Just check on Google. For UK sites, the frequency of "work-oriented" vs. "work-orientated" is about 2:1, for Australia, it's 4:1. For the entire world, it's about 12:1 (and most of that usage is in the UK and Australia). Sounds like this is some odd British usage.
Can I MISHANDLE a product, and sue the manufacturer when my own stupidity causes me to be injured? No.
Not only can you sue, you can win if the design of the product contributes to your injuries. That is, your improper handling caused your injury, but the manufacturer contributed to them by making their product unnecessarily dangerous. It's a long-established legal principle, and it was applied entirely properly in this case.
There is an entire menagerie of bullshit 'crimes' defined by democratic legislatures these days.
What does "democratic" have to do with it? Do you think monarchies or police states have fewer "bullshit crimes"?
Not doing something is not a crime
You can call it what you want, but society has a compelling interest in regulating behavior. That may include things like mandating you to get a vaccination, under penalty of law.
Of course, I think it is outrageous to criminalize the possible development of a descrambling chip. But your response of playing word games over what is or isn't a crime is even more idiotic.
There are some technologies where governments have a compelling interest to restrict their development. For example, if you came into the country with a bunch of vials of smallpox DNA (not the complete virus), I think the government would be well justified in arresting you even if you hadn't made the virus yet. So, this type of law is justifiable in principle it's just that the balance needs to be struck erring on the side of personal freedoms, and satellite descramblers just don't rise to the level of threat as, say, smallpox DNA.
And if you want to know the deeper reason for all this, it isn't "democracy" per se, it's ties between big business and politics. If we got the money out of our democracy, people wouldn't get thrown in jail for distributing or using cable descramblers.
I wish people would stop citing the MacDonalds case as an example of an excessive judgement. MacDonalds had violated standards for the temperature of coffee repeatedly, resulting in injuries to many people. Finally, in the case of this woman, who received third degree burns as a result, the jury said that enough is enough and awarded a judgement that the bean counters at MacDonalds would actually notice. The judgement was not in proportion to the injuries of the woman, the judgement was in proportion to the financial situation of MacDonalds. If that judgement has gotten reversed, it's a shame, because the only thing that will cause big corporations like MacDonalds to change their behavior is if they have to pay enough in damages that it hurts their bottom line.
If we survive that long as a technological society, we will have the technology to leave our planet whether we explicitly develop it or not. Putting people into tin cans now won't make any difference.
But by that time, perhaps, humanity will also have acquired the wisdom to realize that to every thing there is a season, and a time to die. If humanity survives that long, it will have lived an enormously long, full life, and we can just be grateful for that.
Sorry, but your analysis is wrong. Using time-of-flight gating, you can look at different "layers" with X-ray backscatter, and you would adjust the X-rays so that enough go through the outer wall to make the inside visible. The radiation inside the house would not be very high either. And you wouldn't need any detectors behind the house.
I would expect that in a few years, all the necessary equipment would fit into a suitcase.
That definition lists "irony particles". Will it turn out that the world is built out of "irony particles" and "sarcasm particles", held together by "humerons"?
[People would be better advised to look up at night and realize that they, or their children, are never going to leave this planet. They should come to realize that they either fix their problems on earth or that they will have to live with them.] If we had lived like that throughout history humanity would never have advanced to what it is today, I'm sorry to say.
Oh, and where is the proof for that? The age of exploration was economically advantageous for Europe in the short term, but Europe would probably have industrialized and become democratic without it. Furthermore, the civilizations that were destroyed by Europeans would have had a chance to develop on their own.
To squash that because we have to fix our immediate problems first is an invitation to creating a society that wants to regress to a Dark Age of culture.
Rejection of space exploration as a solution to human ills isn't the same as a "quick fix" approach to humanity's problems. Quite to the contrary: space exploration embodies the "quick fix" mentality--"if we just get off this planet, we don't have to deal with our problems".
The problems humanity faces are difficult sociological problems, and they will require long term thinking. But they won't be solved by having illusions about escaping into space.
This is not a joke, either--I've actually read some literature from environmental extremists that want to drastically cull the human race and reduce them back to the state of Stone Age-level noble savages.
The human population clearly is far too large to be sustainable. But reducing it doesn't require "culling", it merely requires getting our birthrates under control and for politicians to stop pretending that we can grow out of any economic problems.
As for the appropriate level of technology for a more sustainable human population size, I don't see any reason why it should be any less advanced than it is today. However, I would expect a shift away from semiconductor and chemical technologies to biotechnologies.
To use an imperfect but still appropriate analogy, you can't say, "I'm too weak to lift weights. I'll wait until I'm stronger, and then do it."
But we aren't just "waiting", we are "exercising". Robotic exploration of space teaches us everything about space technologies. Medical science on earth is making great advances on the technologies that will, incidentally, also permit long distance space travel (prevention of tissue degeneration, hibernation, etc.). And engineering is creating more and more efficient manufacturing technologies, which will enable self-sufficient colonies.
In a couple of centuries, technology will have automatically advanced to the point where human space exploration will be easy. We don't need to waste money on a human space program now, and the people-in-tin-cans stuff we are doing right now doesn't seem to teach us much of anything.
Running out of resources here on earth (not likely, of course, but at some point it may be more economically feasible to acquire those resources from space, especially if all the hard work like figuring out how to keep humans there has already been figured out).
Life on earth hasn't "run out of resources" for a billion years. We, too, an live on Earth sustainably if we only try.
To escape the clutches of a stagnant culture and civilization. Think global stagnation can't happen? The pieces are being put into place even as we speak. It's the inevitable result of globalization. And remember: an evil police state won't fall if it doesn't have any outside competition.
Yes, it would be nice to have a wide range of human societies that can develop independently. But to achieve that in space, we would need not just colonies but fairly self-sufficient and autonomous colonies. Not even the US is self-sufficient and autonomous; how would you expect a colony on a hostile moon to become that?
It will take a lot more technology before that vision can become true, and that technology does not require space exploration to develop. So, let's wait with wasting money on sending humans into space until the technology to create self-sufficient settlements is there.
To maximize humankind's long-term chances of survival. Nasty things have happened in the earth's history, and it's only a matter of time before something nasty happens on our watch.
And your point is what?
Hell, we might even be the cause.
Escapist phantasies only encourage that kind of mismanagement. Humanity needs to realize the fact that either we make things work here, or we die. There is no third option right now, and there won't be for centuries to come.
If you think things can get interesting and weird here, you ain't seen shit. We haven't even begun to discover what interesting things are to be found out there.
In fact, we have begun to discover the interesting things to be found out there--through robotic exploration and astronomy. Human explorers aren't needed in the mix. Robotic probes permit cheaper and faster exploration.
Because exploring and expanding is in our nature. It's why we're here, why we've survived when countless other species have fallen by the wayside. Nature doesn't look kindly upon the meek.
Is that the "cockroach theory of human superiority"? In fact, huge numbers of species survive just fine in their ecological niches. They run into trouble only when humans disturb the equillibrium and bring new species into their environment.
We should be putting lots of people up into space, and shouldn't be screwing around with crap that doesn't teach us how to stay there.
Putting people into space now is probably the least cost-effective way of developing the technologies for a permanent human presence in space. Robotic probes and improvements in manufacturing technologies on earth are what will make a permanent human space presence possible, and shifting money from manned to unmanned programs will help those technologies mature faster.
And they were more than happy to take that risk to get the chance to go into space.
Yes, but I am less than happy to pay for it.
I don't mean that in a cynical way. Humans by their very nature need to explore.
Well, astronauts are free to pay for their own "need to explore". My "need to explore" is better satisfied with unmanned probes.
It would be a horrible shame if manned spaceflight came to an end because it became politically incorrect.
It's ironic that you use right-wing rhetoric to defend what amounts to a useless, bloated government program, a waste of tax payer money. Where is that "private enterprise" spirit people like you keep talking about? If manned space exploration is worth doing, private enterprise will rise to the challenge, right?
Brilliant idea: let's put humans on top of a miles thick ice crust. Then, let's have them twiddle their thumbs for a few weeks while the automated drilling equipment drills through the ice. Then, they can operate a bunch of remotely controlled submarines. All in all, let's move people to the most expensive place we can think of for remotely controlling unmanned vehicles, right? Oh, and by placing then on Europa, we also risk contaminating the moon.
No. The difference is that we need some form of ground transportation to keep our society functioning; we don't need manned space travel for anything.
(Whether cars are the best for of ground transportation is a separate debate. We actually already have cheaper and safer technology than cars: rail and urban planning.)
But damn it, we want to send people into space. We want to send people into space so we can look up at night and imagine that one day we may leave this planet.
People would be better advised to look up at night and realize that they, or their children, are never going to leave this planet. They should come to realize that they either fix their problems on earth or that they will have to live with them.
We want people in space because they inspire our children to become scientists, researchers, and explorers
The manned space program, even if it were successful, has very little to do with science or research. Scientists and researchers almost universally prefer robotic exploration.
As for explorers, there hasn't been any "exploration" going on in the space program. But even if there had been, that reasoning is circular: we first need to decide whether we want manned exploration. If we don't want manned exploration, then there is no point in inspiring children to become explorers.
You are free to engage in whatever follies you personally like, but I draw the line when you try to finance them with my tax dollars.
I doubt that, if given the technology, sailors in the age of exploration would have preferred going themselves instead of sending these tin men.
The sailors of the age were the "tin men". The people who financed these expeditions stayed at home. Human life was as disposable then as a robot is today. And, in any case, who gives a damn what the sailors want? You may want to go on a tax-payer financed billion dollar thrill-ride to space, but that doesn't place an obligation on anybody else to finance it.
The need for a constant human space presence is simple: So that we have a constant human space presence.
"We" as in "the US"? Because the rest of the world generally doesn't seem to think so. And to the degree that other nations occasionally want to send people into space, using rockets and return capsules seems sufficient for them.
And what do "we" need it for? Why don't we worry about, oh, loss of the skill of blacksmithing? Log cabin building? If a skill has little or no demonstrable use, why spend billions each year to maintain it?
The idea is similar for the logic behind keeping Los Alamos labs functioning. We don't need more nuclear weapons,
Well, Bush apparently thinks we need them.
but the fear is that should we decommission the lab, we may lose the talent and knowledge (most of which is intangible/experiential knowledge) of the staff.
It would take at most a few years to re-build such a program. Japan and Germany, two nations without nuclear weapons, are expected to be able to produce nuclear weapons within less than a year from the point that they decide that they need them.
Nuclear weapons labs are there because the US continues to develop nuclear weapons actively and because nuclear weapons are a major part of US military planning.
It's the same as it was during the Space Race: Because we can.
The reason for the space race was a PR battle with the Soviet Union, nothing more. That reason obviously doesn't exist anymore.
These days, the US manned space program is more of a PR liability, as Europeans and Japanese are starting to send out unmanned probes all over the solar system and their populations understand how nifty those kinds of missions are, and what a waste of money the US manned missions are.
Because we want to go. We don't need any other reason. We want to explore and colonize space, even if its inefficient
Well, speak for yourself. I don't want to waste billions of dollars every year on giving a handful of self-important geezers a dangerous thrill-ride.
Unmanned and robotic exploration steadily advances our skills and knowledge of space. Human exploration of space can happen naturally in a few centuries, when the technology has caught up with human desires. Until then, let's not waste money on human explortation.
Look, I'm as big a *nix bigot as the geek next to me, but for the average consumer *nix just isn't ready for the desktop yet.
I disagree.
OpenOffice still has problems, bugs,
And MS Office and Windows are problem-free and bug-free? You must never have used them, or maybe you have used them so much that you just know "don't press that button--it will crash". I use both XP and Linux regularly, and XP and Office have many more problems than a Linux desktop with equivalent functionality. Worse, Microsoft keeps breaking things during their updates.
compatability issues
So does MS Office--it is incompatible with itself in some cases, and it doesn't implement standard formats correctly either.
and lacking features that MS Office has.
So? The largest number of features doesn't make for the best office suite. OpenOffice has everything an office suite needs and more. In some areas, it actually is significantly more featureful than MS Office.
It also runs slow even on the fastest machines.
KDE and Gnome are very responsive on even low-end desktop machines (1GHz, 256M). They aren't any "slower" than the Windows or OS X GUI.
Gnome & KDE are great as well but still aren't ready for prime time. (Sorry guys.. but compare them to the polished look and feature set of OS X and Windows. They just aren't there yet.)
Sorry, but your objection comes down to "Gnome, KDE, and OpenOffice aren't identical to Windows or OS X". Well, they aren't and they won't be, if not for any other reason than that Windows and OS X both contain some pretty significant blunders for systems that want to be mainstream desktop operating systems.
The current Linux desktop has to fear no comparison with Windows or OS X. Gnome and KDE are full-featured, high quality desktop environments. If they have a failing at all, it is that they try to emulate Windows and OS X too closely.
Microsoft licensed Java; that is not the same as a commitment to ship.
Sun's contractual dispute had been settled long before their claim that Microsoft is obligated to ship Java. Sun derived an obligation to ship from a monopoly argument, not a contractual argument.
then shipped some shit almost like java, but called it Java. Sun said "No, we want you to ship JAVA".
Linux also ships "some shit almost like java". I wouldn't want Sun to start dictating to the Linux community what to ship either.
Slashdot Mirror
Just check on Google. For UK sites, the frequency of "work-oriented" vs. "work-orientated" is about 2:1, for Australia, it's 4:1. For the entire world, it's about 12:1 (and most of that usage is in the UK and Australia). Sounds like this is some odd British usage.
Can I MISHANDLE a product, and sue the manufacturer when my own stupidity causes me to be injured? No.
Not only can you sue, you can win if the design of the product contributes to your injuries. That is, your improper handling caused your injury, but the manufacturer contributed to them by making their product unnecessarily dangerous. It's a long-established legal principle, and it was applied entirely properly in this case.
There is an entire menagerie of bullshit 'crimes' defined by democratic legislatures these days.
What does "democratic" have to do with it? Do you think monarchies or police states have fewer "bullshit crimes"?
Not doing something is not a crime
You can call it what you want, but society has a compelling interest in regulating behavior. That may include things like mandating you to get a vaccination, under penalty of law.
Of course, I think it is outrageous to criminalize the possible development of a descrambling chip. But your response of playing word games over what is or isn't a crime is even more idiotic.
There are some technologies where governments have a compelling interest to restrict their development. For example, if you came into the country with a bunch of vials of smallpox DNA (not the complete virus), I think the government would be well justified in arresting you even if you hadn't made the virus yet. So, this type of law is justifiable in principle it's just that the balance needs to be struck erring on the side of personal freedoms, and satellite descramblers just don't rise to the level of threat as, say, smallpox DNA.
And if you want to know the deeper reason for all this, it isn't "democracy" per se, it's ties between big business and politics. If we got the money out of our democracy, people wouldn't get thrown in jail for distributing or using cable descramblers.
Can I drive my car into a wall and sue Ford?
Yes, if the brakes were poorly designed.
Can I slice my wrists and sue Ginsu?
Yes, if the handle was poorly designed and permitted that to occur as an accident.
Can I hit you with a baseball bat and sue Louisville slugger?
Yes, if you didn't intend to hit me but the bat spontaneously disintegrates and injures me.
And that's the case with the MacDonalds coffee: the injury was partially MacDonalds fault because the coffee was too hot.
I wish people would stop citing the MacDonalds case as an example of an excessive judgement. MacDonalds had violated standards for the temperature of coffee repeatedly, resulting in injuries to many people. Finally, in the case of this woman, who received third degree burns as a result, the jury said that enough is enough and awarded a judgement that the bean counters at MacDonalds would actually notice. The judgement was not in proportion to the injuries of the woman, the judgement was in proportion to the financial situation of MacDonalds. If that judgement has gotten reversed, it's a shame, because the only thing that will cause big corporations like MacDonalds to change their behavior is if they have to pay enough in damages that it hurts their bottom line.
It's a word alright, but it's not synonymous with "oriented". An event can be "Linux-oriented", but "Linux-orientated" is bad usage.
If we survive that long as a technological society, we will have the technology to leave our planet whether we explicitly develop it or not. Putting people into tin cans now won't make any difference.
But by that time, perhaps, humanity will also have acquired the wisdom to realize that to every thing there is a season, and a time to die. If humanity survives that long, it will have lived an enormously long, full life, and we can just be grateful for that.
They only measure the X-rays that bounce off the skin, but plenty of them go through the body anyway (they just aren't used for imaging).
Sorry, but your analysis is wrong. Using time-of-flight gating, you can look at different "layers" with X-ray backscatter, and you would adjust the X-rays so that enough go through the outer wall to make the inside visible. The radiation inside the house would not be very high either. And you wouldn't need any detectors behind the house.
I would expect that in a few years, all the necessary equipment would fit into a suitcase.
Would you want your wife and kids walking through one of these things knowing that a complete stranger will be looking at them naked?
Do your wife and kids see a doctor?
What if some pedophile gets a job working these things just to get his jollies from watching children go through?
I don't care what you get your jollies from, and I don't care whether a pedophile gets his jollies from watching an X-ray machine.
What about people that are so self-concious about their weight that they will hold up the line indefinitely rather than go through security?
"Sir, if you aren't going to go through the security system, would you please step aside? No, there won't be a refund on the ticket."
Are these scanned images akin to public pornography?
No: the primary purpose of pornography is to cause sexual arousal; the primary purpose of X-ray backscatter images is security.
That definition lists "irony particles". Will it turn out that the world is built out of "irony particles" and "sarcasm particles", held together by "humerons"?
[People would be better advised to look up at night and realize that they, or their children, are never going to leave this planet. They should come to realize that they either fix their problems on earth or that they will have to live with them.] If we had lived like that throughout history humanity would never have advanced to what it is today, I'm sorry to say.
Oh, and where is the proof for that? The age of exploration was economically advantageous for Europe in the short term, but Europe would probably have industrialized and become democratic without it. Furthermore, the civilizations that were destroyed by Europeans would have had a chance to develop on their own.
To squash that because we have to fix our immediate problems first is an invitation to creating a society that wants to regress to a Dark Age of culture.
Rejection of space exploration as a solution to human ills isn't the same as a "quick fix" approach to humanity's problems. Quite to the contrary: space exploration embodies the "quick fix" mentality--"if we just get off this planet, we don't have to deal with our problems".
The problems humanity faces are difficult sociological problems, and they will require long term thinking. But they won't be solved by having illusions about escaping into space.
This is not a joke, either--I've actually read some literature from environmental extremists that want to drastically cull the human race and reduce them back to the state of Stone Age-level noble savages.
The human population clearly is far too large to be sustainable. But reducing it doesn't require "culling", it merely requires getting our birthrates under control and for politicians to stop pretending that we can grow out of any economic problems.
As for the appropriate level of technology for a more sustainable human population size, I don't see any reason why it should be any less advanced than it is today. However, I would expect a shift away from semiconductor and chemical technologies to biotechnologies.
To use an imperfect but still appropriate analogy, you can't say, "I'm too weak to lift weights. I'll wait until I'm stronger, and then do it."
But we aren't just "waiting", we are "exercising". Robotic exploration of space teaches us everything about space technologies. Medical science on earth is making great advances on the technologies that will, incidentally, also permit long distance space travel (prevention of tissue degeneration, hibernation, etc.). And engineering is creating more and more efficient manufacturing technologies, which will enable self-sufficient colonies.
In a couple of centuries, technology will have automatically advanced to the point where human space exploration will be easy. We don't need to waste money on a human space program now, and the people-in-tin-cans stuff we are doing right now doesn't seem to teach us much of anything.
Running out of resources here on earth (not likely, of course, but at some point it may be more economically feasible to acquire those resources from space, especially if all the hard work like figuring out how to keep humans there has already been figured out).
Life on earth hasn't "run out of resources" for a billion years. We, too, an live on Earth sustainably if we only try.
To escape the clutches of a stagnant culture and civilization. Think global stagnation can't happen? The pieces are being put into place even as we speak. It's the inevitable result of globalization. And remember: an evil police state won't fall if it doesn't have any outside competition.
Yes, it would be nice to have a wide range of human societies that can develop independently. But to achieve that in space, we would need not just colonies but fairly self-sufficient and autonomous colonies. Not even the US is self-sufficient and autonomous; how would you expect a colony on a hostile moon to become that?
It will take a lot more technology before that vision can become true, and that technology does not require space exploration to develop. So, let's wait with wasting money on sending humans into space until the technology to create self-sufficient settlements is there.
To maximize humankind's long-term chances of survival. Nasty things have happened in the earth's history, and it's only a matter of time before something nasty happens on our watch.
And your point is what?
Hell, we might even be the cause.
Escapist phantasies only encourage that kind of mismanagement. Humanity needs to realize the fact that either we make things work here, or we die. There is no third option right now, and there won't be for centuries to come.
If you think things can get interesting and weird here, you ain't seen shit. We haven't even begun to discover what interesting things are to be found out there.
In fact, we have begun to discover the interesting things to be found out there--through robotic exploration and astronomy. Human explorers aren't needed in the mix. Robotic probes permit cheaper and faster exploration.
Because exploring and expanding is in our nature. It's why we're here, why we've survived when countless other species have fallen by the wayside. Nature doesn't look kindly upon the meek.
Is that the "cockroach theory of human superiority"? In fact, huge numbers of species survive just fine in their ecological niches. They run into trouble only when humans disturb the equillibrium and bring new species into their environment.
We should be putting lots of people up into space, and shouldn't be screwing around with crap that doesn't teach us how to stay there.
Putting people into space now is probably the least cost-effective way of developing the technologies for a permanent human presence in space. Robotic probes and improvements in manufacturing technologies on earth are what will make a permanent human space presence possible, and shifting money from manned to unmanned programs will help those technologies mature faster.
And they were more than happy to take that risk to get the chance to go into space.
Yes, but I am less than happy to pay for it.
I don't mean that in a cynical way. Humans by their very nature need to explore.
Well, astronauts are free to pay for their own "need to explore". My "need to explore" is better satisfied with unmanned probes.
It would be a horrible shame if manned spaceflight came to an end because it became politically incorrect.
It's ironic that you use right-wing rhetoric to defend what amounts to a useless, bloated government program, a waste of tax payer money. Where is that "private enterprise" spirit people like you keep talking about? If manned space exploration is worth doing, private enterprise will rise to the challenge, right?
Hell, let's put humans down on Europa
Brilliant idea: let's put humans on top of a miles thick ice crust. Then, let's have them twiddle their thumbs for a few weeks while the automated drilling equipment drills through the ice. Then, they can operate a bunch of remotely controlled submarines. All in all, let's move people to the most expensive place we can think of for remotely controlling unmanned vehicles, right? Oh, and by placing then on Europa, we also risk contaminating the moon.
No. The difference is that we need some form of ground transportation to keep our society functioning; we don't need manned space travel for anything.
(Whether cars are the best for of ground transportation is a separate debate. We actually already have cheaper and safer technology than cars: rail and urban planning.)
But damn it, we want to send people into space. We want to send people into space so we can look up at night and imagine that one day we may leave this planet.
People would be better advised to look up at night and realize that they, or their children, are never going to leave this planet. They should come to realize that they either fix their problems on earth or that they will have to live with them.
We want people in space because they inspire our children to become scientists, researchers, and explorers
The manned space program, even if it were successful, has very little to do with science or research. Scientists and researchers almost universally prefer robotic exploration.
As for explorers, there hasn't been any "exploration" going on in the space program. But even if there had been, that reasoning is circular: we first need to decide whether we want manned exploration. If we don't want manned exploration, then there is no point in inspiring children to become explorers.
"Because it's there."
You are free to engage in whatever follies you personally like, but I draw the line when you try to finance them with my tax dollars.
I doubt that, if given the technology, sailors in the age of exploration would have preferred going themselves instead of sending these tin men.
The sailors of the age were the "tin men". The people who financed these expeditions stayed at home. Human life was as disposable then as a robot is today. And, in any case, who gives a damn what the sailors want? You may want to go on a tax-payer financed billion dollar thrill-ride to space, but that doesn't place an obligation on anybody else to finance it.
The need for a constant human space presence is simple: So that we have a constant human space presence.
"We" as in "the US"? Because the rest of the world generally doesn't seem to think so. And to the degree that other nations occasionally want to send people into space, using rockets and return capsules seems sufficient for them.
And what do "we" need it for? Why don't we worry about, oh, loss of the skill of blacksmithing? Log cabin building? If a skill has little or no demonstrable use, why spend billions each year to maintain it?
The idea is similar for the logic behind keeping Los Alamos labs functioning. We don't need more nuclear weapons,
Well, Bush apparently thinks we need them.
but the fear is that should we decommission the lab, we may lose the talent and knowledge (most of which is intangible/experiential knowledge) of the staff.
It would take at most a few years to re-build such a program. Japan and Germany, two nations without nuclear weapons, are expected to be able to produce nuclear weapons within less than a year from the point that they decide that they need them.
Nuclear weapons labs are there because the US continues to develop nuclear weapons actively and because nuclear weapons are a major part of US military planning.
It's the same as it was during the Space Race: Because we can.
The reason for the space race was a PR battle with the Soviet Union, nothing more. That reason obviously doesn't exist anymore.
These days, the US manned space program is more of a PR liability, as Europeans and Japanese are starting to send out unmanned probes all over the solar system and their populations understand how nifty those kinds of missions are, and what a waste of money the US manned missions are.
Because we want to go. We don't need any other reason. We want to explore and colonize space, even if its inefficient
Well, speak for yourself. I don't want to waste billions of dollars every year on giving a handful of self-important geezers a dangerous thrill-ride.
Unmanned and robotic exploration steadily advances our skills and knowledge of space. Human exploration of space can happen naturally in a few centuries, when the technology has caught up with human desires. Until then, let's not waste money on human explortation.
Look, I'm as big a *nix bigot as the geek next to me, but for the average consumer *nix just isn't ready for the desktop yet.
I disagree.
OpenOffice still has problems, bugs,
And MS Office and Windows are problem-free and bug-free? You must never have used them, or maybe you have used them so much that you just know "don't press that button--it will crash". I use both XP and Linux regularly, and XP and Office have many more problems than a Linux desktop with equivalent functionality. Worse, Microsoft keeps breaking things during their updates.
compatability issues
So does MS Office--it is incompatible with itself in some cases, and it doesn't implement standard formats correctly either.
and lacking features that MS Office has.
So? The largest number of features doesn't make for the best office suite. OpenOffice has everything an office suite needs and more. In some areas, it actually is significantly more featureful than MS Office.
It also runs slow even on the fastest machines.
KDE and Gnome are very responsive on even low-end desktop machines (1GHz, 256M). They aren't any "slower" than the Windows or OS X GUI.
Gnome & KDE are great as well but still aren't ready for prime time. (Sorry guys.. but compare them to the polished look and feature set of OS X and Windows. They just aren't there yet.)
Sorry, but your objection comes down to "Gnome, KDE, and OpenOffice aren't identical to Windows or OS X". Well, they aren't and they won't be, if not for any other reason than that Windows and OS X both contain some pretty significant blunders for systems that want to be mainstream desktop operating systems.
The current Linux desktop has to fear no comparison with Windows or OS X. Gnome and KDE are full-featured, high quality desktop environments. If they have a failing at all, it is that they try to emulate Windows and OS X too closely.
like the Itsy Rock 'n' Scroll? There are many other instances of this idea. It's surprising that commercial systems aren't using it that much.
Maybe if someone produced a SD or CF tilt and motion sensor, this would catch on a bit more.
Companys should stick to contracts thou.
Microsoft licensed Java; that is not the same as a commitment to ship.
Sun's contractual dispute had been settled long before their claim that Microsoft is obligated to ship Java. Sun derived an obligation to ship from a monopoly argument, not a contractual argument.
then shipped some shit almost like java, but called it Java. Sun said "No, we want you to ship JAVA".
Linux also ships "some shit almost like java". I wouldn't want Sun to start dictating to the Linux community what to ship either.