All right, I didn't read the grandgrandparent post. I though 24/7 also applies to breathing monitoring. I agree with your comment about neurosys if parents want to monitor their teen going to school.
But putting that aside, there is no reason to take chances here either, if you can do it not invasively, respecting child's freedom and cheaply. It might strike you as odd today, but as these things become available, it would become more reasonable to use them more. Britons may be against the CCTV cameras now, but as machine vision improves and these cameras become cheaper (a few pounds as opposed to 50 thousand) and smaller (autonomous insect-sized cameras) they would become more effective. In the long term the main issue is not whether to use these technologies, but with what mindset.
It was said in regards to the story for Doom. Tood made a great design doc with a complex plot, etc., but one of the Johns told him to scrap it, saying noone needs that in a shooter. Today id already thinks differently, judging from their goals with Doom3. You are right that gimmicks tend to lose their value, but I disagree that the story is paramount. In movies you basically watch it and do nothing. In games you are an active participant, so in addition to story there is the gameplay, there is fun, and these things tend to be seen as more important than the story (although it's also usually needed).
I enjoyed Mafia a lot, but I also enjoyed GTA, and I can't tell you which game was better. One had a nice cinematic story, comparable (to some extent) to Godfather or Once Upon a Time in America, another had rocket launchers and flamethrowers in a nice setting.;) Creativity is important, but you don't need War and Piece as a story if you can blow shit up in a game.:)
Re:These things exist....
on
Watching You
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· Score: 1
This might be scary, but if that helps develop machine vision, that might be a decent trade-off. In the future there will be robots. And these robots would pick up the trash along the roads and clean the airports. Of course, they would have to keep an eye open for objects that shouldn't be. We don't like the cameras, but nobody in their right mind would complain that police officers or security guards (or even simply concerned citizens) on patrol watch for suspicious activity. As robots become smarter, it would be seen as more and more natural that robots should also keep an eye on things and report them if necessary.
The baby breathing thing is nice, but beyond that I never felt the need to monitor my kid 24/7. In fact, I find the idea kind of creepy.At best it smacks of neurosis on the part of the parent.
There is that thing called Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Basically small kids just tend to die from time to time for no apparent reason.:( "SIDS is the leading killer of infants between one week and one year with an approximate rate of two per thousand live births (1 in 500). 6000-7000 babies die of SIDS every year in the US." (from SIDS FAQ)
So this is not neurosis, this is trying to save the children (tm). There are some reasons to believe that if you can get to the kid real fast, you might have a chance to save him. 24/7/365 monitoring comes handy.
I think it doesn't. Here in St. Petersburg PM is allowed to hire girls to ask people in the streets whether they smoke and if they do, they offer to exchange their cigarettes for PM brands. Most manufacturers are allowed to offer a rebate if you trade in a competitor's product. E.g. you bring an old Canon (or any other brand) printer to the HP store and HP gives you a $25 rebate.
Why should a company be prohibited from sending a message to the potential customers? MS is allowed to preach to Linux-using companies, advertising smaller TCO and other benefits. Why shouldn't they be allowed to do it on Google?
I think, for good or for bad, but the story standards for games are lower. And we, the players, set these standards. If you think about it, we totally accept it when id software makes the script in the last 30 minutes before the game goes gold. We praised the HL story, which was extremely lame if compared to movies or books. We immensely enjoyed GTA, which basically pretends that a compilation of cliches from mafia movies makes for a good story. The reason for that is that interactive fun is usually more important than the story, unless the game aims for the movie niche, like Mafia. There are some FPSes like Tron 2.0 or Splinter Cell, but they only manage to compete with Disney films and Tom Clansy's pulp.:)
I haven't seen the MP2 yet, but in MP1 the bullet-time shooting was the primary attraction. Story was important, but only as a background for the shooting. As Romero (or Carmack) told Todd Hollenshead once, in regards to story computer games are like porn movies - people expect the story to be there, but it's not what they really care about.
after a while the lines start sounding a bit cheesy IIRC, they specifically aimed for the cheesiness in the first game. All text was written in the style of a pulp detective story. I think the same is true for the second game. It's intentional and I believe it worked great for the first game.
That too wide of a generalisation. All Utopias break IF they ignore human nature. For example, if you try to build a communist society while having a poor agrarian economy with miniscule GDP per capita, voluntary labour will not provide enough wealth to support everyone. Those countries that ignored this simple fact (Soviet Russia in early 20th century, North Korea, etc.) broke. But if you design your Utopia to take into account the reality (including human nature), then there is no reason why it should not work. Take Disneyland, for example.:) They work within the limits of human nature and technology and they do provide a good (almost utopian in some sense) experience.:) We only need to take the concept further.:)
I though it was obvious. You see, in communism people do not have to work, because the production capacity of the economy is sufficient to provide most needs even without forced labour. And the society changes to reflect this fact. So although in the short term the displaced workers might feel the negative effects of unemployment (but there will be some replacement jobs - free markets can deal with this to some extent), in the long term they will not have to work any more if they don't want to - their basic needs will be provided for by the machines.
A very good point. May be the unwillingness of people in the West to even consider this alternative to the capitalist society can be explained to some extent by the fact that the term "communism" is so strongly associated with all the problems of the USSR... But how we can call it instead? Golden Age? Technoutopia? Social state? Scientific democracy? Social capitalism? Capitalism with a human face? Roboeconomy? Machine socialism?
Change always sucks in the short term. As opposed to long term, when everyone gets to enjoy the benefits brought by the change.
When all low-skill jobs are (or can be) replaced by machines, the society will have to change in several ways.
1) Only creative work would have to be done by humans. Art, science, invention, etc. 2) It would become feasible to provide all basic needs of all people with a moderate up-front investment (to build enough robots, basically).
We used to call the resulting society "communism". And we used to think it was a bad, nasty, scary thing. But there is enough time to change our attitude.:) Of course, a revolution might be required, not necessarily involving killing people, but at least destroying institutions and stuff like that.:)
As for exporting jobs overseas, it's long overdue. In the global society people everywhere have the right to economic equality. The income levels have to change so that average American no longer earns (and consumes) a hundred times as much as a person in Somalia. It's not easy in the short term, but in the end everyone will be better off.
Don't worry, I don't think all that will take more than a few decades. And around 2020 we will live in a just communist society of abundance and happiness.:) Welcome to Utopia.:)
There are completely automated grocery stores in Switzerland. I've never tried one though. I would guess there are such stores in some other countries too.
Another interesting question is what can be considered "near future". If it's 2-3 years, then you are right. If it's 5-10 years, then you are wrong.:) As simple as that. Brain might be crazy talking about robots taking away all jobs, but he have a point. A lot of things can be automated and they will be, trade unions or not.
Can someone explain what exactly is so great about iTunes, as compared to, say, Winamp 2? Other than integrated music store and CD-rip/burn functions I can't think of anything (but I've only used iTunes for about 5 minutes in my life, before it crashed the MacOS). I'm really curious, but I think WinAmp has everything you might need in its default installation, pretty much everything possible in plugins (i.e. does iTunes have remote control support?) and it also have much better visualisation options for those who like to watch their music.
Well, they wrote QuickTime, which works on Windows as well, so they must have some experience working with the platform. And another thing is that Apple is not one person, who may lack knowledge or skills - it's a corporation. They can hire people with Windows coding skills. In fact, they should have done that. And while coding for Windows can be complex when you are making a state of the art 3D shooter, it is not a problem when coding a music player.
Windows has DirectX, so coding a player is as straightforward as it gets. If Apple can't write a stable one, they suck. As simple as that. Of course, we must take into account the number of users, but I guess iTunes is not too popular yet on Windows.
And BTW, the first (and only) time I used iTunes (on a Mac with System9) it crashed the OS after 5 minutes. I had to turn the power off and back on (I don't know how to reset those things). So I would say save me from that crap, I will use WinAmp 2 instead and specialised CD-rippers/burners. Same with Quicktime - I prefer using Media Player Classic instead. May be Apple makes great products, but I haven't really seen them yet (although I was not exposed to them much. Still I will remain openminded).
The problem is not just kinetic energy, it's the fact that at 10+ km/s even a small piece of anything would make a nice little hole in the spacecraft. It doesn't really matter whether you are hit with a 100 gram or a 1 kg piece of crap, either way you're toast.
That was a bit of an oversimplification, but I hope you get my point.
What the hell does that mean? It's not space is being overrun by some terrible dictator and we need to "step in" to "set things right" since that's what the US just LOVES to do. But there is no democracy in space! You won't argue about that, would you? Someone has to go and build democracy there.
I wish someone would send this general up right now to protect the American interests there, preferably with a very limited supply of oxygen.
There is no reason why space should become a battleground. We used to understand this in the past, thanks in part to the Soviet Union. Now that it is no longer with us, there is no counterbalance to the US militarists. And in their desire to prevent appearance of such counterbalance, the generals want to occupy space themselves (it never occurs to them that there might be enough space for everybody). And of course, space exploration and military projects are the largest money-sinks next only to military space programs.
P.S. My second wish is that when we ascend to posthumanity we retain our revengefulness for a while. People like this general deserve to spend a subjective eternity in a virtual hell, personally experiencing the simulated death of every soldier who ever fought on Earth.
Whatever, if major labels are retailing at $13 it doesn't make any sense for the indies to now cost more. It does. Indie music is less popular, so they can't enjoy the economy of scale the Brittney Spears can. Ergo they need to charge you more per CD.
I agree with most of what you said. But I think that the child will select and filter the materials in a way appropriate to his development stage. If he is in the menthal stage and wants a pure love, then he might be disgusted by some of the porn, but he will not actively seek it. And accidental exposure to porn is more fiction than fact. I've read some accounts of spam which opens dozens of pop-ups with explicit porn images, but I am extremely sceptical about that. Of course, with almost a billion Net users there will be thousands, may be even millions of those who get a glimpse of porn without actively seeking it, but I think in most cases this is not a problem.
And I believe that simply seeing some porn will not cause any lasting problems, unless a person was already off the rocket. I mean, even finding out that your parents do in fact have sex is probably be a bigger shock for a kid than seeing some images of strangers doing the same.
As for the desensitization and objectification, I agree that this might be a problem for heavy porn users, but unless the child in question already heavily masturbates, watches a lot of porn and dreams about having sex, he is unlikely to have any such effects.
You will probably agree that violence on TV and in video games might have some effect on the children, but you must admit that this effect is extremely weak, given thousands of deaths they witness till they come of age. If we are talking about only accidentally exposing children to porn through unlocked adult sites (no warning, no age verification, etc.), this is unlikely to have any effect at all, given our experience with violence. I.e. just a few people having sex vs. thousands of people killed - what is going to have bigger effect? See an example somewhere in this thread about Starship Troopers where the TV station censored woman's breasts during a love scene, but happily showed that woman being torn in half by the bug on screen.
Let's be realists - one image will not fuck up the kid for life.:)
This is something the market can solve. There is no single unified entity that is against allowing cable modem users to host a webpage. If many people prefer ISPs that give them a static IP, ISPs would do that. I never was forced to access Internet through a NAT-like setup. Right now I post this from a computer that doesn't have a dedicated IP address only because I connect through a home-network with WinRoute set up. The home server has a static IP (unchanged for several years) and I can set up WinRoute NAT table to route incoming packets on a specific port to any machine on the home network.
Demand connections with fixed IPs and the fabric of Internet won't be torn to pieces.:)
Whenever lay tech writers talk about data, they describe it in terms of Libraries of Congress, which I've always felt is a pretty bullshit quantizer, as the library obviously has things like photographs, movies, and albums that would take a lot of honking space, so much so that no storage medium exists that could conviently and economically store even 1 Library of Congress.
Sorry to interrupt your crusade against ignorance, but I though you'd find interesting that as early as in 1959 among all people Richard Feynman himself spoke about storing Libraries of Congress (to be exact, about storing Library of Congress plus British Museum Library plus National Library in France). His estimate was that about three square meters of surface was necessary to store all books in the library (all pages visually, not the text in ASCII) using electron lithography.
Speaking in terms of Libraries of Congress instead of terabytes or petabytes is not an oversimplification, it's an easy way to convey the idea of large storage to people who still confuse HDD capacity and RAM.
No. Soviet space exploreres were called cosmonauts, which was a well-though out and descriptive name. When the USA managed to launch a human (an American) into orbit years later, American space exploreres were called astronauts, which is, of course, nonsense, because last time I checked a manned mission to another star was not even on the drawing table at NASA. So yes, it's about national politics nonsense, but in the US, not in Russia or China.
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All right, I didn't read the grandgrandparent post. I though 24/7 also applies to breathing monitoring. I agree with your comment about neurosys if parents want to monitor their teen going to school.
But putting that aside, there is no reason to take chances here either, if you can do it not invasively, respecting child's freedom and cheaply. It might strike you as odd today, but as these things become available, it would become more reasonable to use them more. Britons may be against the CCTV cameras now, but as machine vision improves and these cameras become cheaper (a few pounds as opposed to 50 thousand) and smaller (autonomous insect-sized cameras) they would become more effective. In the long term the main issue is not whether to use these technologies, but with what mindset.
It was said in regards to the story for Doom. Tood made a great design doc with a complex plot, etc., but one of the Johns told him to scrap it, saying noone needs that in a shooter. Today id already thinks differently, judging from their goals with Doom3. You are right that gimmicks tend to lose their value, but I disagree that the story is paramount. In movies you basically watch it and do nothing. In games you are an active participant, so in addition to story there is the gameplay, there is fun, and these things tend to be seen as more important than the story (although it's also usually needed).
;) Creativity is important, but you don't need War and Piece as a story if you can blow shit up in a game. :)
I enjoyed Mafia a lot, but I also enjoyed GTA, and I can't tell you which game was better. One had a nice cinematic story, comparable (to some extent) to Godfather or Once Upon a Time in America, another had rocket launchers and flamethrowers in a nice setting.
This might be scary, but if that helps develop machine vision, that might be a decent trade-off. In the future there will be robots. And these robots would pick up the trash along the roads and clean the airports. Of course, they would have to keep an eye open for objects that shouldn't be. We don't like the cameras, but nobody in their right mind would complain that police officers or security guards (or even simply concerned citizens) on patrol watch for suspicious activity. As robots become smarter, it would be seen as more and more natural that robots should also keep an eye on things and report them if necessary.
The baby breathing thing is nice, but beyond that I never felt the need to monitor my kid 24/7. In fact, I find the idea kind of creepy.At best it smacks of neurosis on the part of the parent.
:( "SIDS is the leading killer of infants between one week and one year with an
There is that thing called Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Basically small kids just tend to die from time to time for no apparent reason.
approximate rate of two per thousand live births (1 in 500). 6000-7000 babies die of SIDS every year in the US." (from SIDS FAQ)
So this is not neurosis, this is trying to save the children (tm). There are some reasons to believe that if you can get to the kid real fast, you might have a chance to save him. 24/7/365 monitoring comes handy.
I think it doesn't. Here in St. Petersburg PM is allowed to hire girls to ask people in the streets whether they smoke and if they do, they offer to exchange their cigarettes for PM brands. Most manufacturers are allowed to offer a rebate if you trade in a competitor's product. E.g. you bring an old Canon (or any other brand) printer to the HP store and HP gives you a $25 rebate.
Why should a company be prohibited from sending a message to the potential customers? MS is allowed to preach to Linux-using companies, advertising smaller TCO and other benefits. Why shouldn't they be allowed to do it on Google?
I think, for good or for bad, but the story standards for games are lower. And we, the players, set these standards. If you think about it, we totally accept it when id software makes the script in the last 30 minutes before the game goes gold. We praised the HL story, which was extremely lame if compared to movies or books. We immensely enjoyed GTA, which basically pretends that a compilation of cliches from mafia movies makes for a good story. The reason for that is that interactive fun is usually more important than the story, unless the game aims for the movie niche, like Mafia. There are some FPSes like Tron 2.0 or Splinter Cell, but they only manage to compete with Disney films and Tom Clansy's pulp. :)
I haven't seen the MP2 yet, but in MP1 the bullet-time shooting was the primary attraction. Story was important, but only as a background for the shooting. As Romero (or Carmack) told Todd Hollenshead once, in regards to story computer games are like porn movies - people expect the story to be there, but it's not what they really care about.
after a while the lines start sounding a bit cheesy
IIRC, they specifically aimed for the cheesiness in the first game. All text was written in the style of a pulp detective story. I think the same is true for the second game. It's intentional and I believe it worked great for the first game.
That too wide of a generalisation. All Utopias break IF they ignore human nature. For example, if you try to build a communist society while having a poor agrarian economy with miniscule GDP per capita, voluntary labour will not provide enough wealth to support everyone. Those countries that ignored this simple fact (Soviet Russia in early 20th century, North Korea, etc.) broke. But if you design your Utopia to take into account the reality (including human nature), then there is no reason why it should not work. Take Disneyland, for example. :) They work within the limits of human nature and technology and they do provide a good (almost utopian in some sense) experience. :) We only need to take the concept further. :)
I though it was obvious. You see, in communism people do not have to work, because the production capacity of the economy is sufficient to provide most needs even without forced labour. And the society changes to reflect this fact. So although in the short term the displaced workers might feel the negative effects of unemployment (but there will be some replacement jobs - free markets can deal with this to some extent), in the long term they will not have to work any more if they don't want to - their basic needs will be provided for by the machines.
A very good point. May be the unwillingness of people in the West to even consider this alternative to the capitalist society can be explained to some extent by the fact that the term "communism" is so strongly associated with all the problems of the USSR... But how we can call it instead? Golden Age? Technoutopia? Social state? Scientific democracy? Social capitalism? Capitalism with a human face? Roboeconomy? Machine socialism?
Any ideas?
Change always sucks in the short term. As opposed to long term, when everyone gets to enjoy the benefits brought by the change.
:) Of course, a revolution might be required, not necessarily involving killing people, but at least destroying institutions and stuff like that. :)
:) Welcome to Utopia. :)
When all low-skill jobs are (or can be) replaced by machines, the society will have to change in several ways.
1) Only creative work would have to be done by humans. Art, science, invention, etc.
2) It would become feasible to provide all basic needs of all people with a moderate up-front investment (to build enough robots, basically).
We used to call the resulting society "communism". And we used to think it was a bad, nasty, scary thing. But there is enough time to change our attitude.
As for exporting jobs overseas, it's long overdue. In the global society people everywhere have the right to economic equality. The income levels have to change so that average American no longer earns (and consumes) a hundred times as much as a person in Somalia. It's not easy in the short term, but in the end everyone will be better off.
Don't worry, I don't think all that will take more than a few decades. And around 2020 we will live in a just communist society of abundance and happiness.
There are completely automated grocery stores in Switzerland. I've never tried one though. I would guess there are such stores in some other countries too.
:) As simple as that. Brain might be crazy talking about robots taking away all jobs, but he have a point. A lot of things can be automated and they will be, trade unions or not.
Another interesting question is what can be considered "near future". If it's 2-3 years, then you are right. If it's 5-10 years, then you are wrong.
Can someone explain what exactly is so great about iTunes, as compared to, say, Winamp 2? Other than integrated music store and CD-rip/burn functions I can't think of anything (but I've only used iTunes for about 5 minutes in my life, before it crashed the MacOS). I'm really curious, but I think WinAmp has everything you might need in its default installation, pretty much everything possible in plugins (i.e. does iTunes have remote control support?) and it also have much better visualisation options for those who like to watch their music.
Well, they wrote QuickTime, which works on Windows as well, so they must have some experience working with the platform. And another thing is that Apple is not one person, who may lack knowledge or skills - it's a corporation. They can hire people with Windows coding skills. In fact, they should have done that. And while coding for Windows can be complex when you are making a state of the art 3D shooter, it is not a problem when coding a music player.
Windows has DirectX, so coding a player is as straightforward as it gets. If Apple can't write a stable one, they suck. As simple as that. Of course, we must take into account the number of users, but I guess iTunes is not too popular yet on Windows.
And BTW, the first (and only) time I used iTunes (on a Mac with System9) it crashed the OS after 5 minutes. I had to turn the power off and back on (I don't know how to reset those things). So I would say save me from that crap, I will use WinAmp 2 instead and specialised CD-rippers/burners. Same with Quicktime - I prefer using Media Player Classic instead. May be Apple makes great products, but I haven't really seen them yet (although I was not exposed to them much. Still I will remain openminded).
The problem is not just kinetic energy, it's the fact that at 10+ km/s even a small piece of anything would make a nice little hole in the spacecraft. It doesn't really matter whether you are hit with a 100 gram or a 1 kg piece of crap, either way you're toast.
That was a bit of an oversimplification, but I hope you get my point.
What the hell does that mean? It's not space is being overrun by some terrible dictator and we need to "step in" to "set things right" since that's what the US just LOVES to do.
But there is no democracy in space! You won't argue about that, would you? Someone has to go and build democracy there.
Do you imply that the general in question doesn't sound like he is hearing voices or having delusions? :)
I wish someone would send this general up right now to protect the American interests there, preferably with a very limited supply of oxygen.
There is no reason why space should become a battleground. We used to understand this in the past, thanks in part to the Soviet Union. Now that it is no longer with us, there is no counterbalance to the US militarists. And in their desire to prevent appearance of such counterbalance, the generals want to occupy space themselves (it never occurs to them that there might be enough space for everybody). And of course, space exploration and military projects are the largest money-sinks next only to military space programs.
P.S. My second wish is that when we ascend to posthumanity we retain our revengefulness for a while. People like this general deserve to spend a subjective eternity in a virtual hell, personally experiencing the simulated death of every soldier who ever fought on Earth.
Well, if there are some Hypersonic Erection Systems already available, I guess there would be some hypersonic oil pumps as well. ;)
Do you think all those great marble statues of the Ancient World and the Renaissance were made with undo enabled? :) Undo is for wimps!
Whatever, if major labels are retailing at $13 it doesn't make any sense for the indies to now cost more.
It does. Indie music is less popular, so they can't enjoy the economy of scale the Brittney Spears can. Ergo they need to charge you more per CD.
I agree with most of what you said. But I think that the child will select and filter the materials in a way appropriate to his development stage. If he is in the menthal stage and wants a pure love, then he might be disgusted by some of the porn, but he will not actively seek it. And accidental exposure to porn is more fiction than fact. I've read some accounts of spam which opens dozens of pop-ups with explicit porn images, but I am extremely sceptical about that. Of course, with almost a billion Net users there will be thousands, may be even millions of those who get a glimpse of porn without actively seeking it, but I think in most cases this is not a problem.
:)
And I believe that simply seeing some porn will not cause any lasting problems, unless a person was already off the rocket. I mean, even finding out that your parents do in fact have sex is probably be a bigger shock for a kid than seeing some images of strangers doing the same.
As for the desensitization and objectification, I agree that this might be a problem for heavy porn users, but unless the child in question already heavily masturbates, watches a lot of porn and dreams about having sex, he is unlikely to have any such effects.
You will probably agree that violence on TV and in video games might have some effect on the children, but you must admit that this effect is extremely weak, given thousands of deaths they witness till they come of age. If we are talking about only accidentally exposing children to porn through unlocked adult sites (no warning, no age verification, etc.), this is unlikely to have any effect at all, given our experience with violence. I.e. just a few people having sex vs. thousands of people killed - what is going to have bigger effect? See an example somewhere in this thread about Starship Troopers where the TV station censored woman's breasts during a love scene, but happily showed that woman being torn in half by the bug on screen.
Let's be realists - one image will not fuck up the kid for life.
This is something the market can solve. There is no single unified entity that is against allowing cable modem users to host a webpage. If many people prefer ISPs that give them a static IP, ISPs would do that. I never was forced to access Internet through a NAT-like setup. Right now I post this from a computer that doesn't have a dedicated IP address only because I connect through a home-network with WinRoute set up. The home server has a static IP (unchanged for several years) and I can set up WinRoute NAT table to route incoming packets on a specific port to any machine on the home network.
:)
Demand connections with fixed IPs and the fabric of Internet won't be torn to pieces.
Whenever lay tech writers talk about data, they describe it in terms of Libraries of Congress, which I've always felt is a pretty bullshit quantizer, as the library obviously has things like photographs, movies, and albums that would take a lot of honking space, so much so that no storage medium exists that could conviently and economically store even 1 Library of Congress.
Sorry to interrupt your crusade against ignorance, but I though you'd find interesting that as early as in 1959 among all people Richard Feynman himself spoke about storing Libraries of Congress (to be exact, about storing Library of Congress plus British Museum Library plus National Library in France). His estimate was that about three square meters of surface was necessary to store all books in the library (all pages visually, not the text in ASCII) using electron lithography.
Speaking in terms of Libraries of Congress instead of terabytes or petabytes is not an oversimplification, it's an easy way to convey the idea of large storage to people who still confuse HDD capacity and RAM.
No. Soviet space exploreres were called cosmonauts, which was a well-though out and descriptive name. When the USA managed to launch a human (an American) into orbit years later, American space exploreres were called astronauts, which is, of course, nonsense, because last time I checked a manned mission to another star was not even on the drawing table at NASA. So yes, it's about national politics nonsense, but in the US, not in Russia or China.