Could you walk into your office of about 40 people (especially if they were technology geeks) and ask "what is the CC license?" and get a reasonable answer?
No doubt that there would be some clueless souls, but it really is a pretty common term. Particularly here on Slashdot as stories regarding open source content of various kind are typical to the point of even defining Slashdot. I'd say CC-by-SA should be as common of knowledge as GPL for those who are regular visitors.
Now the original GP post asking what it stood for was a reasonable request, particularly given his high UID. The ad hominem attacks upon that poster rather than simply answering the question is where it crossed the line.
The civil conspiracy, such as it is, involves admins of WikiTravel sending e-mail messages and "private meetings" at events like WikiMania (the annual "convention" of Wikimedia volunteers) to discuss the possibility of moving the WikiTravel community to become a Wikimedia sister project.
I don't even see how that is illegal.
They aren't saying that the new site is WikiTravel, but the community that once upon a time was maintaining the WikiTravel website (especially the grand majority of the administrators and bureaucrats who did most of the heavy lifting on the site) are moving. That isn't even a lie.
Since most of the folks who used to be admins on WikiTravel have had their privileges revoked, I suppose it is a moot issue as the door is being slammed behind them.
As for if a volunteer administrator can possibly be called a corporate officer charged with fiduciary responsibilities that could be prosecuted under the Lanham Act, that would be an interesting bit of case law. The fact is that they really couldn't speak on behalf of the company any more than a stock clerk (aka "associate") can speak on behalf of Wal-Wart. It will be really interesting to see where all this will go, but I don't think they would even be capable of violating that law as you suggest. Certainly the new website that was referenced did not use or operate under the name "WikiTravel'
It is also factually correct that WikiTravel as a business no longer really does exist as a practical matter. It is just a hallow shell of a website with a bunch of content and nobody to maintain it. Apparently most of the content had a bunch of website crawlers plow through it and that content will be transplanted to the new wiki once everything is in place.
This certainly is going to go down in history as a classic way of how not to treat volunteer administrators on a wiki. Internet Brands is just digging a deeper grave for themselves if they try to push this further.
The complaint is about an admin saying "WikiTraval is moving to Wikimedia" in a mass e-mail to all users who associated an e-mail to their user account on the wiki.
I really want to see where in trademark case law it states that is an infringement of trademark usage, and on top of that where in the policy pages and agreements for admins (if there ever was any at all) that kind of activity was prohibited?
I highly doubt that the admins were required to sign any sort of agreement at all (even a click-through agreement), much less agree to any sort of draconian terms that the company would impose on such admins. That will likely change for Internet Brands websites, but then again who would want to be a moderator working under such ugly terms?
Otherwise, the whole thing is being ticked off at the admins of WikiTravel, who collectively as a group decided to abandon ship. That perhaps a few people might remain behind after the long service admins leave is besides the point. The people who are doing the hard work of maintaining the site and trying to fight against spam and welcoming new users to the site are leaving. That really is the "community", particularly if they switch to another URL to be doing largely the same kind of work using the same policies.
The lawsuit, at least according to the Wikimedia Foundation and its legal counsel, is about intimidating the "administrators" who initiated this move from Internet Brands to Wikimedia.
Saying that the WikiTravel community is moving to Wikimedia sounds pretty reasonable, at least in the context it was used. Internet Brands is crying foul and trying to make sure none of the other admins for any of its other websites would ever consider to do something like this. It really is a preemptive strike trying to keep the rest of its websites in line.
What the Wikimedia Foundation is doing though is saying loud and clear: If you want to come to the WMF as a sister project, we'll consider it and you don't need to fear Internet Brands and their thugs.
Besides, this is a public relations disaster of monumental proportions that is only going to get worse the longer this plays out. The Streisand Effect has certainly kicked in, and it will only get worse.
If the WMF was using the WikiTravel trademark name, there might be a real case here. Unfortunately they aren't... and if anybody has dealt with the Wikimedia Foundation and its projects you would know they are anal retentive about intellectual property issues to a fault.
The real issue seems to stem from a mass e-mail that normally MediaWiki (the software... that just happens to be used by Wikitravel but is also actively under development by the Wikimedia Foundation and its volunteers) allows people with "admin" privileges to send a message of community-wide importance. I've had admin rights on this software before, so I do know how that could work as well. In the e-mail message apparently one of the mentioned that the "WikiTravel community was moving". That was the ugly phrase that is being asserted here.
Well, the truth is that the community is moving. Everybody that was doing all of the work is tired of the situation and wants to start up a new project. Good for them, and I want to encourage that to happen as well. I seriously doubt there was any sort of policy for volunteer admins on the site that prohibited them from sending out such an e-mail, and certainly by calling it the "WikiTravel community" and not "WikiTravel", that may be enough protection.
The funny thing is the obscure computer consulting company, Holliday IT Services Inc., is likely going to get a whole lot of attention in this whole thing. Hopefully what happens here is that Internet Brands gets smart and settles the lawsuit by simply dropping it altogether. Otherwise this is going to turn into SCO v. Novell all over again.
I'd be curious either way, in terms of if it was a bunch of pump and dump scams that raided corporate treasuries and deliberately ran the companies into the ground or if they really were the white knights coming to the rescue of a poorly managed company that just needed a shake up at the top management to put things into proper order.
I'm sure you could find plenty of people with both viewpoints... often when talking about the very same company I might add as well.
Still, it would be harder to suggest that Bain is the scourge of Wall Street if you could show that most companies Bain got into ended up turning a profit after their involvement, and especially if the number of employees in that company increased during the involvement of Bain.
If you need to install all of the device drivers and make a custom installation of Windows, that can be pretty complicated. Most of the manufacturers have provided systems for Windows to automatically detect and load the device drivers though so it is a relatively pain-free process of typing in the serial number (if even that) and then just letting it do its thing. Almost all of the major manufacturers of peripherals and even major computer vendors have worked with Microsoft over the years that they send drivers to Microsoft to include in the Windows distributions... you don't need to do anything else. It is only when you get to more exotic devices or perhaps obsolete devices that it becomes a larger problem.
Some of the Linux distributions are getting that way now though, so it isn't exactly all that difficult either. Ubuntu Linux in particular is relatively pain-free and can install in almost the same way, so it really is just who you are talking about.
If you're using legit adobe software that costs hundreds or in some case thousands of dollars, what the fuck do you care if you spend 100$ more on windows ?
Precisely. Which is why Linux isn't as popular as it could be since Adobe doesn't really care about the operating system other than which OS has the largest market share.
One thing I will give credit to Microsoft about is their software development tools. It is also useful to remember that Microsoft started out as a compiler developer that happened to end up in the operating system game due to (for them) a fortunate series of events.
I've been using Microsoft products since 1979 in one degree or another, even though I do think they are an evil company sucking the life out of the American computer industry. Still, your comments about the quality of their development tools seems to be pretty spot on with my own experience as well. They use these same tools (Visual Studio) to write MS-Windows, so they get a whole lot of internal attention within the company where it is co-workers complaining about nasty bugs and not just outside customers.
I fell in love with C# because the design team for C# is a bunch of guys that I like and are some of the best compiler/language developers in the world. They were the original developers for Borland Delphi, and if you are familiar with both Delphi and C#, you can find a whole lot of similarities in the language design including underlying philosophies for how they work with data structures. The chief architect of both languages was Anders Hejlsberg, somebody who I have come to admire. What I also like is that Microsoft pretty much let him do what he wanted, and C# has become a pretty successful language on its own merits.
Java pretty much does this, although there are sometimes API libraries you need to get for specific platforms and some machine specific code... depending on how you write the application. There have been several high profile games written using Java, so it is certainly possible to do genuine cross-platform development and certainly be able to push out software updates without needing to recompile the software for multiple platforms once you get your API setup worked out for a given application.
You can write proprietary software which runs on Linux. I don't know what you are talking about here in terms of "getting rid of the GPL" other than a massive misunderstanding of what happens in Linux. Almost all APIs are LGPL anyway (any software, including something with a Microsoft EULA, can use those libraries). The only difference is for those who want to steal Linux and make their own operating system and violate the distribution license.
Go knock yourself out. Make a proprietary license operating system. Nobody is stopping you, and there are hundreds of them available including several that work with current hardware.
As for a "write & compile once, run anywhere" type of software, that is the point of dotNet/Mono and Java. I've seen it work pretty well... and again you aren't locked into any particular license if you want to write an application using those tools. If a commercial developer wants to have their applications spread around as far and as wide as possible, they shouldn't be tied to a particular API architecture that pushes them to a particular platform or CPU architecture. The challenges of different distros is that they really are different operating systems even though they have a common kernel (thanks to the GPL I might add). Both dotNet (as Mono) and Java work just fine on Linux (in several different distros). There are some problems with a few dotNet applications because of vendor tie down as some APIs in dotNet are proprietary to Microsoft. The Mono guys work real hard to maintain compatibility, but they are only a group of volunteers working on a moving target.
The only other thing that impacts commercial developers is simply market share, pure and simple. From personal experience, I can say that I find it damn near impossible to get a quality computer running Linux without having to purchase MS Windows in the first place. I've asked, and been stonewalled basically being told to buy Windows and that I can wipe the hard drive if I want to install a Linux distro. That is what keeps Linux as a fringe market rather than something in the mainstream. A few brave companies sell their computers without Windows or the Microsoft tax, but they are too few to be competitive with the mass vendors. You certainly can't go to your local Wal-Mart or Costco and purchase a Linux computer right now. Wal-Mart did sell some Linux computers in the past on its website, but those have been phased out for whatever reason you can come up with.
The same people will not question how their smart phone works or the wonders of physics, electronics, ergonomics, materials and programming they represent, let alone the fact you can't see the radio waves, but the thing works.
Selective science is what people are all about these days. We'll pick and choose what we'll accept, let our children be taught, but we won't let our eye stray to the advances of science which have brought us the vehicles, clothing, entertainment and electronic devices we take for granted.
I don't think it is so much cherry picking are you are suggesting, nor is it so much selective science. Climate studies are something that is a relatively new discipline and has only recently moved from more of an art form to something that can be quantified and measured. If you go back to even relatively recent history, most of what passes as climate studies were more qualitative evaluations and really didn't have any sort of scientific theory behind them at all. It has also been a very tough nut to crack in terms coming up with relatively simple theories because so much is happening at once. It wasn't until computers were common that the torrent of data could efficiently be processed in any sane manner to come up with reasonable conclusions, and sadly they are also working off of data sets that need to be manually entered... resulting in a great many errors that creep into the equation.
Longitudinal climate studies (aka a study that evaluates what is happening over the course of a great many years) has been especially hard to come by. We don't have 19th Century satellite telemetry to compare to things we are seeing today, so instead other secondary measurements are required. There are recorded weather measurements that go back a couple thousand years (some rather detailed weather observations happened in China going back to the 1st Century or even earlier and a some very detailed weather observations by the UK Royal Navy going back at least to the 17th Century... to give some examples) that can offer some data points, but those are also not really easy to compare to modern data very well either. There are some things like ice cores in Greenland, examining tree rings, or other similar kinds of studies that can be a bit more objective and can be compared to contemporary events, or observations like counting sunspots... something that has been done since about 400 BC (again by the Chinese) and reliably accurate counts that can be accurately compared to contemporary counts since the 17th Century.
There is something of a data set that can be used for climate models, but such models certainly aren't perfect and have a whole bunch of assumptions in them that deserve questioning as well, particularly because the predictions of those models are frequently unreliable.
Climate science is something almost everybody sees on a daily basis when they watch the evening news, but ordinary people get very skeptical when they get two inches of "partly cloudy" landing in their back yard. Forecasters are getting better and even long range forecasts such as predicting if we are going to have a generally mild, hot, or cold winter in a few months is something they are getting better at doing because the understanding of how the climate works is improving. Still, it isn't an exact science yet and shouldn't be treated as one.
Climate science in particular doesn't have the predictive powers as Einstein's theory of General Relativity, much less even Newton's laws of motion or Maxwell's equations of electrodynamics. If you want to understand why sane people won't question physical science theory, that is it in a nutshell. Write a computer program based upon the current knowledge of climate data and information we have and tell me how much snow will be on my front lawn on Christmas this year. You can't do that. On the other hand an astronomer can write a computer program to tell me precisely within an arc second or less where to
This is a fallacy of guilt by association, and you are lumping together several different things for which there are independent arguments or criticisms hoping that the taint of one of those things will rub off onto the other topics.
This also shows in you an ignorance of the scientific method, where everything can and should be questioned, including anthroprogenic global warming (or "climate change" as it were). This isn't living in the dark ages, it is questioning the assumptions being used to meet the conclusions and not getting into the hype that the ends justify the means even if it is a righteous cause.
There may be something to AGW, but it is also legitimate to point out that there has been a whole lot of very bad science being performed on the topic that definitely should be called out on the carpet. Those who protect the incredibly lazy scientists who alter or cherry pick data, misapply physical science theories from other fields, or have their climate models questioned as grossly inaccurate and incapable of producing the published conclusions due to improper data analysis and underestimating margins of error should be dismissed and rejected. Much of that is happening in "climate science" and more. In a great many cases the margins of error with a proper data analysis are so huge that no reasonable conclusion can possibly be drawn from the proposed theory and no possible way exists to refute the theory presented in climate science. In other words, it becomes something more on the realm of faith and religion on the part of environmental activists than anything even remotely resembling science.
I can give specific examples of how climate science has been corrupted, and the largest problem is that money has become so pervasive on the issue that objective scientific investigations are difficult or even impossible. It is the politicization of the topic that is the problem, and has corrupted the science. Get back to an honest investigation using the scientific method and being objective about the results.... no matter what you get. Don't wildly overestimate the effects, saying things like by 2010 Miami, Florida will be 10 feet or more underwater (one earlier "prediction" by an activist from a few decades ago). When people go to Miami and see what it looks like today, those people who made earlier wild predictions like that are seen as lunatics and it destroys the credibility of the science being performed in that field.
Groups like oil companies should also be suspect when they try to engage in similar kinds of lousy scientific research doing similar kinds of practices justifying their results saying they are pretty much doing the same thing as the environmental activists. Strangely, they really are as well, even though it is just as lousy science and with just as little credibility as the activists are producing. Ordinary citizens see the whole debacle and treat everybody as just a bunch of nut cases and want to go on living their lives ignoring the whole discussion altogether except when public policy rears its head to do things like a "carbon tax" that has nothing at all to do with the actual science.
What gets people really starting to question the environmental activists is when they have a financial stake in the alternatives being produced. Al Gore, famous for his movie about AGW, has a direct financial stake in several alternative energy companies and in a trading house that works with carbon credits and trades on those credits. He may have invested in those companies and businesses in part because he really does believe in AGW (note... belief as in religious belief) but it certainly doesn't express any sort of objectivity that others on the outside of the argument can reliably use to come to their own conclusions.
At the moment, I'm not even sure it is possible to do objective science in regards to climate studies. A genuinely objective study certainly won't get much funding from any source as almost everybody who has money to send in that direction has a political stake in the argument... including various government funding agencies supporting such research or even non-profit philanthropic foundations. That is unfortunate as well.
Obviously you have such a weak argument to counter anything I say that you must resort to an ad hominem attack on me. Nice to know that is the only possible response you can offer instead of a sound rebuttal.
BTW, there are a whole bunch of people stopping me from going to Mars at the moment. It doesn't matter how much money you put on the table and hand to somebody like even Elon Musk, you simply can't get there from here without approval from the FAA. Actually simplify that. You simply can't get there from here, period.
I could go into the reasons why that is the case. It isn't a grand conspiracy so much as simply ineptitude on the part of the government and policy makers thinking that there is this one and only "space program" running everything in space, and changing the mindset that it may even be possible for a private individual to come up with their own way to get there. This issue has been debated in congressional hearings where members of congress simply laugh at the thought some private individual even could make it into space, in spite of bringing people like Dennis Tito or Richard Garriott to those hearings to show that a determined person can get into space on their own.
It should be embarrassing that a Russian company is sending private individuals into space, but America can't get the job done. Why is that?
Oh, as for Newton's 2nd & 3rd laws, it is really just energy. Yes, reaction mass is an issue, but if you send that reaction mass at a high velocity (say a significant fraction of the speed of light) you can go to a lot of places with not much mass. If you want to see an example of this, just look no further than the Dawn spacecraft that just left Vesta and is on its way to Ceres. That isn't pie in the sky crazy stuff, but real working hardware currently in use on an actual mission in progress. Other similar kinds of propulsion methods exist too, so it isn't really physics holding people back. Scaling up such systems is a trick, and ultimately it is simply a raw energy budget that is needed when designing such vehicles.
Until a propulsion method is invented that can get humans to mars and back in a few weeks the whole premise is ridiculous. No SANE person is going to volunteer to spend a year in a capsule with 18 months on a dust ball with an unbreathable atmosphere and lethal UV radiation. Sure, you'll find some volunteers but I guaranteed they'll all be mentally unbalanced and would probably chicken out at the last moment anyway. And don't anyone compare it with old sailing ship voyages - its nothing like that. On a ship you have gravity, fresh air, you can go outside, stop off at places and even swim. The nearest analogy would be to the conditions the poor slaves were kept in on atlantic voyages down in the hold.
Well, perhaps count me as insane, as I would volunteer for such a trip to Mars in a heartbeat.
Well, if I had to spend a year long voyage to Mars trapped in a capsule the size of a phone booth I would be a little bit more upset and concerned, and there is no way I would travel to Mars in the Orion capsule alone and in free fall the whole way, but there are other ways to make the trip a little more reasonable.
As for comparing a trip to Mars with a voyage from London to San Francisco in the 19th Century or even just across the North Atlantic in the 17th Century, I think the analogy is pretty appropriate. No, you didn't just jump into the water whenever you felt like it (assuming that you could even swim... that was not even a common skill for most people of that era). Regardless, I think you are making too many excuses for why it won't work.
If you want to see at least one well thought out proposal in terms of how somebody has suggested a trip to Mars can happen, here is a video for you to look at:
For myself, I would prefer to travel to Mars in a NAUTILUS-X spacecraft. There are propulsion methods for getting to Mars that are effective in cutting that trip down to just a few weeks like you are suggesting, but most of them involve nuclear energy as an energy source of some kind. There are so many anti-nuclear nuts that complain each time NASA sends up a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (usually called simply an RTG) that assembling a full fledged nuclear reactor in space would be seen as public enemy #1 and would kill any attempt to even try. These same idiots would likely complain even if it was a nuclear fusion reactor instead, as that dreaded "nuclear" word would be used still. The trick for travel to Mars quickly is to simply have a high density energy source. Mars is just on the edge of what you can do with chemical energy in terms of using things like liquid oxygen and something else like hydrogen or methane. That is the reason why it takes so long to travel to Mars.
A multi-billion dollar agency is "low budget"? I think that speaks volumes about the size of the federal government and how it is out of control than necessarily the priority given to the federal government.
Still, look at where all of these projects within NASA are being planned? It is in a central design bureau either at Huntsville Alabama or at NASA HQ in Washington DC. Everything is being done in a top down approach. Sure, an ordinary citizen could have some suggestions in terms of what should happen (and will almost always be ignored with perhaps a polite letter in response) but it is the central planners who are making the decisions. In fact it is seen as "the space program".
Keep in mind that until very recently only government employees ever went into space. There were a couple of employees of space contractors that ended up going through the NASA astronaut training course, but until Dennis Tito (who ended up having to use a Russian Soyuz space capsule because NASA wouldn't let private passengers fly on the Space Shuttle.... oh the irony) there wasn't any way a private individual could go into space on their own. In fact until now the only way to get into space on your own dime has been to pay the Russians as somehow America forgot that free enterprise was even possible.
This is also one of the things that has been holding back the development of space, as government efforts in space have all but shut out private efforts to go into space. Even now, you need special permission from people who are very reluctant to give that permission to even try and get into space in the form of launching Earth observation satellites or doing anything else in space. Very reluctant to the point they laugh in your face if you even suggest you are going to put something into space without government money. That is changing, but too damn slow in my opinion and it is precisely because of this Soviet style central planning bureau which has been running "the space program" in America which is expected to do everything for everybody.
In the 1970's there was a group led by former original Mercury astronaut Deke Slayton (who also was the chief astronaut for NASA for a great many years) that ended up developing a rocket system called the Conestoga rocket. Pretty much they did almost exactly what SpaceX is doing today, but this was the 1970's and not the 2010's. They even sent a few spacecraft into the sky and even passed through the Kármán line more than a couple time.
What ended up killing this rocket system and this company was not the technical capabilities of those involved, but rather because bureaucrats at NASA wanted so bad to prove that the Space Shuttle was a viable concept that they ended up killing the emerging private commercial spaceflight industry before it got going. The Space Shuttle (keep in mind this was designed and operated by government employees at the time.... United Launch Alliance didn't form until the Reagan administration) was seen as the vehicle which would do everything for everybody including the U.S. Air Force and for that matter any other federal agency or even private group. As a part of that effort to prove that the Shuttle was viable, when inquiries were made about how much it would cost to put cargo on the Space Shuttle (or to even ride on the Shuttle as a passenger.... yes that did indeed happen and was promised in the 1970's) some incredibly unrealistically low prices were announced. The price was unrealistic because they were proposing that the Space Shuttle would be having weekly flights to meet this "commercial" demand and that NASA was planning on running the STS system like an airline... just owned by the government (and designed and operated by the government too I might add).
As a practical matter, all of the promises made by NASA (the big central design bureau I should note here as well) simply didn't work out. Not only were the prices unrealistically low (there wasn't r
The previous administration (aka NASA under Mike Griffin in the Bush Administration) proposed a program so horrible that an independent and non-partisan group of industry experts recommended strongly that those programs be immediately terminated. On top of that, they proposed realistic alternatives and laid out the possible directions for future spaceflight initiatives that NASA could consider.
The amazing thing here was that Obama actually listened to that independent commission. If you haven't read that report and still perpetuate the notion that shutting down those programs was a bad thing, at least try to intelligently refute these people who have presented some pretty strong arguments for the current direction of spaceflight in America.
I don't agree with almost any other program that Obama has done and I think he is incompetent as President along with a general dislike of the guy's policies or even governing philosophies. Still, of all of the things he has accomplished, one of the best was to appoint Charles Bolden as head of NASA and to support the adoption of many recommendations from this commission.
My largest gripe against Obama and space policy is that I see his commitment to that policy to be dead last in the USA. Charles Bolden was nearly the last (or may have even been the very last one) of the major departments or agencies to have a director/administrator appointed as its head. I haven't seen Obama really care much about space policy, but he also isn't hurting in this area of expertise either.
I have no doubt that after Charles Bolden was appointed by Obama and confirmed by the U.S. Senate, that Bolden had a serious sit down meeting in the Oval Office discussing outreach efforts on the part of NASA.
Other than the hype, I think it was a pretty good idea. There have been Muslims who have flown on the Space Shuttle (including a Saudi prince), and if there could be a way to have the children of the Middle East and other Muslim countries to have a role model which exemplifies the exploration of space and that living in the 21st Century has some benefits worth trying to examine, I think it is a pretty good thing.
I would also agree with you in terms of looking through what NASA has done over the past couple of years under the leadership of Bolden to see what exactly has accomplished that shows any sort of "selling out" or even making such outreach to Muslim countries something that impacts the other programs of the agency.
For myself, I very much like Obama's space policy and those who hate it usually are partisan hacks who can't find anything good to say about somebody they perceive as "the enemy". The real truth is that space policy over the past 40 years (since the Nixon administration) has been nearly a disaster and so screwed up (under both Democrat and Republican administrations... it was an equal opportunity screw up) that almost any change could have been better.
Obama in this case seemed to want to do something that was "not Bush". Literally NASA's policies were so screwed up under Bush that doing the exact opposite was an improvement. Bush inherited an awful program too, but then again so did Clinton.
There is a time and a place for "cost-plus" contracts that have been traditionally used by NASA over the years (along with the Department of Defense for a great many projects). It is based upon the very successful model used for the Manhattan Project, where a bold goal was established by the government... something seen as critical perhaps even to the survival of the country itself. As to if that was true for building a nuclear bomb or flying people to the Moon could be debated, but the point is that those were set out as significant goals that simply had to be met, and how much it cost to get them accomplished was of relatively minor importance.
It is also important to note that while there were scientists who said that such endeavors were in theory possible, nobody knew at all how to actually get them accomplished. It really is exploring the frontier of human knowledge, where going to the Moon wasn't even conclusively proven to be even possible using any kind of machine on a practical level. Certainly entire new technologies had to be invented from scratch for both the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Project. If you asked even well respected contractors how much it was going to cost to build those devices, they would just give you a blank stare. Oh, they might come up with a rough estimate, but the truth is nobody knew how much it was really going to cost. It had never been done before, so there was no possible way to even remotely guess a great many of the costs. Certainly no sane contractor would ever enter into a contract with the government to produce a device or provide a service when they can't even reliably depend upon even the order of magnitude for the costs they will come into.
That is why you need to have the government take the risk of the costs for such significant endeavors, which is the "cost" part of the contracting model. The "plus" is a guaranteed profit that the company will earn simply for participating and getting involved with such a project. That makes shareholders happy, but it also allows us as citizens to receive the benefits of a company which has the skills and equipment necessary to pull off such important national endeavors.
One of the problems after the Apollo project (and the Manhattan Project in terms of DOD contracts) is that it was considered normal to use such a contracting model for everything else, even if they didn't need such a contract. Sending people into space to go and dock with the ISS is something with a long history and a great many rockets that have been developed over the years capable of such a feat. It is indeed possible to estimate fairly well how much it will cost to perform such a launch down to just a few dollars. For that reason, the cost-plus contracts really should have been abandoned a long time ago.
Going to Mars still has a whole bunch of unknowns about it, and for building the actual spacecraft or even the forward logistical supplies that need to be sent to Mars ahead of time is something that isn't really well known. There have been several spacecraft that have gone to Mars already, so there is at least some history there... it doesn't need to be purely cost-plus, but there might still be some role to play for using that model.
The SLS program is one that is using the "cost-plus" contracting model, which is one of the reasons why it will eventually die as a huge embarrassment to the good United States Senators who held advanced degrees in aeronautical engineering and designed the program through legislation in the first place. It shouldn't be all that complicated to send a big rocket into low-Earth orbit from Kennedy Space Center. Heck, the SLS won't even be the largest vehicle sent from KSC into LEO.
I know, really! Imagine what the public backlash would be against actually spending TRILLIONS of dollars on a needless oil war and secret police regime...
Imagine spending tens of billions of dollars on air conditioning for those soldiers serving in scorching tropical deserts to get some respite.
In fact, more money is spent on lipstick in America than is spent on spaceflight. Go figure and try to understand what the priorities really are for the country.
It is, pure and simple. NASA has five year plans for the future and a central design bureau which marshals the economy to meet certain production quotas and every other trapping of frankly Soviet era Communism.
That is sort of why it sounds like socialism, because it sort of takes socialist ideals and pushes them to the next level.
Even so, they're seasteading examples. And some of the most profound changes in society have come from ships such as the voyage of the HMS Beagle on which Charles Darwin made the observations that became the theory of evolution, or any number of decisive sea battles (such as the battles of Midway, Jutland, or Salamis).
Jared Diamond has gone so far as to assert the development of modern mankind and civilization as we know it today originated from the evolutionary pressure from long distance sailing. Certainly the ability to navigate across the ocean is an evolutionary pressure for increased intelligence.
An important distinction is that KSR also had at that point in the books a significant terraforming project on Mars which had put approximately 200-300 millibars of pressure into the Martian atmosphere. It wasn't perfect, but it was survivable.
How did he propose to do this? I thought getting Mars to hold a significant atmosphere wasn't really likely because 1) it doesn't have that much gravity (1/3g), and 2) it doesn't have a magnetic field to protect against solar winds. And without a liquid iron core, it can't be made to have a magnetic field.
There was a whole suite of ideas for increasing the atmosphere of Mars, and that is sort of the point of the first two books in terms of talking about those techniques. Sure, the atmosphere won't stick around for billions of years, but it will remain on Mars for millions of years.... long enough that on the scale of human civilizations is more than long enough and long enough that life will even evolve and adapt to life on Mars in its own unique way. The people who are around in 2-3 million years can worry about the issue of how to replenish the atmosphere.
Part of what was done is to take locked up carbon in Mars and make some "smog generators" of some kind (deliberately doing to Mars what some are saying we are doing here on the Earth by burning coal). Some other volatiles (mainly water) are suggested to be extracted from the asteroid belt by smashing them into snowballs and raining them down onto Mars in small hand-sized chunks. One of the major plots of the story was also to build a planetary sized Frenzel lens to magnify the Sun to give Earth-level insolation.
A really interesting "event" in the book is also about how Phobos was crashed deliberately into the surface by some "terrorists" (or patriots... depending on your POV of the events in the book).
It really is a good read, and the way everything gets put together in the book seriously discusses terraforming on both an engineering perspective as well as a political one with a significant faction of the Martian people wanting Mars to stay "Red" and another one called "Greens" pushing for terraforming. Pretty good arguments are put forward for both factions too.
In terms of trying to stay somewhat on topic, what is interesting in the book is the evolution of the "spacesuit" on Mars as the atmosphere changes, where eventually KSR does describe people walking around on the surface of Mars without any special aid at all. In fact a marathon is the subject of one of the chapters.
Is this ever going to be used, and is this going to speed up people going to Mars?
I think that, if they NASA et al really wanted to go to Mars and actually do a mission, they'd have developed a proper space suit to match the mission pretty fast. They also managed to do everything for the Moon mission in the 60's, so...
On the list of things necessary to get to Mars and build a permanent outpost there (like the ISS or the Amundsen-Scott Base on the South Pole), I would put getting a proper space suit working is rather far down the list and one of the more insignificant issues to be resolved.... particularly because proven spacesuit designs have already been made in previous flights by at least three different nations and presumably different companies all trying to do the same thing.
Back when NASA was trying to figure out how to build a spacesuit in the first place, the only thing they could remotely find was a suit of armor worn by King Henry VIII of England. It was a full set of battle armor that similarly had to protect the whole body from head to toe, and it didn't expose any part of the body even when joints were flexed. A common technique for medieval warfare was to try and wedge a sword or an arrow into a joint, so the better your protected those joints the better your chances of survival in combat or even at a tournament.
It certainly is useful to look around for alternatives and Mars is going to be an interesting environment to at least plan for. I'm impressed that this kind of thinking is going on, but there are a whole bunch of other issues that need to be addressed for successful human exploration of Mars.
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Could you walk into your office of about 40 people (especially if they were technology geeks) and ask "what is the CC license?" and get a reasonable answer?
No doubt that there would be some clueless souls, but it really is a pretty common term. Particularly here on Slashdot as stories regarding open source content of various kind are typical to the point of even defining Slashdot. I'd say CC-by-SA should be as common of knowledge as GPL for those who are regular visitors.
Now the original GP post asking what it stood for was a reasonable request, particularly given his high UID. The ad hominem attacks upon that poster rather than simply answering the question is where it crossed the line.
The civil conspiracy, such as it is, involves admins of WikiTravel sending e-mail messages and "private meetings" at events like WikiMania (the annual "convention" of Wikimedia volunteers) to discuss the possibility of moving the WikiTravel community to become a Wikimedia sister project.
I don't even see how that is illegal.
They aren't saying that the new site is WikiTravel, but the community that once upon a time was maintaining the WikiTravel website (especially the grand majority of the administrators and bureaucrats who did most of the heavy lifting on the site) are moving. That isn't even a lie.
Since most of the folks who used to be admins on WikiTravel have had their privileges revoked, I suppose it is a moot issue as the door is being slammed behind them.
As for if a volunteer administrator can possibly be called a corporate officer charged with fiduciary responsibilities that could be prosecuted under the Lanham Act, that would be an interesting bit of case law. The fact is that they really couldn't speak on behalf of the company any more than a stock clerk (aka "associate") can speak on behalf of Wal-Wart. It will be really interesting to see where all this will go, but I don't think they would even be capable of violating that law as you suggest. Certainly the new website that was referenced did not use or operate under the name "WikiTravel'
It is also factually correct that WikiTravel as a business no longer really does exist as a practical matter. It is just a hallow shell of a website with a bunch of content and nobody to maintain it. Apparently most of the content had a bunch of website crawlers plow through it and that content will be transplanted to the new wiki once everything is in place.
This certainly is going to go down in history as a classic way of how not to treat volunteer administrators on a wiki. Internet Brands is just digging a deeper grave for themselves if they try to push this further.
The complaint is about an admin saying "WikiTraval is moving to Wikimedia" in a mass e-mail to all users who associated an e-mail to their user account on the wiki.
I really want to see where in trademark case law it states that is an infringement of trademark usage, and on top of that where in the policy pages and agreements for admins (if there ever was any at all) that kind of activity was prohibited?
I highly doubt that the admins were required to sign any sort of agreement at all (even a click-through agreement), much less agree to any sort of draconian terms that the company would impose on such admins. That will likely change for Internet Brands websites, but then again who would want to be a moderator working under such ugly terms?
Otherwise, the whole thing is being ticked off at the admins of WikiTravel, who collectively as a group decided to abandon ship. That perhaps a few people might remain behind after the long service admins leave is besides the point. The people who are doing the hard work of maintaining the site and trying to fight against spam and welcoming new users to the site are leaving. That really is the "community", particularly if they switch to another URL to be doing largely the same kind of work using the same policies.
The lawsuit, at least according to the Wikimedia Foundation and its legal counsel, is about intimidating the "administrators" who initiated this move from Internet Brands to Wikimedia.
Saying that the WikiTravel community is moving to Wikimedia sounds pretty reasonable, at least in the context it was used. Internet Brands is crying foul and trying to make sure none of the other admins for any of its other websites would ever consider to do something like this. It really is a preemptive strike trying to keep the rest of its websites in line.
What the Wikimedia Foundation is doing though is saying loud and clear: If you want to come to the WMF as a sister project, we'll consider it and you don't need to fear Internet Brands and their thugs.
Besides, this is a public relations disaster of monumental proportions that is only going to get worse the longer this plays out. The Streisand Effect has certainly kicked in, and it will only get worse.
If the WMF was using the WikiTravel trademark name, there might be a real case here. Unfortunately they aren't... and if anybody has dealt with the Wikimedia Foundation and its projects you would know they are anal retentive about intellectual property issues to a fault.
The real issue seems to stem from a mass e-mail that normally MediaWiki (the software... that just happens to be used by Wikitravel but is also actively under development by the Wikimedia Foundation and its volunteers) allows people with "admin" privileges to send a message of community-wide importance. I've had admin rights on this software before, so I do know how that could work as well. In the e-mail message apparently one of the mentioned that the "WikiTravel community was moving". That was the ugly phrase that is being asserted here.
Well, the truth is that the community is moving. Everybody that was doing all of the work is tired of the situation and wants to start up a new project. Good for them, and I want to encourage that to happen as well. I seriously doubt there was any sort of policy for volunteer admins on the site that prohibited them from sending out such an e-mail, and certainly by calling it the "WikiTravel community" and not "WikiTravel", that may be enough protection.
The funny thing is the obscure computer consulting company, Holliday IT Services Inc., is likely going to get a whole lot of attention in this whole thing. Hopefully what happens here is that Internet Brands gets smart and settles the lawsuit by simply dropping it altogether. Otherwise this is going to turn into SCO v. Novell all over again.
I'd be curious either way, in terms of if it was a bunch of pump and dump scams that raided corporate treasuries and deliberately ran the companies into the ground or if they really were the white knights coming to the rescue of a poorly managed company that just needed a shake up at the top management to put things into proper order.
I'm sure you could find plenty of people with both viewpoints... often when talking about the very same company I might add as well.
Still, it would be harder to suggest that Bain is the scourge of Wall Street if you could show that most companies Bain got into ended up turning a profit after their involvement, and especially if the number of employees in that company increased during the involvement of Bain.
If you need to install all of the device drivers and make a custom installation of Windows, that can be pretty complicated. Most of the manufacturers have provided systems for Windows to automatically detect and load the device drivers though so it is a relatively pain-free process of typing in the serial number (if even that) and then just letting it do its thing. Almost all of the major manufacturers of peripherals and even major computer vendors have worked with Microsoft over the years that they send drivers to Microsoft to include in the Windows distributions... you don't need to do anything else. It is only when you get to more exotic devices or perhaps obsolete devices that it becomes a larger problem.
Some of the Linux distributions are getting that way now though, so it isn't exactly all that difficult either. Ubuntu Linux in particular is relatively pain-free and can install in almost the same way, so it really is just who you are talking about.
If you're using legit adobe software that costs hundreds or in some case thousands of dollars, what the fuck do you care if you spend 100$ more on windows ?
Precisely. Which is why Linux isn't as popular as it could be since Adobe doesn't really care about the operating system other than which OS has the largest market share.
One thing I will give credit to Microsoft about is their software development tools. It is also useful to remember that Microsoft started out as a compiler developer that happened to end up in the operating system game due to (for them) a fortunate series of events.
I've been using Microsoft products since 1979 in one degree or another, even though I do think they are an evil company sucking the life out of the American computer industry. Still, your comments about the quality of their development tools seems to be pretty spot on with my own experience as well. They use these same tools (Visual Studio) to write MS-Windows, so they get a whole lot of internal attention within the company where it is co-workers complaining about nasty bugs and not just outside customers.
I fell in love with C# because the design team for C# is a bunch of guys that I like and are some of the best compiler/language developers in the world. They were the original developers for Borland Delphi, and if you are familiar with both Delphi and C#, you can find a whole lot of similarities in the language design including underlying philosophies for how they work with data structures. The chief architect of both languages was Anders Hejlsberg, somebody who I have come to admire. What I also like is that Microsoft pretty much let him do what he wanted, and C# has become a pretty successful language on its own merits.
Java pretty much does this, although there are sometimes API libraries you need to get for specific platforms and some machine specific code... depending on how you write the application. There have been several high profile games written using Java, so it is certainly possible to do genuine cross-platform development and certainly be able to push out software updates without needing to recompile the software for multiple platforms once you get your API setup worked out for a given application.
You can write proprietary software which runs on Linux. I don't know what you are talking about here in terms of "getting rid of the GPL" other than a massive misunderstanding of what happens in Linux. Almost all APIs are LGPL anyway (any software, including something with a Microsoft EULA, can use those libraries). The only difference is for those who want to steal Linux and make their own operating system and violate the distribution license.
Go knock yourself out. Make a proprietary license operating system. Nobody is stopping you, and there are hundreds of them available including several that work with current hardware.
As for a "write & compile once, run anywhere" type of software, that is the point of dotNet/Mono and Java. I've seen it work pretty well... and again you aren't locked into any particular license if you want to write an application using those tools. If a commercial developer wants to have their applications spread around as far and as wide as possible, they shouldn't be tied to a particular API architecture that pushes them to a particular platform or CPU architecture. The challenges of different distros is that they really are different operating systems even though they have a common kernel (thanks to the GPL I might add). Both dotNet (as Mono) and Java work just fine on Linux (in several different distros). There are some problems with a few dotNet applications because of vendor tie down as some APIs in dotNet are proprietary to Microsoft. The Mono guys work real hard to maintain compatibility, but they are only a group of volunteers working on a moving target.
The only other thing that impacts commercial developers is simply market share, pure and simple. From personal experience, I can say that I find it damn near impossible to get a quality computer running Linux without having to purchase MS Windows in the first place. I've asked, and been stonewalled basically being told to buy Windows and that I can wipe the hard drive if I want to install a Linux distro. That is what keeps Linux as a fringe market rather than something in the mainstream. A few brave companies sell their computers without Windows or the Microsoft tax, but they are too few to be competitive with the mass vendors. You certainly can't go to your local Wal-Mart or Costco and purchase a Linux computer right now. Wal-Mart did sell some Linux computers in the past on its website, but those have been phased out for whatever reason you can come up with.
Many will question science.
The same people will not question how their smart phone works or the wonders of physics, electronics, ergonomics, materials and programming they represent, let alone the fact you can't see the radio waves, but the thing works.
Selective science is what people are all about these days. We'll pick and choose what we'll accept, let our children be taught, but we won't let our eye stray to the advances of science which have brought us the vehicles, clothing, entertainment and electronic devices we take for granted.
I don't think it is so much cherry picking are you are suggesting, nor is it so much selective science. Climate studies are something that is a relatively new discipline and has only recently moved from more of an art form to something that can be quantified and measured. If you go back to even relatively recent history, most of what passes as climate studies were more qualitative evaluations and really didn't have any sort of scientific theory behind them at all. It has also been a very tough nut to crack in terms coming up with relatively simple theories because so much is happening at once. It wasn't until computers were common that the torrent of data could efficiently be processed in any sane manner to come up with reasonable conclusions, and sadly they are also working off of data sets that need to be manually entered... resulting in a great many errors that creep into the equation.
Longitudinal climate studies (aka a study that evaluates what is happening over the course of a great many years) has been especially hard to come by. We don't have 19th Century satellite telemetry to compare to things we are seeing today, so instead other secondary measurements are required. There are recorded weather measurements that go back a couple thousand years (some rather detailed weather observations happened in China going back to the 1st Century or even earlier and a some very detailed weather observations by the UK Royal Navy going back at least to the 17th Century... to give some examples) that can offer some data points, but those are also not really easy to compare to modern data very well either. There are some things like ice cores in Greenland, examining tree rings, or other similar kinds of studies that can be a bit more objective and can be compared to contemporary events, or observations like counting sunspots... something that has been done since about 400 BC (again by the Chinese) and reliably accurate counts that can be accurately compared to contemporary counts since the 17th Century.
There is something of a data set that can be used for climate models, but such models certainly aren't perfect and have a whole bunch of assumptions in them that deserve questioning as well, particularly because the predictions of those models are frequently unreliable.
Climate science is something almost everybody sees on a daily basis when they watch the evening news, but ordinary people get very skeptical when they get two inches of "partly cloudy" landing in their back yard. Forecasters are getting better and even long range forecasts such as predicting if we are going to have a generally mild, hot, or cold winter in a few months is something they are getting better at doing because the understanding of how the climate works is improving. Still, it isn't an exact science yet and shouldn't be treated as one.
Climate science in particular doesn't have the predictive powers as Einstein's theory of General Relativity, much less even Newton's laws of motion or Maxwell's equations of electrodynamics. If you want to understand why sane people won't question physical science theory, that is it in a nutshell. Write a computer program based upon the current knowledge of climate data and information we have and tell me how much snow will be on my front lawn on Christmas this year. You can't do that. On the other hand an astronomer can write a computer program to tell me precisely within an arc second or less where to
This is a fallacy of guilt by association, and you are lumping together several different things for which there are independent arguments or criticisms hoping that the taint of one of those things will rub off onto the other topics.
This also shows in you an ignorance of the scientific method, where everything can and should be questioned, including anthroprogenic global warming (or "climate change" as it were). This isn't living in the dark ages, it is questioning the assumptions being used to meet the conclusions and not getting into the hype that the ends justify the means even if it is a righteous cause.
There may be something to AGW, but it is also legitimate to point out that there has been a whole lot of very bad science being performed on the topic that definitely should be called out on the carpet. Those who protect the incredibly lazy scientists who alter or cherry pick data, misapply physical science theories from other fields, or have their climate models questioned as grossly inaccurate and incapable of producing the published conclusions due to improper data analysis and underestimating margins of error should be dismissed and rejected. Much of that is happening in "climate science" and more. In a great many cases the margins of error with a proper data analysis are so huge that no reasonable conclusion can possibly be drawn from the proposed theory and no possible way exists to refute the theory presented in climate science. In other words, it becomes something more on the realm of faith and religion on the part of environmental activists than anything even remotely resembling science.
I can give specific examples of how climate science has been corrupted, and the largest problem is that money has become so pervasive on the issue that objective scientific investigations are difficult or even impossible. It is the politicization of the topic that is the problem, and has corrupted the science. Get back to an honest investigation using the scientific method and being objective about the results.... no matter what you get. Don't wildly overestimate the effects, saying things like by 2010 Miami, Florida will be 10 feet or more underwater (one earlier "prediction" by an activist from a few decades ago). When people go to Miami and see what it looks like today, those people who made earlier wild predictions like that are seen as lunatics and it destroys the credibility of the science being performed in that field.
Groups like oil companies should also be suspect when they try to engage in similar kinds of lousy scientific research doing similar kinds of practices justifying their results saying they are pretty much doing the same thing as the environmental activists. Strangely, they really are as well, even though it is just as lousy science and with just as little credibility as the activists are producing. Ordinary citizens see the whole debacle and treat everybody as just a bunch of nut cases and want to go on living their lives ignoring the whole discussion altogether except when public policy rears its head to do things like a "carbon tax" that has nothing at all to do with the actual science.
What gets people really starting to question the environmental activists is when they have a financial stake in the alternatives being produced. Al Gore, famous for his movie about AGW, has a direct financial stake in several alternative energy companies and in a trading house that works with carbon credits and trades on those credits. He may have invested in those companies and businesses in part because he really does believe in AGW (note... belief as in religious belief) but it certainly doesn't express any sort of objectivity that others on the outside of the argument can reliably use to come to their own conclusions.
At the moment, I'm not even sure it is possible to do objective science in regards to climate studies. A genuinely objective study certainly won't get much funding from any source as almost everybody who has money to send in that direction has a political stake in the argument... including various government funding agencies supporting such research or even non-profit philanthropic foundations. That is unfortunate as well.
Obviously you have such a weak argument to counter anything I say that you must resort to an ad hominem attack on me. Nice to know that is the only possible response you can offer instead of a sound rebuttal.
BTW, there are a whole bunch of people stopping me from going to Mars at the moment. It doesn't matter how much money you put on the table and hand to somebody like even Elon Musk, you simply can't get there from here without approval from the FAA. Actually simplify that. You simply can't get there from here, period.
I could go into the reasons why that is the case. It isn't a grand conspiracy so much as simply ineptitude on the part of the government and policy makers thinking that there is this one and only "space program" running everything in space, and changing the mindset that it may even be possible for a private individual to come up with their own way to get there. This issue has been debated in congressional hearings where members of congress simply laugh at the thought some private individual even could make it into space, in spite of bringing people like Dennis Tito or Richard Garriott to those hearings to show that a determined person can get into space on their own.
It should be embarrassing that a Russian company is sending private individuals into space, but America can't get the job done. Why is that?
Oh, as for Newton's 2nd & 3rd laws, it is really just energy. Yes, reaction mass is an issue, but if you send that reaction mass at a high velocity (say a significant fraction of the speed of light) you can go to a lot of places with not much mass. If you want to see an example of this, just look no further than the Dawn spacecraft that just left Vesta and is on its way to Ceres. That isn't pie in the sky crazy stuff, but real working hardware currently in use on an actual mission in progress. Other similar kinds of propulsion methods exist too, so it isn't really physics holding people back. Scaling up such systems is a trick, and ultimately it is simply a raw energy budget that is needed when designing such vehicles.
Until a propulsion method is invented that can get humans to mars and back in a few weeks the whole premise is ridiculous. No SANE person is going to volunteer to spend a year in a capsule with 18 months on a dust ball with an unbreathable atmosphere and lethal UV radiation. Sure, you'll find some volunteers but I guaranteed they'll all be mentally unbalanced and would probably chicken out at the last moment anyway. And don't anyone compare it with old sailing ship voyages - its nothing like that. On a ship you have gravity, fresh air, you can go outside, stop off at places and even swim. The nearest analogy would be to the conditions the poor slaves were kept in on atlantic voyages down in the hold.
Well, perhaps count me as insane, as I would volunteer for such a trip to Mars in a heartbeat.
Well, if I had to spend a year long voyage to Mars trapped in a capsule the size of a phone booth I would be a little bit more upset and concerned, and there is no way I would travel to Mars in the Orion capsule alone and in free fall the whole way, but there are other ways to make the trip a little more reasonable.
As for comparing a trip to Mars with a voyage from London to San Francisco in the 19th Century or even just across the North Atlantic in the 17th Century, I think the analogy is pretty appropriate. No, you didn't just jump into the water whenever you felt like it (assuming that you could even swim... that was not even a common skill for most people of that era). Regardless, I think you are making too many excuses for why it won't work.
If you want to see at least one well thought out proposal in terms of how somebody has suggested a trip to Mars can happen, here is a video for you to look at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cx6cioPdPZQ
For myself, I would prefer to travel to Mars in a NAUTILUS-X spacecraft. There are propulsion methods for getting to Mars that are effective in cutting that trip down to just a few weeks like you are suggesting, but most of them involve nuclear energy as an energy source of some kind. There are so many anti-nuclear nuts that complain each time NASA sends up a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (usually called simply an RTG) that assembling a full fledged nuclear reactor in space would be seen as public enemy #1 and would kill any attempt to even try. These same idiots would likely complain even if it was a nuclear fusion reactor instead, as that dreaded "nuclear" word would be used still. The trick for travel to Mars quickly is to simply have a high density energy source. Mars is just on the edge of what you can do with chemical energy in terms of using things like liquid oxygen and something else like hydrogen or methane. That is the reason why it takes so long to travel to Mars.
A multi-billion dollar agency is "low budget"? I think that speaks volumes about the size of the federal government and how it is out of control than necessarily the priority given to the federal government.
Still, look at where all of these projects within NASA are being planned? It is in a central design bureau either at Huntsville Alabama or at NASA HQ in Washington DC. Everything is being done in a top down approach. Sure, an ordinary citizen could have some suggestions in terms of what should happen (and will almost always be ignored with perhaps a polite letter in response) but it is the central planners who are making the decisions. In fact it is seen as "the space program".
Keep in mind that until very recently only government employees ever went into space. There were a couple of employees of space contractors that ended up going through the NASA astronaut training course, but until Dennis Tito (who ended up having to use a Russian Soyuz space capsule because NASA wouldn't let private passengers fly on the Space Shuttle.... oh the irony) there wasn't any way a private individual could go into space on their own. In fact until now the only way to get into space on your own dime has been to pay the Russians as somehow America forgot that free enterprise was even possible.
This is also one of the things that has been holding back the development of space, as government efforts in space have all but shut out private efforts to go into space. Even now, you need special permission from people who are very reluctant to give that permission to even try and get into space in the form of launching Earth observation satellites or doing anything else in space. Very reluctant to the point they laugh in your face if you even suggest you are going to put something into space without government money. That is changing, but too damn slow in my opinion and it is precisely because of this Soviet style central planning bureau which has been running "the space program" in America which is expected to do everything for everybody.
In the 1970's there was a group led by former original Mercury astronaut Deke Slayton (who also was the chief astronaut for NASA for a great many years) that ended up developing a rocket system called the Conestoga rocket. Pretty much they did almost exactly what SpaceX is doing today, but this was the 1970's and not the 2010's. They even sent a few spacecraft into the sky and even passed through the Kármán line more than a couple time.
What ended up killing this rocket system and this company was not the technical capabilities of those involved, but rather because bureaucrats at NASA wanted so bad to prove that the Space Shuttle was a viable concept that they ended up killing the emerging private commercial spaceflight industry before it got going. The Space Shuttle (keep in mind this was designed and operated by government employees at the time.... United Launch Alliance didn't form until the Reagan administration) was seen as the vehicle which would do everything for everybody including the U.S. Air Force and for that matter any other federal agency or even private group. As a part of that effort to prove that the Shuttle was viable, when inquiries were made about how much it would cost to put cargo on the Space Shuttle (or to even ride on the Shuttle as a passenger.... yes that did indeed happen and was promised in the 1970's) some incredibly unrealistically low prices were announced. The price was unrealistic because they were proposing that the Space Shuttle would be having weekly flights to meet this "commercial" demand and that NASA was planning on running the STS system like an airline... just owned by the government (and designed and operated by the government too I might add).
As a practical matter, all of the promises made by NASA (the big central design bureau I should note here as well) simply didn't work out. Not only were the prices unrealistically low (there wasn't r
The previous administration (aka NASA under Mike Griffin in the Bush Administration) proposed a program so horrible that an independent and non-partisan group of industry experts recommended strongly that those programs be immediately terminated. On top of that, they proposed realistic alternatives and laid out the possible directions for future spaceflight initiatives that NASA could consider.
The amazing thing here was that Obama actually listened to that independent commission. If you haven't read that report and still perpetuate the notion that shutting down those programs was a bad thing, at least try to intelligently refute these people who have presented some pretty strong arguments for the current direction of spaceflight in America.
I don't agree with almost any other program that Obama has done and I think he is incompetent as President along with a general dislike of the guy's policies or even governing philosophies. Still, of all of the things he has accomplished, one of the best was to appoint Charles Bolden as head of NASA and to support the adoption of many recommendations from this commission.
My largest gripe against Obama and space policy is that I see his commitment to that policy to be dead last in the USA. Charles Bolden was nearly the last (or may have even been the very last one) of the major departments or agencies to have a director/administrator appointed as its head. I haven't seen Obama really care much about space policy, but he also isn't hurting in this area of expertise either.
I have no doubt that after Charles Bolden was appointed by Obama and confirmed by the U.S. Senate, that Bolden had a serious sit down meeting in the Oval Office discussing outreach efforts on the part of NASA.
Other than the hype, I think it was a pretty good idea. There have been Muslims who have flown on the Space Shuttle (including a Saudi prince), and if there could be a way to have the children of the Middle East and other Muslim countries to have a role model which exemplifies the exploration of space and that living in the 21st Century has some benefits worth trying to examine, I think it is a pretty good thing.
I would also agree with you in terms of looking through what NASA has done over the past couple of years under the leadership of Bolden to see what exactly has accomplished that shows any sort of "selling out" or even making such outreach to Muslim countries something that impacts the other programs of the agency.
For myself, I very much like Obama's space policy and those who hate it usually are partisan hacks who can't find anything good to say about somebody they perceive as "the enemy". The real truth is that space policy over the past 40 years (since the Nixon administration) has been nearly a disaster and so screwed up (under both Democrat and Republican administrations... it was an equal opportunity screw up) that almost any change could have been better.
Obama in this case seemed to want to do something that was "not Bush". Literally NASA's policies were so screwed up under Bush that doing the exact opposite was an improvement. Bush inherited an awful program too, but then again so did Clinton.
And you believe everything you read on Wikipedia?
There is a time and a place for "cost-plus" contracts that have been traditionally used by NASA over the years (along with the Department of Defense for a great many projects). It is based upon the very successful model used for the Manhattan Project, where a bold goal was established by the government... something seen as critical perhaps even to the survival of the country itself. As to if that was true for building a nuclear bomb or flying people to the Moon could be debated, but the point is that those were set out as significant goals that simply had to be met, and how much it cost to get them accomplished was of relatively minor importance.
It is also important to note that while there were scientists who said that such endeavors were in theory possible, nobody knew at all how to actually get them accomplished. It really is exploring the frontier of human knowledge, where going to the Moon wasn't even conclusively proven to be even possible using any kind of machine on a practical level. Certainly entire new technologies had to be invented from scratch for both the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Project. If you asked even well respected contractors how much it was going to cost to build those devices, they would just give you a blank stare. Oh, they might come up with a rough estimate, but the truth is nobody knew how much it was really going to cost. It had never been done before, so there was no possible way to even remotely guess a great many of the costs. Certainly no sane contractor would ever enter into a contract with the government to produce a device or provide a service when they can't even reliably depend upon even the order of magnitude for the costs they will come into.
That is why you need to have the government take the risk of the costs for such significant endeavors, which is the "cost" part of the contracting model. The "plus" is a guaranteed profit that the company will earn simply for participating and getting involved with such a project. That makes shareholders happy, but it also allows us as citizens to receive the benefits of a company which has the skills and equipment necessary to pull off such important national endeavors.
One of the problems after the Apollo project (and the Manhattan Project in terms of DOD contracts) is that it was considered normal to use such a contracting model for everything else, even if they didn't need such a contract. Sending people into space to go and dock with the ISS is something with a long history and a great many rockets that have been developed over the years capable of such a feat. It is indeed possible to estimate fairly well how much it will cost to perform such a launch down to just a few dollars. For that reason, the cost-plus contracts really should have been abandoned a long time ago.
Going to Mars still has a whole bunch of unknowns about it, and for building the actual spacecraft or even the forward logistical supplies that need to be sent to Mars ahead of time is something that isn't really well known. There have been several spacecraft that have gone to Mars already, so there is at least some history there... it doesn't need to be purely cost-plus, but there might still be some role to play for using that model.
The SLS program is one that is using the "cost-plus" contracting model, which is one of the reasons why it will eventually die as a huge embarrassment to the good United States Senators who held advanced degrees in aeronautical engineering and designed the program through legislation in the first place. It shouldn't be all that complicated to send a big rocket into low-Earth orbit from Kennedy Space Center. Heck, the SLS won't even be the largest vehicle sent from KSC into LEO.
I know, really! Imagine what the public backlash would be against actually spending TRILLIONS of dollars on a needless oil war and secret police regime...
Imagine spending tens of billions of dollars on air conditioning for those soldiers serving in scorching tropical deserts to get some respite.
In fact, more money is spent on lipstick in America than is spent on spaceflight. Go figure and try to understand what the priorities really are for the country.
It is, pure and simple. NASA has five year plans for the future and a central design bureau which marshals the economy to meet certain production quotas and every other trapping of frankly Soviet era Communism.
That is sort of why it sounds like socialism, because it sort of takes socialist ideals and pushes them to the next level.
Even so, they're seasteading examples. And some of the most profound changes in society have come from ships such as the voyage of the HMS Beagle on which Charles Darwin made the observations that became the theory of evolution, or any number of decisive sea battles (such as the battles of Midway, Jutland, or Salamis).
Jared Diamond has gone so far as to assert the development of modern mankind and civilization as we know it today originated from the evolutionary pressure from long distance sailing. Certainly the ability to navigate across the ocean is an evolutionary pressure for increased intelligence.
An important distinction is that KSR also had at that point in the books a significant terraforming project on Mars which had put approximately 200-300 millibars of pressure into the Martian atmosphere. It wasn't perfect, but it was survivable.
How did he propose to do this? I thought getting Mars to hold a significant atmosphere wasn't really likely because 1) it doesn't have that much gravity (1/3g), and 2) it doesn't have a magnetic field to protect against solar winds. And without a liquid iron core, it can't be made to have a magnetic field.
There was a whole suite of ideas for increasing the atmosphere of Mars, and that is sort of the point of the first two books in terms of talking about those techniques. Sure, the atmosphere won't stick around for billions of years, but it will remain on Mars for millions of years.... long enough that on the scale of human civilizations is more than long enough and long enough that life will even evolve and adapt to life on Mars in its own unique way. The people who are around in 2-3 million years can worry about the issue of how to replenish the atmosphere.
Part of what was done is to take locked up carbon in Mars and make some "smog generators" of some kind (deliberately doing to Mars what some are saying we are doing here on the Earth by burning coal). Some other volatiles (mainly water) are suggested to be extracted from the asteroid belt by smashing them into snowballs and raining them down onto Mars in small hand-sized chunks. One of the major plots of the story was also to build a planetary sized Frenzel lens to magnify the Sun to give Earth-level insolation.
A really interesting "event" in the book is also about how Phobos was crashed deliberately into the surface by some "terrorists" (or patriots... depending on your POV of the events in the book).
It really is a good read, and the way everything gets put together in the book seriously discusses terraforming on both an engineering perspective as well as a political one with a significant faction of the Martian people wanting Mars to stay "Red" and another one called "Greens" pushing for terraforming. Pretty good arguments are put forward for both factions too.
In terms of trying to stay somewhat on topic, what is interesting in the book is the evolution of the "spacesuit" on Mars as the atmosphere changes, where eventually KSR does describe people walking around on the surface of Mars without any special aid at all. In fact a marathon is the subject of one of the chapters.
Is this ever going to be used, and is this going to speed up people going to Mars?
I think that, if they NASA et al really wanted to go to Mars and actually do a mission, they'd have developed a proper space suit to match the mission pretty fast. They also managed to do everything for the Moon mission in the 60's, so ...
On the list of things necessary to get to Mars and build a permanent outpost there (like the ISS or the Amundsen-Scott Base on the South Pole), I would put getting a proper space suit working is rather far down the list and one of the more insignificant issues to be resolved.... particularly because proven spacesuit designs have already been made in previous flights by at least three different nations and presumably different companies all trying to do the same thing.
Back when NASA was trying to figure out how to build a spacesuit in the first place, the only thing they could remotely find was a suit of armor worn by King Henry VIII of England. It was a full set of battle armor that similarly had to protect the whole body from head to toe, and it didn't expose any part of the body even when joints were flexed. A common technique for medieval warfare was to try and wedge a sword or an arrow into a joint, so the better your protected those joints the better your chances of survival in combat or even at a tournament.
It certainly is useful to look around for alternatives and Mars is going to be an interesting environment to at least plan for. I'm impressed that this kind of thinking is going on, but there are a whole bunch of other issues that need to be addressed for successful human exploration of Mars.