Cuting and pasting this from another comment..
PS: ASCII is for the sytem to look at not for storing data. The File looks like looks like this 0100001F54 in hex, but I get to see "The user's name is stored here." ID 21, Unicode, "Mike" Checksum valid as debugging output. Hell when I look at it I get links that show me lot's of usefull info on the web site but then again I have a lot of usefull tools for working with this data what I want to know is if there is a good reason to switch to XML with some of my new code. When there is no way in hell I am going to let people edit the data in raw format.
Anyway, if your file is 123 you can read that. But what if your storing a tree. So that bill brances to marry (braches to mark) and steve (braches to david and sue (branches to linda)) while storing there user id's and passwords (it's a simple example config information would be window list's with there setting information) Now shure you can see that marry has id 31 if you stare at it for long enough but for anything that's not simple it's going to be a pain in the arse. So you might as well setup a GUI to look at the data while your making your app as these are all setings that your going to need to edit anyway. Now as to the schema idea that might have some merrit this just uses a checksum after the data to enshure that the element is not corrupt.
Ok first off it's raw data so there is no escape sequences and if the numbers are off the format's not valid.
2nd You don't CAN"T edit config files manualy that's a feature not a bug. I have seen lot's of people edit config files in production and it's always causes problems.
The Stored strings have no inharent meaning for the app there only used as debugging output so you can store random numbers and it would still work.
As to the browser idea yea you can look at them though a applet. And while I have written a simple app that transform's this into XML so you can do anything that you can do with XML files to these. I have yet to find anything usefull to do with the XML output. The thing is looking at the data is not usefull out side of the aplication it's running in. Now there is a tun of system data in a database that needs to talk to the world but XML would be way to slow for storing that stuff. So I still want to know why people want to use XML for config files. I mean you still have to wite something that decodes the XML information even if you read in it's format.
PS: ASCII is for the sytem to look at not for storing data. The File looks like looks like this 0100001F54 in hex, but I get to see "The user's name is stored here." ID 21, Unicode, "Mike" Checksum valid as debugging output. Hell when I look at it I get links that show me lot's of usefull info on the web site but then again I have a lot of usefull tools for working with this data what I want to know is if there is a good reason to switch to XML with some of my new code. When there is no way in hell I am going to let people edit the data in raw format.
XML is not Human readable on anything ther than the most simple app. And do you want people to be able to mess with config files when they don't have the documentation?
If there still breaking the law then the government is involved but not the company's that make the software. So it does not matter if they care or not you could go to jail for breaking encription protecting software that was latter released for free.
Also think of it like this if you have a rock on a string some of that string close to your hand is moving a lot slower than the string close to the rock. But the whole thing is spinning around your hand the same number of times a second. If your standing over the equator and you put up a pole it's going to aproach orbital speed and be in the right path. If you do the same thing over DC it's going to aproach orbal speed but not an orbital path.
Ok say you want something in space to point at some point on earth all the time. Well the closer to the earth the more gravity some the faster you need to go so in LEO you need to go mach 23. But if your far away say where the moon is go can go slower ~27days. In between those two point's there is an orbit that's 24 hours which means if your over the equator and that high up your orbiting the earth.
So if you built a tower from that point you would hit orbit no problems. You could aso build down from that orbit and hit earth now problems and when those poin'ts are connected you how your elevator.
Now over the north pole you would never hit orbit al speed becasue you would never circle the earth.
Now if you where a little closer to the equator but not on it you could build something that's not strat up and down that would be do the same thing but it would not work untill it was compleated as the orbit would not be stable untill it was connected to the ground. It would also need to be longer ect. Hell if you had a realy big rock orbiting the earth just outside of geo sinc orbit and tied it with something realy strong to a point on the north pole you could have a space elevator but it would be a hell of a lot harder and longer than building over the equator.
I don't know about you but I chose to work places where being the fastest drone is not the point of my job. I worked between 10 and 20 hours less a week last year than any other developer and I sill got a larger raise than anyone else who workes here. Sometimes it's better to say that's a bad idea than it is to hand that in a week early. If you convince your customer that they are better served with some other solution that just happens to take 1/2 the time to implement then everyone wins. But hey be that rat and run as fast as you can.
Ok when your storing data files you might as well use a database vs XML. But, if your storing configuration files I like to use (int;name lenght) (name as an ascii str) (int; element id) (int; data type) (int; data size) (data)
It's low over head and easy to parce so you can store a tun of data, simple or complex data, with ease. It's also easy to check the syntax so you know you did not mess up when writing or reading the data. It's also easy to store list's or nest data. Ok now if you tell me how XML is so much better than this fine but other than being a little more readable by hand I don't see what the advantage is. As to data type's;
0 = new tree
1 = string ASCII
2 = String Unicode
10 = signed int
20 = unsigned int
30 = floating point number (format 1)
31 = floating point number (format 2)...
I basicly keep aything under 10,000 as uneversal format's and use stuff over that for odd adhock stuff which I don't have time to deconstruct.
I have been thinking of picking up one of these mostly for it's size. And the fact I miss having a mac in my pc room.
Once you start having 4 or 5+ pc's they start to take up a lot of space. And as far as upgrading things goes once your on a giga bit lan and have a TB+ disk storage you tend to slow down how much you open cases on anything other than a gaming rig.
Let's see there is the Gamming rig, 2nd pc (as in your upgrading fast enough that your leftovers tend to make a PC), Server 1 (Mostly web stuff but it can handle games for lan party's now and then.), Sever 2 Disk Space (5x 250gig in rad 5 for storage and a 60 gig drive for the OS), Old SUN box from ebay, iMac for MP3's in the living room, Laptop, and then the old junk that's now powered up but still takes up space...
Starting to wonder if I am ever going to go under 200$ electric bill again... probably not.
Why not? Earth as a whole sit's at ~300 deg kelven block say 1percent of incomeing energy and you drop around 5 deg C.
So: (3963.19 * 3963.19 * pi ) *.01 =493,446.03 sq miles. Or 18585 * 493,000 = 9 billion Roll's of Reynolds Wrap Heavy Duty Aluminum Foil - 18'' x 1000'.
Now all this needs to be in orbit with some way of keeping things aligned and overhead so the total weight may be 10 times that but it's still posible... or Not.
Anyway, as bad as that sounds some form of reflective dust in orbit might work well and be doable.
Now I know you may want disagree but "health" referes to how far something is from death and both genetic diversity and net biomass are indecators of how far an enviernment is from total colaps.. So when you talk about the environment suffering you can say that either the genetic diversity goes down or the net biomass goes down. AKA Deforistation is bad as it does both. Pollution is bad as it harms both. Climat change is bad because it reduces genetic diversity.
Now clearly some changes may help the enviernment such as a mild increase in background radiation but the gist of the statment is the fact that human populations harm other lifeforms. Now if your saying we can go to the moon and not harm the moon's ecosystem that's correct insorfar as it has none but that's well outside the scope of that arugment.
The guy's logical argument - that human habitation harms the enviroment of the arctic and thus shouldn't happen - applies to all of human development and expansion. Hence the reason why the argument is fallacious.
If you killed all humans the more life forms would be better off than not.
AKA. Cow's die but Cod and sword fish do better.
Which is in no way containing or based on a fallacy. Now you may say having lot's of humans balances this out (aka we are worth it) but that does not change the fact that we do a great deal of harm.
The executive summary version of this fact is that if the entire population of the earth were consuming energy at the same rate as Americans, the atmosphere would be incandescent with waste heat.
Are you on crack? Look at New York is it hot or cold in the winter? The amount of energy used by us humans is TINY when compaired to say the amound of solar radiation that lands on the earth each and every day and the net tempature of the planet stays constant because all this energy is radiated back out into space.
DO the math 24*7 the sun is dumping energy on pi * 15,700,000 sq Miles and it's all going back out to space.
I always thought the simplest interpretation of LOTR was a direct reflection of WWI.
It's more a like a war story told from the grunts perspective than anything else. I mean there is never any reason given for the LOTR war. It's just someone wants to make war and losing would be Vary Vary BAD.
The hobbit's = the Irish / hearth and home. The US = treabeard and his fellows ect.
Archers and bowmen on your side vs. Enemy; tanks artillery and all.
But, I would say such things are more the background for the story than it's deeper meaning. He is using such ideas for the emotions they evoke rather than as an attempt to provide meaning. You can look at it as "Don't piss of the Ent's!" or "Thank got the Ent's have joined the fray!" which seems to be his intent. Picture a little kid screaming "NEVER PISS OFF THE ENT'S!" at the top of his lungs vs. a chess master saying "Ahh you forked your nights o well one more piece for me". Now clearly LOTR's tone is much more that of a rollercoaster ride of a child than the cold calculation of chess Master.
Universities are more about the acquisition of credits than learning. Who receives a better grade in English 201 the guy who likes writing in Iambic pentameter for fun the foreign student who is coping with English as a second language?
As someone who lowered there GPA by taking classes that where not required I quickly discovered my school would much rather stamp out another student than let someone enrich them selves by say taking more than 23 credit hours. They did not mind me taking Dif EQ but god forbid I wanted to audit the class so it would not harm my job search after collage. Once you realize schooling is more about passing tests than learning you can start working with the system to get the most out of school but never forget they care more about your grades than what your learning.
Ok say MeshNet had a bandwith of 50kbps I think it would be around 1-30Kbps to the internet but that's a difrent issue. Now most people would pay for high speed of some sort 10,000 Kbps connections are out in some areas for 60$ a month so everyone that's still useing a modem by choice would stick with mesh net everyone else would have real internet acsess.
A nation wide Meshnet would have horable bandwith but within a city it might not be that bad. Say you had 10,000 people on mesh net in New York at anyone time do you think a few Universities would band together and provide free internet acsess to all these people? Bandwith cost's money and there is little to no reason why you would set up a backbone for all these people instead of telling them to go get a 3g phone or whatever.
You total bandwith would be the bandwith of each basestation.
First off there is more than one person using the system so divide by the number of users.
Second devide by the number of average hops because each message needs to use bandwith from more than one network.
Now you have 1,000,000 users over 10,000,000 10Mbits/s stattions with an average hop count of 100.
Now you could say the number of users / node is way off but don't forget in a city you can only have so many nodes because you run out of bandwith on the air waves. So even if you wanted to add more base stations you hit limits where adding a new base station does little because you need to retransmit all its messages to other stations anyway.
What your forgetting is the patent system expires. 20 years may seem like forever but take today's/. post Liquid Oxygen from Lunar Rocks you can see that someone found a method to take the Oxygen out of some oxidized metals in lunar rock. Now there this research may or may not prove useful for the next 100+ years of space exploration but chances are it's going to see much use until well after the patent expires.
Like most basic research it may open other doors which could have a great deal of value. The problem is it might fall under a whole class of information that could be extremely profitable but would not get explored because the risk is way to high for any corporation to undertake.
Think of it this way if you make Jets spending a billion to research the best angle / rotation rate for the blades is probably worth it. Even if your ROI is only twice the R&D cost it keeps you as the world leader in Jet's so it's worth it. But, you could also spend a billion researching scram jet's not that could be worth 100 billion over the next 50 years but if your not going to recover the cost before the end of the patent your going to let someone else do the research and then look into the best intake design for the scram jet...
Now I agree that NASA should use as few shuttle missions as it can get away with. After all NASA has little reason to shave 5% off of the shuttles operations budget so I feel they should spend most of there budget on research and with every innovation reduce the risk to private enterprise. You can let private enterprise take over for fine tooning the systems for efficacy. But, never expect private enterprise to research things for the good of mankind.
Unless you give companies 40+ year patents there is no reason for them to sink billions into aerospace at this point. The reason NASA is failing is private industry is sucking up all there funding leaving them little room to innovate. Things like the recent mach 10 are where NASA shines. Doing high-risk science to push the boundaries of what can be done. As much as people laugh at the shuttle it so far beyond what anything private industry has put into space it's silly.
What NASA needs to do is keep pushing the limits not putting 30 people into space every year but keep designing new and better launch systems, better robots, better materials... ect. Government needs to sponsor basic research and then let companies eat up the profit once minor improvements are all that's needed.
But, in the real world you need to have an understanding of the subject matter you're administering because your underlings can't suddenly fill you in on all the background to make a technical decision. Your also going to have underlings that lie and / or fudge the numbers so you need to understand what there doing as a sort of sanity check. So sure IF your job was to facilitate then sure you don't need to know what's going on, but in the real world you need to dig for information otherwise you just delegated your job to someone else.
Well as there working on a 500MW powerplant righ now I would say it's a solution in the near future. We could have it in 15 years for less than 1/4 the cost of bushes war.
Slashdot Mirror
It's also from March 2, 2004. Looks like a repost from fark to me.
Cuting and pasting this from another comment..
PS: ASCII is for the sytem to look at not for storing data. The File looks like looks like this 0100001F54 in hex, but I get to see "The user's name is stored here." ID 21, Unicode, "Mike" Checksum valid as debugging output. Hell when I look at it I get links that show me lot's of usefull info on the web site but then again I have a lot of usefull tools for working with this data what I want to know is if there is a good reason to switch to XML with some of my new code. When there is no way in hell I am going to let people edit the data in raw format.
Anyway, if your file is 123 you can read that. But what if your storing a tree. So that bill brances to marry (braches to mark) and steve (braches to david and sue (branches to linda)) while storing there user id's and passwords (it's a simple example config information would be window list's with there setting information) Now shure you can see that marry has id 31 if you stare at it for long enough but for anything that's not simple it's going to be a pain in the arse. So you might as well setup a GUI to look at the data while your making your app as these are all setings that your going to need to edit anyway. Now as to the schema idea that might have some merrit this just uses a checksum after the data to enshure that the element is not corrupt.
Ok first off it's raw data so there is no escape sequences and if the numbers are off the format's not valid.
2nd You don't CAN"T edit config files manualy that's a feature not a bug. I have seen lot's of people edit config files in production and it's always causes problems.
The Stored strings have no inharent meaning for the app there only used as debugging output so you can store random numbers and it would still work.
As to the browser idea yea you can look at them though a applet. And while I have written a simple app that transform's this into XML so you can do anything that you can do with XML files to these. I have yet to find anything usefull to do with the XML output. The thing is looking at the data is not usefull out side of the aplication it's running in. Now there is a tun of system data in a database that needs to talk to the world but XML would be way to slow for storing that stuff. So I still want to know why people want to use XML for config files. I mean you still have to wite something that decodes the XML information even if you read in it's format.
PS: ASCII is for the sytem to look at not for storing data. The File looks like looks like this 0100001F54 in hex, but I get to see "The user's name is stored here." ID 21, Unicode, "Mike" Checksum valid as debugging output. Hell when I look at it I get links that show me lot's of usefull info on the web site but then again I have a lot of usefull tools for working with this data what I want to know is if there is a good reason to switch to XML with some of my new code. When there is no way in hell I am going to let people edit the data in raw format.
XML is not Human readable on anything ther than the most simple app. And do you want people to be able to mess with config files when they don't have the documentation?
If there still breaking the law then the government is involved but not the company's that make the software. So it does not matter if they care or not you could go to jail for breaking encription protecting software that was latter released for free.
Also think of it like this if you have a rock on a string some of that string close to your hand is moving a lot slower than the string close to the rock. But the whole thing is spinning around your hand the same number of times a second. If your standing over the equator and you put up a pole it's going to aproach orbital speed and be in the right path. If you do the same thing over DC it's going to aproach orbal speed but not an orbital path.
Ok say you want something in space to point at some point on earth all the time. Well the closer to the earth the more gravity some the faster you need to go so in LEO you need to go mach 23. But if your far away say where the moon is go can go slower ~27days. In between those two point's there is an orbit that's 24 hours which means if your over the equator and that high up your orbiting the earth.
So if you built a tower from that point you would hit orbit no problems. You could aso build down from that orbit and hit earth now problems and when those poin'ts are connected you how your elevator.
Now over the north pole you would never hit orbit al speed becasue you would never circle the earth.
Now if you where a little closer to the equator but not on it you could build something that's not strat up and down that would be do the same thing but it would not work untill it was compleated as the orbit would not be stable untill it was connected to the ground. It would also need to be longer ect. Hell if you had a realy big rock orbiting the earth just outside of geo sinc orbit and tied it with something realy strong to a point on the north pole you could have a space elevator but it would be a hell of a lot harder and longer than building over the equator.
I don't know about you but I chose to work places where being the fastest drone is not the point of my job. I worked between 10 and 20 hours less a week last year than any other developer and I sill got a larger raise than anyone else who workes here. Sometimes it's better to say that's a bad idea than it is to hand that in a week early. If you convince your customer that they are better served with some other solution that just happens to take 1/2 the time to implement then everyone wins. But hey be that rat and run as fast as you can.
Ok when your storing data files you might as well use a database vs XML. But, if your storing configuration files I like to use (int;name lenght) (name as an ascii str) (int; element id) (int; data type) (int; data size) (data)
...
It's low over head and easy to parce so you can store a tun of data, simple or complex data, with ease. It's also easy to check the syntax so you know you did not mess up when writing or reading the data. It's also easy to store list's or nest data. Ok now if you tell me how XML is so much better than this fine but other than being a little more readable by hand I don't see what the advantage is. As to data type's;
0 = new tree
1 = string ASCII
2 = String Unicode
10 = signed int
20 = unsigned int
30 = floating point number (format 1) 31 = floating point number (format 2)
I basicly keep aything under 10,000 as uneversal format's and use stuff over that for odd adhock stuff which I don't have time to deconstruct.
I find there is more mac software I would like to run on windows than the other way around but that's just me.
I have been thinking of picking up one of these mostly for it's size. And the fact I miss having a mac in my pc room.
Once you start having 4 or 5+ pc's they start to take up a lot of space. And as far as upgrading things goes once your on a giga bit lan and have a TB+ disk storage you tend to slow down how much you open cases on anything other than a gaming rig.
Let's see there is the Gamming rig, 2nd pc (as in your upgrading fast enough that your leftovers tend to make a PC), Server 1 (Mostly web stuff but it can handle games for lan party's now and then.), Sever 2 Disk Space (5x 250gig in rad 5 for storage and a 60 gig drive for the OS), Old SUN box from ebay, iMac for MP3's in the living room, Laptop, and then the old junk that's now powered up but still takes up space...
Starting to wonder if I am ever going to go under 200$ electric bill again... probably not.
" planet-sized air conditioner or something?"
Why not? Earth as a whole sit's at ~300 deg kelven block say 1percent of incomeing energy and you drop around 5 deg C.
So: (3963.19 * 3963.19 * pi ) *.01 =493,446.03 sq miles. Or 18585 * 493,000 = 9 billion Roll's of Reynolds Wrap Heavy Duty Aluminum Foil - 18'' x 1000'.
Now all this needs to be in orbit with some way of keeping things aligned and overhead so the total weight may be 10 times that but it's still posible... or Not.
Anyway, as bad as that sounds some form of reflective dust in orbit might work well and be doable.
Now I know you may want disagree but "health" referes to how far something is from death and both genetic diversity and net biomass are indecators of how far an enviernment is from total colaps.. So when you talk about the environment suffering you can say that either the genetic diversity goes down or the net biomass goes down. AKA Deforistation is bad as it does both. Pollution is bad as it harms both. Climat change is bad because it reduces genetic diversity.
Now clearly some changes may help the enviernment such as a mild increase in background radiation but the gist of the statment is the fact that human populations harm other lifeforms. Now if your saying we can go to the moon and not harm the moon's ecosystem that's correct insorfar as it has none but that's well outside the scope of that arugment.
The guy's logical argument - that human habitation harms the enviroment of the arctic and thus shouldn't happen - applies to all of human development and expansion. Hence the reason why the argument is fallacious.
If you killed all humans the more life forms would be better off than not.
AKA. Cow's die but Cod and sword fish do better.
Which is in no way containing or based on a fallacy. Now you may say having lot's of humans balances this out (aka we are worth it) but that does not change the fact that we do a great deal of harm.
Elephant = vegan
Tiger = not so much
Human's = a little of both. Just look at our teeth, shure we have molars but we are not stuck eating just plants.
As to the milk; I agree it's nasty stuff that's best avoided.
The executive summary version of this fact is that if the entire population of the earth were consuming energy at the same rate as Americans, the atmosphere would be incandescent with waste heat.
Are you on crack? Look at New York is it hot or cold in the winter? The amount of energy used by us humans is TINY when compaired to say the amound of solar radiation that lands on the earth each and every day and the net tempature of the planet stays constant because all this energy is radiated back out into space.
DO the math 24*7 the sun is dumping energy on pi * 15,700,000 sq Miles and it's all going back out to space.
I always thought the simplest interpretation of LOTR was a direct reflection of WWI.
It's more a like a war story told from the grunts perspective than anything else. I mean there is never any reason given for the LOTR war. It's just someone wants to make war and losing would be Vary Vary BAD.
The hobbit's = the Irish / hearth and home.
The US = treabeard and his fellows ect.
Archers and bowmen on your side vs. Enemy; tanks artillery and all.
But, I would say such things are more the background for the story than it's deeper meaning. He is using such ideas for the emotions they evoke rather than as an attempt to provide meaning. You can look at it as "Don't piss of the Ent's!" or "Thank got the Ent's have joined the fray!" which seems to be his intent. Picture a little kid screaming "NEVER PISS OFF THE ENT'S!" at the top of his lungs vs. a chess master saying "Ahh you forked your nights o well one more piece for me". Now clearly LOTR's tone is much more that of a rollercoaster ride of a child than the cold calculation of chess Master.
Universities are more about the acquisition of credits than learning. Who receives a better grade in English 201 the guy who likes writing in Iambic pentameter for fun the foreign student who is coping with English as a second language?
As someone who lowered there GPA by taking classes that where not required I quickly discovered my school would much rather stamp out another student than let someone enrich them selves by say taking more than 23 credit hours. They did not mind me taking Dif EQ but god forbid I wanted to audit the class so it would not harm my job search after collage. Once you realize schooling is more about passing tests than learning you can start working with the system to get the most out of school but never forget they care more about your grades than what your learning.
More than one person could have discoverd the some holes. Then again probably not if there alowed to use any *NIX app.
Ok say MeshNet had a bandwith of 50kbps I think it would be around 1-30Kbps to the internet but that's a difrent issue.
Now most people would pay for high speed of some sort 10,000 Kbps connections are out in some areas for 60$ a month so everyone that's still useing a modem by choice would stick with mesh net everyone else would have real internet acsess.
A nation wide Meshnet would have horable bandwith but within a city it might not be that bad. Say you had 10,000 people on mesh net in New York at anyone time do you think a few Universities would band together and provide free internet acsess to all these people? Bandwith cost's money and there is little to no reason why you would set up a backbone for all these people instead of telling them to go get a 3g phone or whatever.
You total bandwith would be the bandwith of each basestation.
First off there is more than one person using the system so divide by the number of users.
Second devide by the number of average hops because each message needs to use bandwith from more than one network.
Now you have 1,000,000 users over 10,000,000 10Mbits/s stattions with an average hop count of 100.
Total bandwith = 10,000,000 * 10 Mbit = 100,000,000 Mbits/s. Each users bandwith = 100,000,000 Mbits/s / 1000,000 / users / 100 hops. = 10KB/s.
Now you could say the number of users / node is way off but don't forget in a city you can only have so many nodes because you run out of bandwith on the air waves. So even if you wanted to add more base stations you hit limits where adding a new base station does little because you need to retransmit all its messages to other stations anyway.
What your forgetting is the patent system expires. 20 years may seem like forever but take today's /. post Liquid Oxygen from Lunar Rocks you can see that someone found a method to take the Oxygen out of some oxidized metals in lunar rock. Now there this research may or may not prove useful for the next 100+ years of space exploration but chances are it's going to see much use until well after the patent expires.
Like most basic research it may open other doors which could have a great deal of value. The problem is it might fall under a whole class of information that could be extremely profitable but would not get explored because the risk is way to high for any corporation to undertake.
Think of it this way if you make Jets spending a billion to research the best angle / rotation rate for the blades is probably worth it. Even if your ROI is only twice the R&D cost it keeps you as the world leader in Jet's so it's worth it. But, you could also spend a billion researching scram jet's not that could be worth 100 billion over the next 50 years but if your not going to recover the cost before the end of the patent your going to let someone else do the research and then look into the best intake design for the scram jet...
Now I agree that NASA should use as few shuttle missions as it can get away with. After all NASA has little reason to shave 5% off of the shuttles operations budget so I feel they should spend most of there budget on research and with every innovation reduce the risk to private enterprise. You can let private enterprise take over for fine tooning the systems for efficacy. But, never expect private enterprise to research things for the good of mankind.
What profit?
Unless you give companies 40+ year patents there is no reason for them to sink billions into aerospace at this point. The reason NASA is failing is private industry is sucking up all there funding leaving them little room to innovate. Things like the recent mach 10 are where NASA shines. Doing high-risk science to push the boundaries of what can be done. As much as people laugh at the shuttle it so far beyond what anything private industry has put into space it's silly.
What NASA needs to do is keep pushing the limits not putting 30 people into space every year but keep designing new and better launch systems, better robots, better materials... ect. Government needs to sponsor basic research and then let companies eat up the profit once minor improvements are all that's needed.
That's great in theory...
But, in the real world you need to have an understanding of the subject matter you're administering because your underlings can't suddenly fill you in on all the background to make a technical decision. Your also going to have underlings that lie and / or fudge the numbers so you need to understand what there doing as a sort of sanity check. So sure IF your job was to facilitate then sure you don't need to know what's going on, but in the real world you need to dig for information otherwise you just delegated your job to someone else.
Well as there working on a 500MW powerplant righ now I would say it's a solution in the near future. We could have it in 15 years for less than 1/4 the cost of bushes war.