And I'm going to punch the next person that tells me "Broadband is a right". The hell it is. It is a good, a service that must be paid for, same as healthcare.
There are some regulatory hassles, but pretty much anyone can buy land and build a dr office on it.
On the other hand, I can't think of any broadband provider who does not have easements to steal the use of property, a government granted monopoly to sell in a market, or use the public's wireless spectrum for private profit, or simply sponge off/resell someone else whom does so.
That's the difference. Broadband is not a free market by any means so its pointless to pretend that it is. Take Take Take from the public, the least the public should ask for is universal service and a nicely regulated price. If the drooling masses want to dramatically simplify that to "broadband is a right" that's more or less close enough.
You can not have a right to something that is non-free.
Like free speech, or equal protection under the law, or not quartering soldiers in private homes without the owner's consent? That's expensive compared the alternatives, but our ancestors decided the costs were worth it. You can always move to Somalia if you think that would be a paradise on earth.
Even worse, imagine if instead of needing a fancy web browser or text messaging cellphone, it had an audio interface you could just talk to, maybe over a phone. And instead of texting 40404 you called a shorter number, like maybe 911, in this post 9/11 world that sounds like a good number for crisis reports. Then instead of distributing the map as a pic on the internet, you had someone read the locations and activities over a radio, that anyone could listen to with a "scanner".
As far as criminal applications go, I'm totally unimpressed. They've got better tools right now, that they don't use.
It's just an awful way of bumping up the price of the game without doing so on the box. If they had offered the game cheaper upon the initial purchase then fair enough that would be a bit more acceptable but that's not the case.
Essentially its a false advertising argument.
You can play the game on this disk for $X. You pay $X. Ha Ha Sucker to play the game on this disk you have to pay an extra $5. Ha Ha Ha.
That's blatant false advertising. Like buying a steak at the store for a fair and agreed upon price, taking it home, opening the package, and discovering you actually have to pay even more to eat the entire steak.
In the worst case scenario with 1 in 5 million, you might get 1,000 or so U.S. hits to the same. that would clearly be a problem.
You forgot, times the number of unsolved horrific cases per year. Lets say the false positives are 1e3 per test. Lets say the number of horrific unsolved cases is 1e3 per year. That's 1e6 arrest warrants per year for people whom basically did nothing. Or put another way, "About 1 in 3 people will be falsely arrested on a DNA warrant in their lifetime"
Another big problem is circumstantial evidence. I work in a rough neighborhood and they find about one body per year on long term average. I kid you not, I'm not making this part of the story up for slashdot, this really happens. I have no excuse, but I spit in the alleyway as I was walking back from lunch, spicy food does that to me sometimes. Hell Taco Bell makes me outright puke sometimes, much less have to spit. My DNA is now in contact with some raped and killed chick's body. The hard way to do detective work is to check out the chicks history, friends, relatives, pimp, dealer, loan shark, etc. The easiest thing to do, is pick up a dude with a DNA match. I simply do not have an alibi for last night, other than why the hell would I hang out in this neighborhood at night, and I claim I did not do it. I am not amused with the likely almost certain outcome.
Tech savvy blackmailer would probably make more money threatening to plant evidence.
The deal now, is DNA is gathered AFTER the evidence, so in theory its hard to plant evidence. With the new plan, that will change. Essentially, DNA evidence will become utterly useless in court.
Currently having a DNA match means you're 100% guilty may as well lock em up and throw away the key why even bother with a trial except to determine the length of prison stay. Now every crooked cop in the country will have your DNA. Even worse, they'll have everyone elses DNA. What are you willing to pay to make sure it doesn't show up in the wrong place? What are you willing to pay to make sure your kids DNA doesn't show up in the wrong place? Now, rich people are useful because you can get money from them. Poor people are useful because you can blackmail them into criminal activity. What will they do to the eternally shrinking middle class, other than make them pay for the whole thing?
IF it is indeed technically possible that one can "hash" DNA into a one-way encoding, then the concerns for abuse drop dramatically while the benefits (identification) still stay roughly the same.
All you have to do is trust the politicians. You know, the professional lying class.
And freely shared digital copies of everything. Ooops, did I just say that?
Seriously though, isn't the ratio of legit vs illegit content slightly better on ebooks than ipods due to project gutenberg and friends? But the ratio is not going to be dramatically different.
So you'll have poor kids with million book library collections, and clueless execs claiming that's a "loss" of a million times the cost of a book, if not more. Yet regardless of that, apple, or someone, will have a billion dollar ebook store. And the mall bookstores will go the way of the mall record stores.
After an hour? No. After 12 hours a day, 5 days a week? Yes. If I've been sitting in front of a computer screen for several hours and close my eyes I can feel the muscles unwinding. It's not something I'm conciously away of until I look away from the screen, but the muscles of and around my eyes are constantly tense when reading off a monitor.
Visit an eye doctor / optometrist please. Seriously. People with healthy eyes don't have that problem. The problem is inside your eyeballs, not the monitors display technology.
You can wait, like my grandma did, of course she's blind in one eye now. Or you can get it taken care of before you're permanently disabled. Annoying as starting glaucoma eyedrops might be, it beats the hell out of blindness.
I'm serious, stop posting to slashdot about how wonderful e-ink would be, and fix yer eyes. Once you're blind, e-ink vs LCD vs CRT is all pretty irrelevant.
I was skeptical about E-Ink too before having tried it out. It looks almost exactly like the real paper.
Yeah, if everything you print on real paper is dull dark gray on dull light gray.
Been there, tried it, couldn't stand the ultra low contrast, the flickering screen, the 1 Hz (or so) refresh rate. Also the lack of a backlight really sucked.
Kind of like going back to a 1992 laptop after you've been using a 2010 laptop for awhile.
E Ink certainly has less to fear from Apple since E Ink could sell their screens to Apple
Perpenso Calc for iPhone and iPod touch, scientific and bill/tip calculator, fractions, complex numbers, RPN
Oh the irony, oh the irony. E-ink display would kill your app. Nice app, gotta love a RPN calculator, but using your "20 digit precision" I don't want to go click / one second while the screen flashes a couple times / click / delay / click / delay on an eink display.
Heck, I could probably add and subtract in my head faster than your calculator could update a slow eink display.
DVDs for example might not have been, or have gotten, as big as they are now if it wasn't for the people that went out and spent thousands of dollars on the original players and hundreds on the original DVDs.
2) Any program -- good or bad -- that wants to be active in RAM has no choice but to take up some space in RAM. At least one byte, right?
Wrong. Do the steganography thing to a live programs data. Find a.jpeg in outlook and insert the encrypted executable code into the pix. There are other interesting alternatives involving modification of the stack and stack pointers. Even things like the map for virtual memory can be messed with to store a wee little bit of data.
Sure, it isn't as fiddly, but when you have 40 of them to do all at once... you tend to get good at it.
And it can become a very visual explanation of the "off by one" software bug.
You can also do some pretty good slapstick comedy by installing one heavy rail mounted server in a new empty rack, pull the heavy server out on the rails to test them, then dodge the tipping over rack. You did anchor the rack to the floor and overhead first, right?
PHB = Impressed by how fast you slap RAM sticks into a glorified desktop. Nice job not running memtest86+, its cheaper for the users to open support tickets after the guarantee expires, right?
Real Techs = Impressed by how cleanly the cables are routed/tied down and how well the equipment and external cables are labeled/documented.
Unless you have connections over there, you'll never really know.
It would be almost infinitely funny if it was actually 4channers saying they were Iranians saying it was the Iranians.
Or even better, slashdotters saying they're 4channers saying they're Iranians saying it was the Iranians. Not that I'm admitting anything. I think we can fit "The Onion" in there somewhere too.
Those Orthodox Jews are citizens that get to vote and tend to be a very cohesive voting bloc. Pissing them off would be a poor choice for an elected official.
Polarized voting blocs are politically irrelevant, in any system.
For example, 99%-ish of black folks vote democratic, every time. Therefore the democrats have no motivation to do anything for them, for gods sake its not like they're going to vote republican! Similarly, the republicans have no motivation to do anything for them, for gods sake its not like they're going to vote republican! Their orthodoxy makes them pretty much politically irrelevant.
Once you understand this, you understand a lot about the American two party system. That's one reason why the loudest most extreme groups never really seem to get anywhere. And why people/legal citizens like corporations that donate to both parties mostly equally, pretty much get to have their way with us.
So in this application, if the Orthodox are super-polarized, which my very limited understand of Israeli politics would indicate, their votes will not change under any circumstances. On the other hand, the leader of the Orthodox party might be replaced.
If no one other than the Orthodox party (which might be vaguely irrelevant by super-polarization) really cares about the issue, except for people with friends and relatives who had their lives saved by a transplant...
Like I wrote "to one sig fig". I'm pleased as punch that my estimate was correct.
I wonder if the 54 meters counts the payload, maybe the itty bity lightning rod at the top, etc. Or is there a standard payload shroud that all payloads must live within for aerodynamic consistency reasons, in which case I guess it would be fair to count the shroud as part of the launcher.
Not only making it too hard, but making changes too frequent.
You always know you're dealing with someone incompetent when that's a requirement.
You need to change your pass code on door locks because the used digits begin to look physically different than the unused digits.
You need to change ENCRYPTION KEYS occasionally to avoid known plaintext attacks, some MITM issues, and some other esoteric stuff.
Encryption keys and door passcodes are kind of security related, and login passwords are security related, therefore they must be the same (if you're stupid) so you must change your login password on a regular basis.
Some people confuse two of the A's in AAA. Login passwords are for "authorization". "Accounting" is where you catch multiple people using the same login, not "authorization".
Finally there's the idiots that think good security must be inconvenient, therefore ANYTHING inconvenient must inherently be secure.
The only reason you have to change your password on a regular basis is basically, stupid people quoting other stupid people saying its important because they heard other stupid people saying it, aka an urban legend. Nothing more.
Oddly enough the same morons whom claim changing passwords increases security, also believe biometrics are more secure because you can't change your fingerprint... or can you?
1) Will the bureaucracy actually be reduced? I suspect not.
You could staff 30 SpaceX companies with the number of people downsized by the shuttle program ending. Or in other words, its not a good time to be an aerospace engineer. (Has it ever been a good time to be an aerospace engineer?)
Downsize 27000 jobs as regards the shuttle shut down. Note that is a delta, for the industry not just NASA. I know its an industry wide figure because NASA only employs 17900 people per wikipedia.
I know americans have problems with units for length but really "15 story tall"? Exactly how tall is a story?
How tall are you? A story is a bit taller than that, to account for ceiling mounted HVAC ducts and lighting. Intuitively its going to be about 10 feet per story, to one sig fig. Or about 3 meters. So, figure around 150 feet, or around 45 meters.
I agree that it is about as annoying as specifying all computer related measurements in "libraries of congress".
It would have been much more interesting if the journalist compared it to the size of a common launcher, like a space shuttle stack. Its 25% taller than a ready to launch shuttle stack or whatever it turns out to be.
I check finance.google.com and its all BS paper shuffling worthless shells of a company. All either struggling, dying, living off the government teat, or all of the above. Its like watching a bad season of survivor and the only ones left on the island are the biggest crooks and cheats so you wish none of them would win.
On the other hand, I'd like to invest in a company doing something interesting, like spacex. Even if they fail, I'd much rather throw away $$$ on a cool rocket than a bunch of thieving financial industry crooks.
I found one article from Dec 2007 stating they might IPO in the next two years, aka Dec 2009
So, wheres the IPO? I was reading slashdot in the Redhat IPO era and I suspect the combined slashdot readership would probably enjoy buying some SPACEX even more so than RHAT.
If 50K slashdotters alone, each bought $1K of SPACEX at an IPO, that would be enough for one Falcon 9 launch right there.
Finally, last but not least, circumstantially, crazy/insane people seem to encounter more unreproducible bugs than typical people. Don't know if they're more ornery so the tend to report more, or more creative so they tend to find more, but I do know they're a pain to deal with.
I think I'm one of these.
No, by crazy, I meant the people that claim I'm hacking them, and/or they want to kill me, or they're at home and drunk or high, or they are theoretically native born English speakers but are actually quite illiterate, or they apparently speak exclusively in 4-letter words, or they think I am part of the paranoid (or real?) conspiracy out to get them, or occasionally all of the above simultaneously. Perhaps not "crazy" so much as profoundly anti-social (which might be a symptom of being crazy).
In the army we had a term "magnet ass" for a guy whom mystically attracted incoming gunfire. Despite the fact that copper plated lead is not ferromagnetic. Well, it was the Army after all, not exactly a physicist convention. Anyway, you sir don't seem crazy, but merely seem to attract bugs. Perhaps a can of "Off"?
Right, like I said, the whole point was "Much like nuclear weapons, the plan was never to actually use it, but to manipulate the other side's behavior..."
So, now the other guys are wasting expensive valuable mass and volume on self destruct mechanisms instead of larger heavier camera lenses or maneuvering fuel or electrical capacity or whatever.
Even better, a self destruct system that doesn't exist, can't accidentally fail, but one that exists, can fail. So fewer satellites are a "success".
Best of all, your spies can steal the self destruct codes or whatever and have all kinds of fun. And how exactly do you know they haven't stolen them? Remember they can spend $1 less than an expensive ASAT program and run a "paper profit", so they probably will.
Slashdot Mirror
And I'm going to punch the next person that tells me "Broadband is a right". The hell it is. It is a good, a service that must be paid for, same as healthcare.
There are some regulatory hassles, but pretty much anyone can buy land and build a dr office on it.
On the other hand, I can't think of any broadband provider who does not have easements to steal the use of property, a government granted monopoly to sell in a market, or use the public's wireless spectrum for private profit, or simply sponge off/resell someone else whom does so.
That's the difference. Broadband is not a free market by any means so its pointless to pretend that it is. Take Take Take from the public, the least the public should ask for is universal service and a nicely regulated price. If the drooling masses want to dramatically simplify that to "broadband is a right" that's more or less close enough.
You can not have a right to something that is non-free.
Like free speech, or equal protection under the law, or not quartering soldiers in private homes without the owner's consent? That's expensive compared the alternatives, but our ancestors decided the costs were worth it. You can always move to Somalia if you think that would be a paradise on earth.
Even worse, imagine if instead of needing a fancy web browser or text messaging cellphone, it had an audio interface you could just talk to, maybe over a phone. And instead of texting 40404 you called a shorter number, like maybe 911, in this post 9/11 world that sounds like a good number for crisis reports. Then instead of distributing the map as a pic on the internet, you had someone read the locations and activities over a radio, that anyone could listen to with a "scanner".
As far as criminal applications go, I'm totally unimpressed. They've got better tools right now, that they don't use.
It's just an awful way of bumping up the price of the game without doing so on the box. If they had offered the game cheaper upon the initial purchase then fair enough that would be a bit more acceptable but that's not the case.
Essentially its a false advertising argument.
You can play the game on this disk for $X. You pay $X. Ha Ha Sucker to play the game on this disk you have to pay an extra $5. Ha Ha Ha.
That's blatant false advertising. Like buying a steak at the store for a fair and agreed upon price, taking it home, opening the package, and discovering you actually have to pay even more to eat the entire steak.
In the worst case scenario with 1 in 5 million, you might get 1,000 or so U.S. hits to the same. that would clearly be a problem.
You forgot, times the number of unsolved horrific cases per year. Lets say the false positives are 1e3 per test. Lets say the number of horrific unsolved cases is 1e3 per year. That's 1e6 arrest warrants per year for people whom basically did nothing. Or put another way, "About 1 in 3 people will be falsely arrested on a DNA warrant in their lifetime"
Another big problem is circumstantial evidence. I work in a rough neighborhood and they find about one body per year on long term average. I kid you not, I'm not making this part of the story up for slashdot, this really happens. I have no excuse, but I spit in the alleyway as I was walking back from lunch, spicy food does that to me sometimes. Hell Taco Bell makes me outright puke sometimes, much less have to spit. My DNA is now in contact with some raped and killed chick's body. The hard way to do detective work is to check out the chicks history, friends, relatives, pimp, dealer, loan shark, etc. The easiest thing to do, is pick up a dude with a DNA match. I simply do not have an alibi for last night, other than why the hell would I hang out in this neighborhood at night, and I claim I did not do it. I am not amused with the likely almost certain outcome.
Tech savvy blackmailer would probably make more money threatening to plant evidence.
The deal now, is DNA is gathered AFTER the evidence, so in theory its hard to plant evidence. With the new plan, that will change. Essentially, DNA evidence will become utterly useless in court.
Currently having a DNA match means you're 100% guilty may as well lock em up and throw away the key why even bother with a trial except to determine the length of prison stay. Now every crooked cop in the country will have your DNA. Even worse, they'll have everyone elses DNA. What are you willing to pay to make sure it doesn't show up in the wrong place? What are you willing to pay to make sure your kids DNA doesn't show up in the wrong place? Now, rich people are useful because you can get money from them. Poor people are useful because you can blackmail them into criminal activity. What will they do to the eternally shrinking middle class, other than make them pay for the whole thing?
IF it is indeed technically possible that one can "hash" DNA into a one-way encoding, then the concerns for abuse drop dramatically while the benefits (identification) still stay roughly the same.
All you have to do is trust the politicians. You know, the professional lying class.
The government would never lie to us. It never has lied to us, has it?
And freely shared digital copies of everything. Ooops, did I just say that?
Seriously though, isn't the ratio of legit vs illegit content slightly better on ebooks than ipods due to project gutenberg and friends? But the ratio is not going to be dramatically different.
So you'll have poor kids with million book library collections, and clueless execs claiming that's a "loss" of a million times the cost of a book, if not more. Yet regardless of that, apple, or someone, will have a billion dollar ebook store. And the mall bookstores will go the way of the mall record stores.
After an hour? No. After 12 hours a day, 5 days a week? Yes. If I've been sitting in front of a computer screen for several hours and close my eyes I can feel the muscles unwinding. It's not something I'm conciously away of until I look away from the screen, but the muscles of and around my eyes are constantly tense when reading off a monitor.
Visit an eye doctor / optometrist please. Seriously. People with healthy eyes don't have that problem. The problem is inside your eyeballs, not the monitors display technology.
You can wait, like my grandma did, of course she's blind in one eye now. Or you can get it taken care of before you're permanently disabled. Annoying as starting glaucoma eyedrops might be, it beats the hell out of blindness.
I'm serious, stop posting to slashdot about how wonderful e-ink would be, and fix yer eyes. Once you're blind, e-ink vs LCD vs CRT is all pretty irrelevant.
I was skeptical about E-Ink too before having tried it out. It looks almost exactly like the real paper.
Yeah, if everything you print on real paper is dull dark gray on dull light gray.
Been there, tried it, couldn't stand the ultra low contrast, the flickering screen, the 1 Hz (or so) refresh rate. Also the lack of a backlight really sucked.
Kind of like going back to a 1992 laptop after you've been using a 2010 laptop for awhile.
E Ink certainly has less to fear from Apple since E Ink could sell their screens to Apple
Perpenso Calc for iPhone and iPod touch, scientific and bill/tip calculator, fractions, complex numbers, RPN
Oh the irony, oh the irony. E-ink display would kill your app. Nice app, gotta love a RPN calculator, but using your "20 digit precision" I don't want to go click / one second while the screen flashes a couple times / click / delay / click / delay on an eink display.
Heck, I could probably add and subtract in my head faster than your calculator could update a slow eink display.
DVDs for example might not have been, or have gotten, as big as they are now if it wasn't for the people that went out and spent thousands of dollars on the original players and hundreds on the original DVDs.
DVDs were substantially better than VCR tapes.
On the other hand, e-ink vs LCD, a big "eh".
One big mistake from the article is:
2) Any program -- good or bad -- that wants to be active in RAM has no choice but to take up some space in RAM. At least one byte, right?
Wrong. Do the steganography thing to a live programs data. Find a .jpeg in outlook and insert the encrypted executable code into the pix. There are other interesting alternatives involving modification of the stack and stack pointers. Even things like the map for virtual memory can be messed with to store a wee little bit of data.
Sure, it isn't as fiddly, but when you have 40 of them to do all at once... you tend to get good at it.
And it can become a very visual explanation of the "off by one" software bug.
You can also do some pretty good slapstick comedy by installing one heavy rail mounted server in a new empty rack, pull the heavy server out on the rails to test them, then dodge the tipping over rack. You did anchor the rack to the floor and overhead first, right?
PHB = Impressed by how fast you slap RAM sticks into a glorified desktop. Nice job not running memtest86+, its cheaper for the users to open support tickets after the guarantee expires, right?
Real Techs = Impressed by how cleanly the cables are routed/tied down and how well the equipment and external cables are labeled/documented.
Time should only be valid if the PC boots and all hardware responds correctly.
And if they didn't drop the hard drive. Which I hear was a single IDE drive. Classy.
Well, the Iranians say it was the Iranians.
Unless you have connections over there, you'll never really know.
It would be almost infinitely funny if it was actually 4channers saying they were Iranians saying it was the Iranians.
Or even better, slashdotters saying they're 4channers saying they're Iranians saying it was the Iranians. Not that I'm admitting anything. I think we can fit "The Onion" in there somewhere too.
Those Orthodox Jews are citizens that get to vote and tend to be a very cohesive voting bloc. Pissing them off would be a poor choice for an elected official.
Polarized voting blocs are politically irrelevant, in any system.
For example, 99%-ish of black folks vote democratic, every time. Therefore the democrats have no motivation to do anything for them, for gods sake its not like they're going to vote republican! Similarly, the republicans have no motivation to do anything for them, for gods sake its not like they're going to vote republican! Their orthodoxy makes them pretty much politically irrelevant.
Once you understand this, you understand a lot about the American two party system. That's one reason why the loudest most extreme groups never really seem to get anywhere. And why people/legal citizens like corporations that donate to both parties mostly equally, pretty much get to have their way with us.
So in this application, if the Orthodox are super-polarized, which my very limited understand of Israeli politics would indicate, their votes will not change under any circumstances. On the other hand, the leader of the Orthodox party might be replaced.
If no one other than the Orthodox party (which might be vaguely irrelevant by super-polarization) really cares about the issue, except for people with friends and relatives who had their lives saved by a transplant...
Like I wrote "to one sig fig". I'm pleased as punch that my estimate was correct.
I wonder if the 54 meters counts the payload, maybe the itty bity lightning rod at the top, etc. Or is there a standard payload shroud that all payloads must live within for aerodynamic consistency reasons, in which case I guess it would be fair to count the shroud as part of the launcher.
Not only making it too hard, but making changes too frequent.
You always know you're dealing with someone incompetent when that's a requirement.
You need to change your pass code on door locks because the used digits begin to look physically different than the unused digits.
You need to change ENCRYPTION KEYS occasionally to avoid known plaintext attacks, some MITM issues, and some other esoteric stuff.
Encryption keys and door passcodes are kind of security related, and login passwords are security related, therefore they must be the same (if you're stupid) so you must change your login password on a regular basis.
Some people confuse two of the A's in AAA. Login passwords are for "authorization". "Accounting" is where you catch multiple people using the same login, not "authorization".
Finally there's the idiots that think good security must be inconvenient, therefore ANYTHING inconvenient must inherently be secure.
The only reason you have to change your password on a regular basis is basically, stupid people quoting other stupid people saying its important because they heard other stupid people saying it, aka an urban legend. Nothing more.
Oddly enough the same morons whom claim changing passwords increases security, also believe biometrics are more secure because you can't change your fingerprint... or can you?
1) Will the bureaucracy actually be reduced? I suspect not.
You could staff 30 SpaceX companies with the number of people downsized by the shuttle program ending. Or in other words, its not a good time to be an aerospace engineer. (Has it ever been a good time to be an aerospace engineer?)
Downsize 27000 jobs as regards the shuttle shut down. Note that is a delta, for the industry not just NASA.
I know its an industry wide figure because NASA only employs 17900 people per wikipedia.
http://app1.kuhf.org/houston_public_radio-news-display.php?articles_id=1267053819
SpaceX employs 900 people
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX
I know americans have problems with units for length but really "15 story tall"? Exactly how tall is a story?
How tall are you? A story is a bit taller than that, to account for ceiling mounted HVAC ducts and lighting. Intuitively its going to be about 10 feet per story, to one sig fig. Or about 3 meters. So, figure around 150 feet, or around 45 meters.
I agree that it is about as annoying as specifying all computer related measurements in "libraries of congress".
It would have been much more interesting if the journalist compared it to the size of a common launcher, like a space shuttle stack. Its 25% taller than a ready to launch shuttle stack or whatever it turns out to be.
Whens the IPO for spaceX?
I check finance.google.com and its all BS paper shuffling worthless shells of a company. All either struggling, dying, living off the government teat, or all of the above. Its like watching a bad season of survivor and the only ones left on the island are the biggest crooks and cheats so you wish none of them would win.
On the other hand, I'd like to invest in a company doing something interesting, like spacex. Even if they fail, I'd much rather throw away $$$ on a cool rocket than a bunch of thieving financial industry crooks.
I found one article from Dec 2007 stating they might IPO in the next two years, aka Dec 2009
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN0344600420071204
So, wheres the IPO? I was reading slashdot in the Redhat IPO era and I suspect the combined slashdot readership would probably enjoy buying some SPACEX even more so than RHAT.
If 50K slashdotters alone, each bought $1K of SPACEX at an IPO, that would be enough for one Falcon 9 launch right there.
Finally, last but not least, circumstantially, crazy/insane people seem to encounter more unreproducible bugs than typical people. Don't know if they're more ornery so the tend to report more, or more creative so they tend to find more, but I do know they're a pain to deal with.
I think I'm one of these.
No, by crazy, I meant the people that claim I'm hacking them, and/or they want to kill me, or they're at home and drunk or high, or they are theoretically native born English speakers but are actually quite illiterate, or they apparently speak exclusively in 4-letter words, or they think I am part of the paranoid (or real?) conspiracy out to get them, or occasionally all of the above simultaneously. Perhaps not "crazy" so much as profoundly anti-social (which might be a symptom of being crazy).
In the army we had a term "magnet ass" for a guy whom mystically attracted incoming gunfire. Despite the fact that copper plated lead is not ferromagnetic. Well, it was the Army after all, not exactly a physicist convention. Anyway, you sir don't seem crazy, but merely seem to attract bugs. Perhaps a can of "Off"?
Right, like I said, the whole point was "Much like nuclear weapons, the plan was never to actually use it, but to manipulate the other side's behavior..."
So, now the other guys are wasting expensive valuable mass and volume on self destruct mechanisms instead of larger heavier camera lenses or maneuvering fuel or electrical capacity or whatever.
Even better, a self destruct system that doesn't exist, can't accidentally fail, but one that exists, can fail. So fewer satellites are a "success".
Best of all, your spies can steal the self destruct codes or whatever and have all kinds of fun. And how exactly do you know they haven't stolen them? Remember they can spend $1 less than an expensive ASAT program and run a "paper profit", so they probably will.