Roland Piquepaille writes "Some days bring big surprises. Like many people, I always believed that it was impossible to write in space with ordinary pens because ink would not flow. So imagine my astonishment when I read Pedro Duque's diary from space this morning...
In the 60's we longed to use space technology to explore other worlds, and did a great job of it. Then we decided to make spaceflight routine and do great science on orbital space stations. They would be used as stepping stones to the Moon and Mars we were told. What we got is an expensive, perpetual, and feckless welfare program for the exploration of triviality. In the 30 years since Apollo we have answered such pressing questions as: How long does it take to get sick in space while spinning on a gyroscope? Can spiders spin webs in zero g? Can ballpoint pens work in space? With the exception of planetary missions, the current space program is a complete waste.
Branding gives you things to hang onto. Some people like their jeans more because missy elliot wears then (or says she wears them). I'd like Mozilla more if I didnt look like a dinosaur geek everytime it starts up.
Then I imagine you are offended by Tux the Penguin and the ubiquitous GNU too. Do you really think Mozilla needs a serious icon like... a flying window? I for one am amused at the discomfort of the suits when they must use free software for cost reasons but let some of the counter culture through the door as a result.
The Russians managed three full orbits on their first try. We didn't do that until Glenn, our third flight.
Gagarin flew 1 orbit. I think Leonov flew 17 on the second.
The Chinese did have 4 unmanned test flights.
The Chinese, as always, have a plan for future exploration. What plan does NASA have?
The Chinese plan (rhetoric) sounds a lot like NASA's plans after Apollo. I don't doubt that there will be 2 lonely Chinese camped out in a minimal space station, no doubt of Russian design, within 10 years. To what end, besides flag waiving?
And let's hope the Chinese do better than NASA, the latter having killed their astronauts with stupid bureaucratic decisions.
Fly any test vehicle as many times as the shuttle has and you will have problems. The failure of the shuttle is not the bureaucracy so much as the lack of builtin robust crew escape and abort capability. Do you think there are no bureaucrats in China?
If the US does not get off its duff soon, we may see a Chinese camera on the moon looking at two taikonauts wondering whether to take down the American flag still found at the Sea of Tranquility before we know it.
"I, for one, don't want to go to sleep by the light of a communist moon." -- Lyndon Johnson, 1958
This is more than about a space launch. This is about China telling the world that it has arrived and that things are going to be different in the International arena.
It is difficult to guess how. China is no more a strategic threat then it has been. They have no global military reach and unlikely to obtain one in the near future. US carrier groups steaming through the Taiwan Straits are symbolic of that. Except for Tibet China and the derelict DPRK China exerts very little political influence and has nothing to offer the world idealogically.
I wouldn't read to much into the space launch either. The Chinese space program consists of a repainted Soyuz sitting on top of a Long March rocket. It would have been far more impressive if Chinese industry had developed the spacecraft themselves.
They have their own rapidly growing technology sector, including china developed chips [zdnet.co.uk] and Red Flag linux [redflag-linux.com] and they are building their own space agency [yahoo.com]. Investmenting in technology is crucial to challenging the US lead economically, politically and militarily.
All true. But politically China is run by a bunch of gangsters trying there best to keep a lid on revolution and placate a freedom starved population. Can China's leadership ever be comfortable projecting power on the world stage when they have so many skeletons in the closet at home.
They have little or no foreign debt [uscc.gov] and growing economic power [cato.org]...
They have a non-market currency whose low value gives them a temporary trade advantage, but is not sustainable.
This rather than being the New American Century [newamericancentury.org] is likely to be Chinese!
I wouldn't say that this is a new American Century, just another American Century.
But the Free Software Foundation doesn't want royalties--it wants you to burn down your house, or at the very least share it with cloners.
People who violate the GPL are not the owners of their derivative works in the way Forbes thinks is natural. To use the housing analogy, such violators are more like squatters. Complaining about GPL enforcement is like signing a contract agreeing to communal living then complaining when someone new moves in.
All those years ago the dicey first flights of Alan Shepherd, John Glenn, Apollo 8, and STS-1 were broadcast live. In the US our technical successes and failures are there for all to see. What's your excuse China?
NASA has successfully tested a small-scale aircraft that flies solely by means of propulsive power delivered by an invisible, ground-based laser.
Wonderful. If NASA scales up the airplane to do something useful the laser will have to be so powerful that it will incinerate the vehicle.
How far away can in-flight IP/LASER broadband be?
In a sense it has been here for some time. The US military flies satellites that use laser crosslinks to relay communications. Milstar is one. Any others?
It may not be the case presently, but Stallman has to be considered one of the most productive programmers of all time. You can read about his Lisp exploits in "Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution" by Steven Levy. He single handedly developed GNU Emacs and GCC through the early 1990's. He was a major contributor to make, gdb,
gas, gld, and numerous other programs that are essential to GNU/Linux today. Most of the packaging and naming conventions used in free software are due to him.
I would have listed Eric Raymond in the top 50, though.
Talk about a dreamer not a doer! Raymond would like to think he is a great hacker, but he is middling at best. Emacs VC and fetchmail are welcome contributions but nothing extraordinary. Raymond is really more of a pundit with a glib writting style that has some popularity. As helpful as he is in many respects to the free software cause, his imposition of gun politics in his writtings makes him less persuasive.
Here is a household name for the free software crowd. To leave Stallman out of this list is unthinkable. Stallman is to Torvalds what Marx was to Lenin.
I thought that astronomers were upset about asteroid panic that these meaningless announcements stir up. Glad to see/. is still doing its part in spreading the hysteria.
Back in 1995 I worked for Evolving Systems in Denver. I was a pretty good place but had its share of sleezy management. We got all the free cookies, chips, and soda we could consume in return for withering 60-70 work weeks. One Friday afternoon one of the officers sent out an email that all of the company servers would be down that weekend for maintainance. This was a bit suspicious given that I had never known the company to not operate on the weekend. Monday morning we came in to find the doors locked. The entire staff was herded into a large meeting room and told that there would be a large layoff. We were to go to our office (everybody had one!) close the door and wait. Out in the halls you could hear knocks on the doors and lots of whispering and shuffling. I just sat there waiting for the angel of death to knock at my door. It never happened, but over 100 of 400 employees got axed. The severed employees were treated respectfully, but there were guards all over the place just in case someone went rogue.
Afterward the CEO sat the remaining group down and told us how we were specially choosen and should stick around. I found a new job in a month.
What exactly is innovative about this mission? It is the same mission as flown by Clementine years ago. Solar electric propulsion is commonplace. Here are some spacecraft that have flow them to date:
Boeing HS-602 HP satellites
Boeing HS-702 satellites
NASA's Deep Space 1
NASA's Stardust Mission (thrusted continuously for over a year!)
I have always wondered whether patent lawyers were malicious or just stupid. This one seems to be both.
Ok, so I did (just a few months and I am a patent attorney in The Netherlands). But what's wrong with writing a software patent? IMO It's not the one who writes the patent who's to blame, but the one who enforces the patent in a way that bars all competition and development.
One assumes an inventor creates a patent so he can receive the benefits from it.
A lot of software development costs large amounts of money and not every company is in the position to make far too much money on a crappy OS to support development of other software. They have to earn that money with the sales of their ideas. And how to protect those ideas? Correctly, by patents.
Strange, I've always thought that you earn money buy selling better products and services than your competitor. Not by impeding him. Nobody forces a company to release their source code to their competitors. A head start on the competition is not enough it seems. Software patents effectively bar competitors from producing competing products at all. Unfortunately, such dirty tactics have become the hallmark of global capitalism.
And all of you out there protesting against software patents should be very happy that software protection is not included in copyright protection, because that would make protection probably five time longer (at least).
Citizens should never be content with unjust law. And please don't use the word "protection". Copyright is sufficient.
In other words: it's probably the only way for small enterprises to protect themselves against the large companies. Imagine when graphical web browsing would have been patented by the NCSA or Netscape would have patented a lot of improvements. Who would know Microsoft Internet Explorer?
Small companies can best be protected by insisting that governments enforce anti-trust laws to keep the Microsofts of the world in check. Sadly, we have abandoned that idea in the US. Because web browsing was not patented we have plenty of great free alternatives such as Konqueror and Mozilla. Web browsing was not invented at NCSA. It was invented at CERN Switzerland.
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Mother Nature has blessed us with a more efficient power source. It is called Uranium. It doesn't cause nasty climate change either.
In the 60's we longed to use space technology to explore other worlds, and did a great job of it. Then we decided to make spaceflight routine and do great science on orbital space stations. They would be used as stepping stones to the Moon and Mars we were told. What we got is an expensive, perpetual, and feckless welfare program for the exploration of triviality. In the 30 years since Apollo we have answered such pressing questions as: How long does it take to get sick in space while spinning on a gyroscope? Can spiders spin webs in zero g? Can ballpoint pens work in space? With the exception of planetary missions, the current space program is a complete waste.
The Shuttle and Station are guaranteed to have a perfect safty record if no one uses them. I't time to shrug of the Columbia funk and light candle!
Branding gives you things to hang onto. Some people like their jeans more because missy elliot wears then (or says she wears them). I'd like Mozilla more if I didnt look like a dinosaur geek everytime it starts up.
Then I imagine you are offended by Tux the Penguin and the ubiquitous GNU too. Do you really think Mozilla needs a serious icon like ... a flying window? I for one am amused at the discomfort of the suits when they must use free software for cost reasons but let some of the counter culture through the door as a result.
Which itself is the same as C RPC?
Will Europe still fly the Concorde as an R&D vehicle? It seems a shame to just scrap them.
It already is on any LiGNUx file system!
% find . -name "*me*sophie*.img" -printWhat could be better?
Gagarin flew 1 orbit. I think Leonov flew 17 on the second.
The Chinese did have 4 unmanned test flights.
The Chinese, as always, have a plan for future exploration. What plan does NASA have?
The Chinese plan (rhetoric) sounds a lot like NASA's plans after Apollo. I don't doubt that there will be 2 lonely Chinese camped out in a minimal space station, no doubt of Russian design, within 10 years. To what end, besides flag waiving?
And let's hope the Chinese do better than NASA, the latter having killed their astronauts with stupid bureaucratic decisions.
Fly any test vehicle as many times as the shuttle has and you will have problems. The failure of the shuttle is not the bureaucracy so much as the lack of builtin robust crew escape and abort capability. Do you think there are no bureaucrats in China?
Congratulations China! You almost duplicated Gordon Cooper's Mercury flight of 1963!
"I, for one, don't want to go to sleep by the light of a communist moon." -- Lyndon Johnson, 1958
This is more than about a space launch. This is about China telling the world that it has arrived and that things are going to be different in the International arena.
It is difficult to guess how. China is no more a strategic threat then it has been. They have no global military reach and unlikely to obtain one in the near future. US carrier groups steaming through the Taiwan Straits are symbolic of that. Except for Tibet China and the derelict DPRK China exerts very little political influence and has nothing to offer the world idealogically.
I wouldn't read to much into the space launch either. The Chinese space program consists of a repainted Soyuz sitting on top of a Long March rocket. It would have been far more impressive if Chinese industry had developed the spacecraft themselves.
They have their own rapidly growing technology sector, including china developed chips [zdnet.co.uk] and Red Flag linux [redflag-linux.com] and they are building their own space agency [yahoo.com]. Investmenting in technology is crucial to challenging the US lead economically, politically and militarily.
All true. But politically China is run by a bunch of gangsters trying there best to keep a lid on revolution and placate a freedom starved population. Can China's leadership ever be comfortable projecting power on the world stage when they have so many skeletons in the closet at home.
They have little or no foreign debt [uscc.gov] and growing economic power [cato.org]...
They have a non-market currency whose low value gives them a temporary trade advantage, but is not sustainable.
This rather than being the New American Century [newamericancentury.org] is likely to be Chinese!I wouldn't say that this is a new American Century, just another American Century.
People who violate the GPL are not the owners of their derivative works in the way Forbes thinks is natural. To use the housing analogy, such violators are more like squatters. Complaining about GPL enforcement is like signing a contract agreeing to communal living then complaining when someone new moves in.
CNN.com: China scraps live TV space plan
All those years ago the dicey first flights of Alan Shepherd, John Glenn, Apollo 8, and STS-1 were broadcast live. In the US our technical successes and failures are there for all to see. What's your excuse China?
Wonderful. If NASA scales up the airplane to do something useful the laser will have to be so powerful that it will incinerate the vehicle.
How far away can in-flight IP/LASER broadband be?
In a sense it has been here for some time. The US military flies satellites that use laser crosslinks to relay communications. Milstar is one. Any others?
By installing Emacs 21.3 you get:
It may not be the case presently, but Stallman has to be considered one of the most productive programmers of all time. You can read about his Lisp exploits in "Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution" by Steven Levy. He single handedly developed GNU Emacs and GCC through the early 1990's. He was a major contributor to make, gdb, gas, gld, and numerous other programs that are essential to GNU/Linux today. Most of the packaging and naming conventions used in free software are due to him.
I would have listed Eric Raymond in the top 50, though.
Talk about a dreamer not a doer! Raymond would like to think he is a great hacker, but he is middling at best. Emacs VC and fetchmail are welcome contributions but nothing extraordinary. Raymond is really more of a pundit with a glib writting style that has some popularity. As helpful as he is in many respects to the free software cause, his imposition of gun politics in his writtings makes him less persuasive.
Hu Jintao
Here is a household name for the free software crowd. To leave Stallman out of this list is unthinkable. Stallman is to Torvalds what Marx was to Lenin.
I don't see how this will prevent head injuries for laptop users.
I thought that astronomers were upset about asteroid panic that these meaningless announcements stir up. Glad to see /. is still doing its part in spreading the hysteria.
Back in 1995 I worked for Evolving Systems in Denver. I was a pretty good place but had its share of sleezy management. We got all the free cookies, chips, and soda we could consume in return for withering 60-70 work weeks. One Friday afternoon one of the officers sent out an email that all of the company servers would be down that weekend for maintainance. This was a bit suspicious given that I had never known the company to not operate on the weekend. Monday morning we came in to find the doors locked. The entire staff was herded into a large meeting room and told that there would be a large layoff. We were to go to our office (everybody had one!) close the door and wait. Out in the halls you could hear knocks on the doors and lots of whispering and shuffling. I just sat there waiting for the angel of death to knock at my door. It never happened, but over 100 of 400 employees got axed. The severed employees were treated respectfully, but there were guards all over the place just in case someone went rogue. Afterward the CEO sat the remaining group down and told us how we were specially choosen and should stick around. I found a new job in a month.
You mean the way photocopiers have for 15 years?
Convicted by whom is the relevant question.
You object to Sharon, but support Arafat?
What exactly is innovative about this mission? It is the same mission as flown by Clementine years ago. Solar electric propulsion is commonplace. Here are some spacecraft that have flow them to date:
I don't think this story is slashdot worthy.
Your decaying body will release copious amounts of CO2 and CH4 into the atmosphere.
I have always wondered whether patent lawyers were malicious or just stupid. This one seems to be both.
Ok, so I did (just a few months and I am a patent attorney in The Netherlands). But what's wrong with writing a software patent? IMO It's not the one who writes the patent who's to blame, but the one who enforces the patent in a way that bars all competition and development.One assumes an inventor creates a patent so he can receive the benefits from it.
A lot of software development costs large amounts of money and not every company is in the position to make far too much money on a crappy OS to support development of other software. They have to earn that money with the sales of their ideas. And how to protect those ideas? Correctly, by patents.Strange, I've always thought that you earn money buy selling better products and services than your competitor. Not by impeding him. Nobody forces a company to release their source code to their competitors. A head start on the competition is not enough it seems. Software patents effectively bar competitors from producing competing products at all. Unfortunately, such dirty tactics have become the hallmark of global capitalism.
And all of you out there protesting against software patents should be very happy that software protection is not included in copyright protection, because that would make protection probably five time longer (at least).Citizens should never be content with unjust law. And please don't use the word "protection". Copyright is sufficient.
In other words: it's probably the only way for small enterprises to protect themselves against the large companies. Imagine when graphical web browsing would have been patented by the NCSA or Netscape would have patented a lot of improvements. Who would know Microsoft Internet Explorer?Small companies can best be protected by insisting that governments enforce anti-trust laws to keep the Microsofts of the world in check. Sadly, we have abandoned that idea in the US. Because web browsing was not patented we have plenty of great free alternatives such as Konqueror and Mozilla. Web browsing was not invented at NCSA. It was invented at CERN Switzerland.