U.S. Air Force also has a separate "Air Force Space Command" which does more than its share of activity in space including the infamous X-37 that appears to be using some of the technology developed for the Space Shuttle.
If you are critical of NASA, that criticism is justified but it is wrong to compare NASA to what the Chinese are doing as NASA is hardly what is happening in America for spaceflight. The real exciting stuff in America is happening with private companies, who are essentially telling the U.S. government to get lost and not get in their way.
The galactic senate didn't stop Palpatine from taking over. In fact, they cheered him on.
So said George Lucas in a thinly veiled critique of the American system of government in this very fictional account. Then again, just look at what happened to Hitler with the Reichstag (what I think Lucas was alluding to) and you might have a point.
The reason why DVDs took over from VHS tapes (which hardly was an overnight thing either) had more to do with creature comforts of not having to rewind the tape, deal with tape stretching/media fall out, and other physical problems of the VHS medium. That the DVD discs took up much less space was also a huge bonus and none of those advantages applied to Bluray as a format. For the most part Bluray is simply DVD on steroids and seen as just that.
On the technical side, there are some decided advantages of the Bluray format over DVD that goes well beyond just resolution and menuing options. One thing that hasn't even remotely been dealt with on Bluray content though is the fact that the Bluray player is a fully functional computer that is merely optimized for video playback. DVD was mostly the same thing, but it didn't have any RAM in the official spec (other than data buffers... not really accessible) and only 40 or so registers with fewer options in terms of what you could do with that computer. Unfortunately the technical specs are locked up so hobbyist-hacker developers can't really develop content unless they are employed by a major video studio.
I take it that you've never seen an episode of Saturday Night Live? They've had several prominent politicians on that show including several presidential candidates and I believe a sitting U.S. President.
That doesn't even get into movies like Contact that featured Bill Clinton announcing the discovery of an extra-terrestrial radio signal coming from the Vega star system. Yes, I do know what the press conference that Bill Clinton was responding to was actually about (and just as nuts) but that doesn't stop stuff like that from being used either.
This kind of thing is hardly new, much less something to condemn a sitting Prime Minister of any country for having some fun.
On the contrary. Most incredible ideas are built upon the ideas of others that have contributed in the past. Isaac Newton would not have been able to write Principia Mathematica or even Optics without involving the work of a great many people before him, and Albert Einstein could not have conceived of General Relativity without having studied the work of Newton and other great physicists of the past.
The same thing is certainly true of the mathematicians who participated in the development of mechanical computational theory either. It is said that we stand upon the shoulders of giants, and I don't think Grace Hopper would have disputed that either.
The problem here is trying to single somebody out as "the discoverer" or "founder" when in fact there were many before with amazing ideas, and there will be many in the future who will continue to advance human knowledge into the future.
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How much of that added safety is something that was added by the federal government (and other government regulatory agencies like those in Japan and Europe) and how much of that was demanded by customers? What other options were made available to ordinary consumers that may not have wanted to spend that kind of money?
There is a reason why Scaled Composites is jettisoning its foray into hybrid rocket motors. They are temperamental and cause all sort of problems. Unfortunately Scaled Composites also lost some good people to those tests.... something that sort of tempers you view as well when you are trying to evaluate the viability of a particular technology (regardless of what you may think about its use).
I may be misinformed on this as well, but SpaceShip One did use a hybrid motor for its flights into space.
Probably one of the best indy film "series" that I've ever seen was Pioneer One. It is telling that they are now trying to substantially raise the amount of money that they need to continue the series... as the producers ran up huge debts and as they've said on their Season 2 web page that they simply need more money to do the job right. You might be able to spend less than the roughly $1 billion spent on the production of the Lord of the Rings + Hobbit and still do a polished job of the whole production, but it won't be so easy to do either. Most of the time you are cutting corners and it shows.
Sometimes you can trade time & favors for cost... as they've done with Pioneer One. While an episodic TV series, it has months between episodes and they only have six episodes to work with. I give kudos to these guys for what they've done, but it does take more.
There are several other on-line groups which are trying to make their own videos... many with Hollywood connections in terms of actual talent and knowledge of how to do this kind of thing in terms of knowing more than the raw mechanics of the whole thing. It isn't easy though. The big change is really distribution as the internet has completely changed how content is getting delivered. The actual production of video content hasn't really changed all that much.
You mean a union like this one? BTW, it happens to be the same union that Ronald Reagan (yes that same guy) was previously president over. Standard contracts do exist, but the lousy pay for journeymen actors isn't for a lack of a decent union.
Actually, I don't really see the difference. I used to do 8mm films back years ago, and even did a fairly good job of editing. It cost a little bit more to get that kind of equipment (the editor was about $500-$1000 and the camera was about $300 plus film stock & processing).
By far and away the largest changes that have happened are the things that take the tediousness out of the process, the quality of the "film stock" (you can now shoot HD format videos as opposed to grainy 8mm film), and the cost has gone down somewhat. Even more significant is the distribution channels, where the 8mm films I used to shoot might have been seen by my immediate family and a few friends (perhaps a church group or a school club as well), but real opportunities to distribute the stuff didn't exist before. Now you have YouTube where you can literally show the world something you've made and lightning does strike some people with a few million views for what is utter nonsense.
Quality films made by true film artists that tell a compelling story on the other hand are not something that can easily be made by rank amateurs. It has been cheap for some time to buy some canvas and a bunch of oil paints, yet how many people can duplicate Rembrandt? Copy his work, perhaps, but they can't make a masterpiece that looks like it was made by one of the old masters unless they really are that good themselves. And that says nothing about extending the art form itself into something genuinely innovative. That does take real skill.
I'd like to see you try. I know there are some people who think they can do something like that.... which is why You Tube is filled with things like Minecraft videos.
There still is an element of skill that is applied to these videos though, and I don't think Moore's Law is going to completely compensate for the total lack of talent that some people may have.
I should have noted that some of these actors really can do their craft and make a very compelling portrayal of their characters where you tend to forget who they are and look instead at the character rather than the actor. Bill Murry with the portrayal of FDR in Hyde Park on the Hudson is an excellent example of what a quality actor can do.... where as even Bill Murry's earlier portrayals mostly seemed like himself (in Ghost Busters, Groundhog Day, and even Stripes) but this one really made me lose the sense it was the actor and got me thinking about FDR instead.
There are some actors who really do hone their craft. I really like Eddie Murphy as I've never seen an actor play a white Jewish barber like him. I really had to do a double take to even notice it was him at all. There is real skill in acting, and there are certainly several actors who simply can't act even if their life depended on it. William Shatner comes to mind on that point (or maybe it is deliberately bad acting.... it may be with this particular comedian).
Actors aren't paid "millions of dollars" for their skills. They are paid for their names. Generally a "Tom Cruise" movie is going to bring in a lot more people to see it than an unknown actor. Tom gets to charge his rates based, quite a bit, on _that_.
Actors are paid big money because people are willing to go see films made by actors who they like. Tom Cruise, Harrison Ford, and Jack Nicholson are noted for nearly consistently being in films that are quite popular and from a studio perspective are all actors who have been in successful projects. Actors like Bruce Willis on the other hand are noted for being in a series of box office bombs that seem to consistently lose money (except for the Die Hard series). If you are associated with successful projects, you will be worth more than somebody who stays in fringe films or films that do poorly.
When was the last time you saw a Kevin Costner film? I didn't think so. Getting successive Raspberry Awards in a row tends to do that to an actor. And yes, he still is doing stuff.... just that nobody sees them anymore.
There were thousands of computers and tens of thousands of computer hours.
By Moore's Law, this is 20 years away from being an overnight job for a home PC. Home production of modern-big-budget-film quality will happen in the not-too-distant future. We should be thinking now about how to optimise the laws to allow society to benefit from it.
There is a whole lot to making movies that can't be automated... or at least it shows as a low quality film if people try. Compare Xtranormal videos to even something like a video shot with a $50 camera and somebody who took time to actually edit a film with something like Microsoft Movie Studio. It simply takes time and a whole lot of talent to get the job done.
There certainly have been many movie making tasks that have been automated or things like a digital non-linear editing system that used to be literally impossible to perform in the past that can now be downloaded for free (both beer and in freedom depending on the software) that do a really good job. That might get rid of about half of the jobs on a typical big budget film today compared to about 30 years ago. It isn't going to be an "overnight job" for a home PC any time soon regardless of what miracles you think Moore's Law brings.
Try this: Stand outside the front of my house and tell me that I suck.
Then stand directly in front of my door and tell me that I suck. As long as you are on the sidewalk or on "public ways" you can go ahead and do that. Step onto my own private property and I'll have you arrested for trespassing (assuming you stick around for any length of time) and possibly other charges.
If IBM does the same thing at their HQ, I don't have a problem with that and the same issues apply. You can stand in front of the entrance to the IBM property (which does have public access) and protest saying that IBM sucks. If you want to be a jerk and rush inside of IBM property and do the same thing, you deserve to be treated like a jerk just as somebody standing directly at my front door should be treated too.
Oh... were you saying that an IBM employee getting fired because he tells his boss that the boss sucks is not grounds to be terminated? If you really don't want to work for the company or be a part of that company, why are you sticking around? You are free to form your own corporation and do whatever it is that you want to do for employment. You aren't, however, as free to form your own country and do whatever it is that you want to do.... there is a little bit of a difference there.
That's false.
First, if touch gestures annoy you, you can turn them off.
The point you are missing is that the video producer (he really isn't an author) tried to do just as you said.... and couldn't figure out how to do the thing you are saying he should try to do.
Perhaps the laptop hardware developer should have written their own operating system so he didn't need to figure out how to turn the bloody thing off. Oh.... that is what Microsoft was supposed to be doing in the first place for that company, wasn't it? More to the point, Windows 8 should never have been installed onto that laptop in the first place by the manufacturer. Windows 7 might have worked just fine, but note that wasn't even an option because of Microsoft's contracts with the various manufacturers.
Windows 8 simply isn't the right tool for the job, but unfortunately some suits at Microsoft simply don't give a damn about stuff like that and think this is the one operating system to "rule them all". It is likely that Linux will be installed on this particular computer by the time the reviewer is through.... but why the hell did he have to pay for an operating system he wasn't even going to use in the first place?
Who said it had to happen in a human lifetime, or that a human lifetime was limited to about 100 years with a million years of technological progress? 10k years ago engineers in Egypt were still trying to figure out how to build the pyramids and the typical lifespan of most people was about 30 years. It was nearly that bad 500 years ago and the technologies needed to cross oceans were by comparison worse than what we have to cross between planets in the Solar System today (and comparatively expensive by standards of ordinary working people of the era too).
I'm not saying that it will be easy to travel between stars, and I'm not really certain that you will be able to do something like drop-ship a package by FedEx to Tau Ceti or Alpha Centauri in the next few hundred years, but human travel between stars is just on the inside of practical physics and it could happen. It will take energy densities approaching that of a matter-antimatter engine and as a practical matter today's engineering certainly isn't up to the challenge, but it isn't really impossible provided somebody really wants to come up with a plan for how to get it to happen.
... or by Generation 8 they may simply not want to stop. The notion of living on a planet is so old fashion that they may not want it. The only reason they would want to stop is to get supplies needed to continue the trip... so they would be looking for asteroids and not planets like the Earth.
That isn't exactly true. There have been some real innovations in propulsion technology, but the real issue is that those systems which really advance technology need to be nuclear powered rather than powered with chemical energy. It really is just a matter of energy density, and mixing chemicals simply doesn't work very well beyond going to the Moon or perhaps out the outside going to Mars in about a year.
Things that have been proposed, besides the "nuclear pulse rocket" (aka literally detonating nuclear bombs as a propulsion system) include the VASMR engine, ion propulsion, solar sails, and the discovery of the Interplanetary Transport Network (really just a bunch of equations to find very low energy transfers to other places in the Solar System).
The Dawn spacecraft is using the ion propulsion system, and it seems to be working out very well. It has the thrust of perhaps a whisper or a gentle breath, but if that is sustained over the period of months as continuous thrust it can add up to quite a bit.
Some serious work on new ideas has been done, the trick is simply getting some of those crazy ideas built and out of the hands of rocket scientists and into the hands of engineers who can actually make them work.
Even traveling at just 0.1c, humanity can literally fill up the Milky Way Galaxy and move on to the rest of the local group of stars in less than a million years. From the perspective of the age of the universe that is an incredibly short period of time. Assuming that only 1% of all stars in the galaxy have habitable planets (meaning "habitable" like Mars... something that takes effort to get resources but is still doable by mere mortals), that is still more planets than there are people on the Earth right now.
I don't know what would get that initial spark of people moving out to the rest of the stars of the galaxy, but once it starts happening, it won't stop.
Ceti Alpha is not a proper stellar designation. That must have been a script writer like the one who thought a parsec was a unit of time. Alpha Ceti is a proper designation, which usually comes in the form: [ Greek letter ] [ constellation ]
(the Greek letter is often spelled out in Latin, but sometimes abbreviated with just the Greek letter instead). Transposing the constellation and letter might be considered a twist of the name, but it is still identifiable.
A slightly more famous star name is Alpha Centauri.... the first star (usually the brightest) designated in the Centaur constellation. Tau Ceti is thus a rather dim star in Cetus, but none the less one you can still see without a telescope if you really try to search for it.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_designation
That is Alpha Ceti, not Tau Ceti..... different star systems. None the less, it is the same constellation (Cetus the Whale), thus in the same general direction in the sky from the Earth.
Some people at NASA aren't at fault. There is a huge divide going on in NASA right now between those who want to encourage private commercial spaceflight and those who don't. Lori Garver received a cold shoulder when she first visited NASA centers while she was on a "fact finding tour" for the Obama administration.... then she became their boss. I've also heard in those same congressional hearings some very negative things about private spaceflight efforts coming from NASA center chiefs and other prominent people within NASA.... not just dissenting congressmen.
The saddest one was trying to get Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan to essentially tell congress that it was a waste of money to even support commercial spaceflight efforts. This is a battle of ideas that has been happening for some time. The funny thing about that particular hearing is that Buzz Aldrin and Harrison Schmitt (ship-mates of these two other astronauts) were saying nearly the exact opposite things. This has nothing to do with political affiliation, but it does represent a huge reluctance on the part of many entrenched interests to even consider commercial spaceflight as a legitimate option for future spaceflight needs.
Note that they discontinued sales in 2009. Not a bad site though.
SpaceX is not where the action is happening. If you think the only private spaceflight is SpaceX, you simply don't know what is going on.
Check out Armadillo Aerospace, Masten Space Systems, Scaled Composites, Bigelow Aerospace, Blur Origin, and XCor (just to name a few... I know I'm missing a bunch). Even with SpaceX their flight manifest has a majority of the flights booked for commercial projects that have nothing to do with the federal government.
I guess the saying goes that if it is raining money, you haul out the buckets and grab what you can, so doing business with the government is a prudent thing if they are throwing money about. None the less it isn't even the government that is the concern.
I'd also have you listen in on hearings with the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. There are a number of members of congress that are incredibly hostile to commercial spaceflight and are openly trying to stop commercial enterprises from happening at all in space or are incredulous that commercial activities could even happen at all. Quite literally the owners of these private enterprises are telling the government to get out of their way and not mess with their businesses.
NASA is not the only "space agency" in the U.S. federal government, and it isn't even the largest (which would arguably be the National Reconnaissance Office), and the U.S. Air Force also has a separate "Air Force Space Command" which does more than its share of activity in space including the infamous X-37 that appears to be using some of the technology developed for the Space Shuttle.
If you are critical of NASA, that criticism is justified but it is wrong to compare NASA to what the Chinese are doing as NASA is hardly what is happening in America for spaceflight. The real exciting stuff in America is happening with private companies, who are essentially telling the U.S. government to get lost and not get in their way.
The galactic senate didn't stop Palpatine from taking over. In fact, they cheered him on.
So said George Lucas in a thinly veiled critique of the American system of government in this very fictional account. Then again, just look at what happened to Hitler with the Reichstag (what I think Lucas was alluding to) and you might have a point.
The reason why DVDs took over from VHS tapes (which hardly was an overnight thing either) had more to do with creature comforts of not having to rewind the tape, deal with tape stretching/media fall out, and other physical problems of the VHS medium. That the DVD discs took up much less space was also a huge bonus and none of those advantages applied to Bluray as a format. For the most part Bluray is simply DVD on steroids and seen as just that.
On the technical side, there are some decided advantages of the Bluray format over DVD that goes well beyond just resolution and menuing options. One thing that hasn't even remotely been dealt with on Bluray content though is the fact that the Bluray player is a fully functional computer that is merely optimized for video playback. DVD was mostly the same thing, but it didn't have any RAM in the official spec (other than data buffers... not really accessible) and only 40 or so registers with fewer options in terms of what you could do with that computer. Unfortunately the technical specs are locked up so hobbyist-hacker developers can't really develop content unless they are employed by a major video studio.
I take it that you've never seen an episode of Saturday Night Live? They've had several prominent politicians on that show including several presidential candidates and I believe a sitting U.S. President.
That doesn't even get into movies like Contact that featured Bill Clinton announcing the discovery of an extra-terrestrial radio signal coming from the Vega star system. Yes, I do know what the press conference that Bill Clinton was responding to was actually about (and just as nuts) but that doesn't stop stuff like that from being used either.
This kind of thing is hardly new, much less something to condemn a sitting Prime Minister of any country for having some fun.
On the contrary. Most incredible ideas are built upon the ideas of others that have contributed in the past. Isaac Newton would not have been able to write Principia Mathematica or even Optics without involving the work of a great many people before him, and Albert Einstein could not have conceived of General Relativity without having studied the work of Newton and other great physicists of the past.
The same thing is certainly true of the mathematicians who participated in the development of mechanical computational theory either. It is said that we stand upon the shoulders of giants, and I don't think Grace Hopper would have disputed that either.
The problem here is trying to single somebody out as "the discoverer" or "founder" when in fact there were many before with amazing ideas, and there will be many in the future who will continue to advance human knowledge into the future.