It's possible that we deliberately downed a drone over Iran with a modern appearance but made with the wrong materials, and with old sensors and electronics generally — or maybe with electronics deeply flawed in a subtle way — with the intent of having Russia and China get their hands on it and then underestimate our capabilities. It's possible, that is, that this is actually an intelligence coup of the highest order.
Knowing our government from inside experience, though, I'm voting for the assclown theory as the survivor of Occam's razor.
I don't disagree with anything you said, but I do think you've missed something. Let's say that SpaceX halves the per unit mass cost of access to space, and then never ever reduces its costs again. What it has done in that case is cannibalized the business that otherwise would have gone to ULA, etc. at those higher costs. Now, SpaceX doesn't have an incentive to reduce costs — it has the market — but ULA and Armadillo and such do have an incentive to lower their costs if they want to get the market that SpaceX took. So competition begets rounds of cost cuttings rotating through suppliers even if any given supplier tries to keep the prices from decreasing.
And at some point, the cost comes down to the point that doing truly new things becomes practical. Consider that if it cost $25,000 to fly to Europe, few would do so, perhaps only a few hundred per year. But at $2500 or less, many thousands of people do so every year. That's more or less exactly what happened between the 1970s and today in commercial air travel. Along with such services as UPS and FedEx, which couldn't exist as global air delivery services if the prices hadn't dropped. I don't know what would happen if the price of access to space were dropped by an order of magnitude. I don't think anyone can convince me that they really do know the answer to that. But I'm betting that what happens in space at that point would be radically different than what happens today.
I am unimpressed by your static analysis. Even taking all your points as true (which I don't), what happens when the price of getting material into space is reduced by an order of magnitude? It's certainly likely that we'll see an order of magnitude reduction in the next decade, given the advances made by SpaceX and others.
I generally see Mark Whittington as being the chief cheerleader for the "let's do Apollo again" school of space flight. There's nothing wrong with that, except that NASA has pretty definitively proven over a period of decades that it's too bureaucratic, too sclerotic, and too much organized as a patronage/jobs organization to do anything big in manned space flight. Even were that not the case, it's a shame that Whittington continually elides the fact that the commercial space contracts — both cargo and crew — only pay out when specific milestones are achieved, and they pay fixed amounts for those milestones. In other words, this isn't Solyndra, where money is just thrown down the drain with no expectation of success; that actually better describes NASA's normal manned space flight program than it does the commercial space companies.
I think Chaikin's right, and that the entrepreneurial spirit that characterized NASA in the 1960s now resides in the private space companies. And as a bitter critic of the Obama administration on pretty much every other point, I nonetheless have to say that this is the one area where they've definitely improved on the Republicans.
Oh, please! First, it would be in active use, so it would be boosted as the orbit decays (by the rockets it's refueling, most likely). Second, fuel depots wouldn't be reentry shielded and fuel is highly flammable, by definition. So if one were allowed to deorbit, all that would hit the ground is a bit of metal, and not much of that. Satellites fall all the time with little risk on the ground.
I'm all about getting to Mars. Heck, offer me a one way ticket and I'm off. But here's the deal: NASA is not going to get us there. Today's NASA is not the entrepreneurial NASA of the 1960s or even the 1970s. This is an Iron Law bureaucracy whose job is to keep working, which they do by spreading money across a lot of important Senators' districts. Note the important fact left out of the summary: this finding of getting there cheaper with fuel depots was buried by NASA for months because they didn't want to interfere with the SLS funding, which like Constellation before it is almost certain to never, ever fly. Consider that the last successful NASA development program for rockets was run in the 1970s, with the Shuttle. (And that was only successful if "success" means "getting people into space" as opposed to meeting cost or capability targets.) The only new rockets since then have been commercial, and NASA is in a love/hate relationship with those.
To be blunt, because Iraqi factions include some who are aligned with us, and others who are aligned against us (and generally with Iran). You need immunity to prevent those factions not aligned with us from using prosecutions of our troops on trumped up charges to manipulate us.
Tell the police that you connected to the machine to try to track him down and found that he had downloaded child porn with it. Then, when they bust him and take the computer, you can file a claim with them. Kind of the nuclear option, but I bet it would work.
Jobs made life better for millions of people. The world was inarguably a better place for his having lived. What higher praise could there be than that?
I know of no one who thinks that the private investments in Solyndra were a problem. It's the government investment in a private firm that not-so-coincidentally was heavily backed and part owned by a large donor to the President that causes heartburn for everyone. If it weren't taxpayer money - more accurately, money borrowed from China and the interest of which will still be being paid by our great-grandchildren - there wouldn't be a scandal.
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as "bad luck."
when the customer hires consultants so that they (the customer) can have someone to blame when things go wrong, and then spends all of their time ensuring that blame is affixed for anything and everything (including "doing exactly as directed after warning of this specific consequence") rather than spending any time trying to make things better?
It is more sophisticated. The question is, is it more accurate? I've yet to see a climate model that, given the conditions at some point in the past, can predict the present. Why should I have confidence in their predictions of the future? And you know what, if this were just an academic debate about what the climate were doing, I'd note that and move on, the way that I now note that the inferences on the diamond planet are reasonable but not necessarily correct (there are alternative reasonable explanations) and move on. If people were saying that the earth is warming, man is probably having some effect, and stopping there, I think most if not all critics of CAGW as its normally presented would happily move on.
The problem with climate science is not a problem with the science per se. It's that the science was used to create a set of political demands. Let's use the example of evolution. Let's say that biologists were to come out and say that evolution showed that blacks were clearly inferior and that discrimination against blacks was therefore scientifically justified. Far fetched? Hardly: such arguments have been made against blacks and Jews, and probably far more than that. But if those arguments were made, then wouldn't questioning the scientific basis of the arguments be just as valid as questioning the political ends of the argument? After all, if the scientific basis is invalid, then the political ends are meaningless in the context of the argument presented about the science. So why wouldn't that also be true about climatology? Climatologists have in fact tried to make policy arguments (Hanson comes to mind), never mind the hangers-on of the political world like Gore who have merely used the climatologists' results to make political claims. So if they are using climate science as a basis of a policy argument, then why should their opponents not argue the science as well as the policy?
Note that all of this is true whether or not the CAGW theory is true. And it if is true, it can stand on its own merits, just as evolution has done.
Doesn't work,and here's why. Can the laborers, who are now also shareholders, alienate their ownership? That is to say, can I sell my share in State Widgets, Inc. to someone else, in exchange for anything else - be it goods, money, shares in other enterprises, etc?
If so, then some people will sell their shares, and others will hold on to them. Those that hold on to shares in profitable enterprises and alienate shares in unprofitable enterprises will prosper. Those that sell shares in profitable enterprises, whether or not they hold shares in unprofitable enterprises, will not prosper. And that means that differential abilities will quickly result in differential results. And those people that prospered from handling their investments well will in turn be able to use those profits to acquire more ownership by buying other people's shares, or to raise their immediate standard of living by buying other goods. Thus you very quickly get back into the same situation that prompted you to implement worker ownership in the first place.
So, then, the solution is to not let them sell their shares, right? But then, in what sense do they own an asset? If the enterprise is profitable, it can distribute the profits over and above whatever it provides as pay. But if the business needs to invest in new equipment, or new labor, from where does that money come? If it's to come out of the profits, one assumes that would be decided by shareholder vote. But what if there aren't enough - or any - profits? Then if the business cannot improve because it cannot invest because it cannot get the money to invest from selling shares, eventually the business will collapse. Then what?
Communism and Marxism have been tried in many, many, many guises, and it has yet to lead to anything other than immiseration and tyranny. Usually in the short term, not the long term.
Capitalism is a perfect system with many assumptions about a controlled environment and a perfect world. Add in greedy people, and it unravels pretty quickly.
I think it has its merits, but the problem is that nothing has feasibly been melded with it to make it more compatible with the real world.
Slashdot Mirror
Trust me when I tell you that you do not want to work in technology anywhere near the White House.
to move my domain off of GoDaddy. My laziness only gets them so much revenue.
Reading comprehension something alien to you, or did you stop before I got to the point that it's far more likely that we just screwed something up?
Well, that's why I said that it's more likely the assclown explanation: we screwed something up.
It's possible that we deliberately downed a drone over Iran with a modern appearance but made with the wrong materials, and with old sensors and electronics generally — or maybe with electronics deeply flawed in a subtle way — with the intent of having Russia and China get their hands on it and then underestimate our capabilities. It's possible, that is, that this is actually an intelligence coup of the highest order.
Knowing our government from inside experience, though, I'm voting for the assclown theory as the survivor of Occam's razor.
Well, that was pretty much beclowning yourself. Congrats.
And at some point, the cost comes down to the point that doing truly new things becomes practical. Consider that if it cost $25,000 to fly to Europe, few would do so, perhaps only a few hundred per year. But at $2500 or less, many thousands of people do so every year. That's more or less exactly what happened between the 1970s and today in commercial air travel. Along with such services as UPS and FedEx, which couldn't exist as global air delivery services if the prices hadn't dropped. I don't know what would happen if the price of access to space were dropped by an order of magnitude. I don't think anyone can convince me that they really do know the answer to that. But I'm betting that what happens in space at that point would be radically different than what happens today.
I am unimpressed by your static analysis. Even taking all your points as true (which I don't), what happens when the price of getting material into space is reduced by an order of magnitude? It's certainly likely that we'll see an order of magnitude reduction in the next decade, given the advances made by SpaceX and others.
I generally see Mark Whittington as being the chief cheerleader for the "let's do Apollo again" school of space flight. There's nothing wrong with that, except that NASA has pretty definitively proven over a period of decades that it's too bureaucratic, too sclerotic, and too much organized as a patronage/jobs organization to do anything big in manned space flight. Even were that not the case, it's a shame that Whittington continually elides the fact that the commercial space contracts — both cargo and crew — only pay out when specific milestones are achieved, and they pay fixed amounts for those milestones. In other words, this isn't Solyndra, where money is just thrown down the drain with no expectation of success; that actually better describes NASA's normal manned space flight program than it does the commercial space companies.
I think Chaikin's right, and that the entrepreneurial spirit that characterized NASA in the 1960s now resides in the private space companies. And as a bitter critic of the Obama administration on pretty much every other point, I nonetheless have to say that this is the one area where they've definitely improved on the Republicans.
I cannot tell if this is brilliantly hilarious parody of idiocy or actual idiocy. Well done, sir.
Oh, please! First, it would be in active use, so it would be boosted as the orbit decays (by the rockets it's refueling, most likely). Second, fuel depots wouldn't be reentry shielded and fuel is highly flammable, by definition. So if one were allowed to deorbit, all that would hit the ground is a bit of metal, and not much of that. Satellites fall all the time with little risk on the ground.
I'm all about getting to Mars. Heck, offer me a one way ticket and I'm off. But here's the deal: NASA is not going to get us there. Today's NASA is not the entrepreneurial NASA of the 1960s or even the 1970s. This is an Iron Law bureaucracy whose job is to keep working, which they do by spreading money across a lot of important Senators' districts. Note the important fact left out of the summary: this finding of getting there cheaper with fuel depots was buried by NASA for months because they didn't want to interfere with the SLS funding, which like Constellation before it is almost certain to never, ever fly. Consider that the last successful NASA development program for rockets was run in the 1970s, with the Shuttle. (And that was only successful if "success" means "getting people into space" as opposed to meeting cost or capability targets.) The only new rockets since then have been commercial, and NASA is in a love/hate relationship with those.
As a resident of the DC area, we'd be happy to.
To be blunt, because Iraqi factions include some who are aligned with us, and others who are aligned against us (and generally with Iran). You need immunity to prevent those factions not aligned with us from using prosecutions of our troops on trumped up charges to manipulate us.
Tell the police that you connected to the machine to try to track him down and found that he had downloaded child porn with it. Then, when they bust him and take the computer, you can file a claim with them. Kind of the nuclear option, but I bet it would work.
Jobs made life better for millions of people. The world was inarguably a better place for his having lived. What higher praise could there be than that?
I know of no one who thinks that the private investments in Solyndra were a problem. It's the government investment in a private firm that not-so-coincidentally was heavily backed and part owned by a large donor to the President that causes heartburn for everyone. If it weren't taxpayer money - more accurately, money borrowed from China and the interest of which will still be being paid by our great-grandchildren - there wouldn't be a scandal.
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as "bad luck."
when the customer hires consultants so that they (the customer) can have someone to blame when things go wrong, and then spends all of their time ensuring that blame is affixed for anything and everything (including "doing exactly as directed after warning of this specific consequence") rather than spending any time trying to make things better?
Odd. It doesn't look blueish.
It is more sophisticated. The question is, is it more accurate? I've yet to see a climate model that, given the conditions at some point in the past, can predict the present. Why should I have confidence in their predictions of the future? And you know what, if this were just an academic debate about what the climate were doing, I'd note that and move on, the way that I now note that the inferences on the diamond planet are reasonable but not necessarily correct (there are alternative reasonable explanations) and move on. If people were saying that the earth is warming, man is probably having some effect, and stopping there, I think most if not all critics of CAGW as its normally presented would happily move on.
The problem with climate science is not a problem with the science per se. It's that the science was used to create a set of political demands. Let's use the example of evolution. Let's say that biologists were to come out and say that evolution showed that blacks were clearly inferior and that discrimination against blacks was therefore scientifically justified. Far fetched? Hardly: such arguments have been made against blacks and Jews, and probably far more than that. But if those arguments were made, then wouldn't questioning the scientific basis of the arguments be just as valid as questioning the political ends of the argument? After all, if the scientific basis is invalid, then the political ends are meaningless in the context of the argument presented about the science. So why wouldn't that also be true about climatology? Climatologists have in fact tried to make policy arguments (Hanson comes to mind), never mind the hangers-on of the political world like Gore who have merely used the climatologists' results to make political claims. So if they are using climate science as a basis of a policy argument, then why should their opponents not argue the science as well as the policy?
Note that all of this is true whether or not the CAGW theory is true. And it if is true, it can stand on its own merits, just as evolution has done.
No games and no interactive ads because this is a streaming server.
No, because the Flash content is on the server and it's streamed to the device. The vulnerabilities are thus not introduced to the device.
Doesn't work,and here's why. Can the laborers, who are now also shareholders, alienate their ownership? That is to say, can I sell my share in State Widgets, Inc. to someone else, in exchange for anything else - be it goods, money, shares in other enterprises, etc?
If so, then some people will sell their shares, and others will hold on to them. Those that hold on to shares in profitable enterprises and alienate shares in unprofitable enterprises will prosper. Those that sell shares in profitable enterprises, whether or not they hold shares in unprofitable enterprises, will not prosper. And that means that differential abilities will quickly result in differential results. And those people that prospered from handling their investments well will in turn be able to use those profits to acquire more ownership by buying other people's shares, or to raise their immediate standard of living by buying other goods. Thus you very quickly get back into the same situation that prompted you to implement worker ownership in the first place.
So, then, the solution is to not let them sell their shares, right? But then, in what sense do they own an asset? If the enterprise is profitable, it can distribute the profits over and above whatever it provides as pay. But if the business needs to invest in new equipment, or new labor, from where does that money come? If it's to come out of the profits, one assumes that would be decided by shareholder vote. But what if there aren't enough - or any - profits? Then if the business cannot improve because it cannot invest because it cannot get the money to invest from selling shares, eventually the business will collapse. Then what?
Communism and Marxism have been tried in many, many, many guises, and it has yet to lead to anything other than immiseration and tyranny. Usually in the short term, not the long term.
Capitalism is a perfect system with many assumptions about a controlled environment and a perfect world. Add in greedy people, and it unravels pretty quickly.
I think it has its merits, but the problem is that nothing has feasibly been melded with it to make it more compatible with the real world.
^Capitalism^Communism