That's exactly why I don't have children. I know my genetic code has some flaws in it. I will do what I can to make it through this life, and then die. The 'weird' and otherwise imperfect DNA will die with me instead of being perpetuated.
While your reproductive choice is, of course, your decision, no one is smart enough to second-guess evolution. "Survival of the fittest" is actually just shorthand for selection pressure, which favors different specific traits in different environments. As environments change, what was "fit" yesterday now fails. So over time, it is the range or diversity of traits within the species as a whole that determines its viability.
There are many examples: in humans, slow metabolic rates confer advantages in famine, sickle cell anemia combats malaria, etc. I speculate that severe depression and other mental illnesses are intimately tied to the processes required for creativity and cognition.
Evolution isn't your decision because you cannot know the future, or what selection pressures are in store for humanity.
"There is no beauty which hath not some strangeness in its proportion." - Shakespeare
Re:Owning is Dead, long live pay per vew!
on
Buzzword du Jour: DRM
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Unless new models of distribution can be created which connect the content creators directly with the content users.
"Content creators/users" is totally corporate-centric terminology. The web already does a great job of linking (ahem) artists to their audiences. As you guessed, pay per view is not far from my specific distribution model. I update my main product about once a month. Customers get the original download and all updates (to the next full version) if they buy a copy. That also grants them access to support/friendly banter. But I don't mind at all if, for example, a teacher makes copies for an entire class, because all support/downloads route through the teacher. About the time the semester ends, I get a flurry of purchases (and fan letters) from the students, their friends and relatives.
Unlike pay-per-view, my model does let people own the downloads and do whatever they want with them. But the downloads start to seem stale in a few months; those who actually buy always have the slickest version.
As I understand it, this sort of "bootleg-friendly" distribution model worked well for the Greatful Dead, Metallica, and others, even before it was trivially easy (via www) to link artists with their audiences.
It's not just the media companies...
on
Buzzword du Jour: DRM
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Yes, media companies will fight to own all distribution of old content. But watch out for the hardware companies. They're already trying to own all distribution of new content. It's slick. Just visit their online store, download the content, and it only runs on your phone/PDA/laptop/whatever. Until it breaks, that is.
As an artist, you'd think I'd just love this scheme. Hah! The problem is, once a company thinks it owns your distribution, it thinks it owns you! When I fell for DRM and the lure of easy money, all of a sudden I was spending months fighting to retain designs and customer relationships that had taken years to refine. All this fussing cut into my productivity, and my fans noticed.
For the record, when I dropped copy protection completely, sales doubled almost immediately.
So don't be fooled by the current battle between the media and hardware companies. They're just fighting for who gets to own the artists and milk their audience. I'm not falling for it again, and I hope you won't, either.
I see in my mind's eye several hawaiian shirt and sunglasses wearing citizens... Is humankind so pathetic that the only reason we want to go into space is to expand the tourism industry?
Thanks for your application to the Celestial Fashion Police. Indeed, the Galaxy needs hand-picked uniformed police like you to turn away millions of ugly space tourists at the airlock.
We've heard reports that some of these unsightly revelers have been sneaking aboard shuttles under false credentials as space adventure travelers. As you know, this term is reserved for Buzz Aldrin, Captain Picard, and a handful of other hand-picked people who look good on TV.
As you know, everyone was born in the same big universe, and born curious about it. Yes, even the teeming masses of People with Too Much Hair Who Still Think Black Doc Martins Are Rad. Better that the cosmos should remain sterile and lifeless than populated with uncool people who overstay their welcome, and invent all sorts of unsanctioned space arts, sports and societies.
So Welcome, Sherrif. Welcome to the Celestial Fashion Constabulary. Say, is that an M-star in your badge? You know, with your eyes, you could probably get away with an O or B star, and those are soooo popular these days...
Every point is obvious once you get it, but you still don't. Don't pout! You're not in bad company. Every astronautics student I've ever met and even one astronaut candidate I know were off by at least an order of magnitude when they guessed the fuel cost of space access.
The consequence of this misconception is too much emphasis on fuel efficiency, and not enough on operational efficiency. For example, what if you built a shuttle that cost half as much to turn around between flights by having such massive tankage and engines that it had to burn 10x as much fuel to put each kg into orbit? The vehicle would be 2.15x bigger than the Shuttle in each dimension and its fixed cost would be 10x as much (per your intuition). But for Shuttle, fixed cost is on the order of 1% of the total cost when you run it out to 100 flights. OK, now your fixed cost is 16%, and fuel is 8%. By pink-slipping half the standing army of 6,000 people required to turn the Shuttle around, you've still managed to make space 65% more accessible on a fixed budget.
(BTW, this example is very unfair to Rutan, XCOR and a few others working on robust, reusable launch systems of moderate performance. These guys are targeting operations cost reductions well in excess of 90%, with much less mass gain than in my example. Also, reduced operational demand can result in a higher flight rate and longer vehicle life - a virtuous design cycle. Rutan et al are aiming to make space more than 1,000% more accessible.)
Engineers lured by the siren song of fuel efficiency have also often chosen exotic, toxic, low-density, and/or cryogenic fuels. All of these qualities increase dry mass a little and operations expense by a lot when compared to boring old kerosene or alcohol. All offer very modest gains in performance for a first stage or during early stages of flight, when you burn the most fuel.
So, Dude, to sum up, you correctly assumed fuel volume would relate to fixed cost, but incorrectly assumed fixed cost was dominant. You also did not even try the exercise I left for you in the prior post, so you flat-out missed the fact that operational costs dominate. Too bad. Operations is the most decisive factor WRT how soon you you'll be able to buy a ticket to orbit.
A very large portion of the overall mass (and price) of current space transport is just the fuel to get out of the atmosphere.
A perfect statement of one of the most persistent and erroneous misconceptions in astronautics. Price it out: rockets typically burn on the order of 200kg fuel to put a kg payload into orbit (double this for manned, halve it for simplest payloads). LOX is around $0.16 (USD)/kg and kerosene around $0.40 (USD)/kg. Burning 2.5:1, you pay $0.22/kg fuel, or $45 per kg into orbit. Now add tankage, engines/motors (hella pricey, used once and tossed or essentially rebuilt), systems integration, logistics, infrastructure, admin overhead, and you get ~$9,000/kg delivered. Fuel is only 0.5% of the total cost. It is left as an exercise to the reader to figure out why our space program is so inefficient.
To recap this week's lesson for rocket scientists and voters: know some numbers before throwing your weight behind multibillion USD expenditures.
Sources: astronautix.com; Wertz, Space Mission Analysis and Design, 2nd ed., Microcosm: 1992, p. 731.
I would like to see a more detailed analysis of his cost estimates -- $15 billion seems rather low for "developing a new, more flexible launch vehicle," designing a sophisticated (and large) long-life station, shipping the thing up to L1 point, and assembling it.
Yup. Building a new ISS and putting it 700 times farther away, out in the searing radiation beyond the Van Allen belts, is going to cost more. ISS cost $100 billion ,
so I shudder to think what Buzz' rig would cost. Throw in logistics and the usual geopolitical tug-of war, and you'd better tack on one or two more zeros to the price.
BTW, I've dined with Buzz. He's a hella nice guy who asks a lot of questions, is generous with his ideas, and is patient with the tongue-tied adoration of space freaks such as myself and the two others who joined us. That's why it's so shocking to see him suggest something with such completely bogus numbers as this.
Nothing gets America going more than a little competition.
Bah. Competition to do what? Have a few Taikonauts and Astronauts, hand-picked by Government Committees, plant a few flags and conduct sanitized, comittee-screened research? Old story. 45 years old. How much more accessible has space become since then?
If you want to celebrate your anniversary some day by getting wild in orbit, or see your children walk on the Moon or Mars, just hope this Moon Race blows over before too many people defect from X-prize teams to cushy, go-nowhere jobs with NASA.
XCOR isn't shooting for the X-prize, so there's nothing to bet about here. They seem to be following a longer-term strategy, aiming at markets with far greater value than the X-prize purse. That is probably why XCOR has been much more serious than the X-Prize teams about getting their regulatory ducks in line.
Regarding capability, Rutan hasn't built a rocket plane that's taken off and landed multiple times under its own rocket power. XCOR has, a couple years ago. Admittedly, they did it by modifying a Rutan kit plane of late 70's vintage. But the astonishing thing is XCOR achieved winged flight with two full-scale liquid rockets at something like 1/20 Rutan's rumored budget for SpaceShip One, which itself is slated to use a simpler composite rocket. Also note that XCOR's EZ Rocket was approved for use at an air show. Successful regulatory legwork, again. Tech is only half the battle when your real prize is taking the lead in a new industry.
As long as you're using rockets and not transporter beams or beanstalks, you have to fly through the air to get to orbit. That's the FAA's baliwick.
The FAA had its roots in the Air Commerce Act of 1926, a year before Lindberg's transatlantic flight. The Air Commerce Act created a series of agencies whose whole point was promoting safe air commerce. Emphasis on commerce. 45 years after the act was passed, you could fly just about anywhere in the world on a jet. That's what I call success, and this is lineage of agencies to talk to if you want to start selling tickets to orbit. Heaven forbid you should talk to NASA, which has been around for 45 years, thinks they own space itself, and distains commerce.
Several years ago I did some science enrichment work with a Boys and Girls' club in South Central LA. It was a mixed-gender group of 11-13 year-olds from the surrounding neighborhood (a scary 'hood, too: bars in every window, pit bulls in every yard, and burned-out vehicles and graffiti everywhere). The counselors held the children to very high standards of conduct, so we never encountered gender issues in the lab.
BTW, in several hundred presentations to groups ranging from pre-school through grad school, I have never seen students dive into a technology project with as much drive and intelligence. After 2 weeks with Lego Mindstorms and books about remote exploration, we held a final showcase. After my brief lecture about remote environments, every last student was just bursting with questions. Some questions were better than I had heard anywhere else. We then broke for technical demos. Because hardware was scarce, they had devised a team approach to tear-down and rebuild that let them accomplish it in 2 minutes flat (vs. typically 20-45 minutes for an adult). Thus they were able to showcase many original designs in less than an hour.
The highest-performing assembly was designed by a girl, a fact that none of the students thought unusual or remarkable. They just said, "We saved Nancy's for last because it's the fastest!"
To me, this experience is a strong argument for mixed-gender sci/tech enrichment, especially in neighborhoods with otherwise poor infrastructure.
For the love of sanity, the parent post has to be the stupidest one I've ever read!
"How would you feel if for the sake of arguement the eventual winner of the X-Prize were to become the MS of space exploration, with almost total control over who does what in space."
What you're describing, of course is NASA, an agency founded to beat the USSR and establish a monopoly on all space activity. Guess what? NASA succeeded! The only thing it failed to do is die gracefully when it accomplished its mission.
"What will the visa requirements be for landing on Planet Microsoft I wonder ?"
One hell of a lot less stringent than the process of getting into the Astronaut Corps. Americans have been paying billions a year for this elitist little club to play with food in space. When do we get to go? For 40 years, NASA has not reduced the price of manned space access by one blue cent, not that you could buy a ticket at any price. Dennis Tito tried. NASA laughed him off. So he went to the only place that believes in private space enterprise - Russia! And guess which agency fought him tooth and nail every step of the way? NASA!
Don't kid yourself. NASA has no incentive to make manned space flight cheap because that would weaken the barriers to competition - making their political mandate to control the space frontier that much less defensible.
If you want a visa to anywhere else in the universe, you'd better hope the private sector wins this battle against runaway bureaucracy. Just like a century ago, when you would have done well to place your transportation bets on greedy bastards like Henry Ford or the Wright Brothers.
It's not the bill "as introduced" that I fear as a small operator, it's the special interests who got it on the table in the first place and who are now trying to lower that $5M cap to $25K-$50K.
This would kill artists like me who might have only five different items for sale online. Maintaining fifty accounts and cutting and sending 200 forms and checks per year would put me the hell out of business. The accounting alone - not even the taxes - would run me an additional $3K-$10K/year.
The Internet let artists like me sell direct to our adoring fans, without having to be Big Media's little ho. Right now I keep 96% of every sale I make, and it's enough to live on. I'm in the game because my customers like my stuff, not because some Moneybags picked me out of 100 competing acts and offered me 8%.
Make no mistake. If you're an artist in any media including code, all the Moneybags in this biz (Mr. Bezos included) want is a whopping cut of your revenue stream, or to cut you out of the business entirely, so consumers are forced to buy their stuff. So they're buying all the channels and government officials they can, and trying like mad to shut down every alternative.
Average salary of a State Legislator: $30K. Average amount spent lobbying them: $130K - Harper's
If bad PR is the price, it's a relatively small one compared to the size of the problem.
Whoever said that has never sold music for a living.
Money is whatever we agree it is. Music customers agree to buy based on notoriously fickle perceptions. Lose the faith, lose the customer. That's why PR is delicate, and that's why it makes or breaks every act. How, then, did the promoters, who know this and who once owned the industry, let the lawyers seize control, and start running it into the ground?
As many posters have noted, pop music promotion, which is targeted at teens and pre-teens, has become blatantly sexualized.
As an (ahem) modest proposal, perhaps it would make sense to introduce a hostile amendment to the bill to identify and outlaw those communications companies and media which have the longest history of targeting children with sexual content, starting with the largest, most organized and egregious offenders: Sony Music and Universal Music.
Any bets on how long this bill would take to die in committee?
I stopped buying in 2001 when Sony and Universal started sneaking copy-protected CDs into stores. Doesn't matter how long it lasted or how many copies were tainted. They threatened my OS and lost my trust.
Trust = sales. I sell my art (and no one else's) as downloads. Sometimes people ask for a freebie. I just say get it from a friend (it's not copy-protected) or buy it from me with guarantees and the latest tweaks. I get googled a lot, and people figure I'm OK, so they buy. I keep 96% of each sale, and spend about a third of that on publicity. Sales have doubled each of four years running and it's become a good living.
So let the big boys death-spiral their shiny plastic all they want. If they think this is all about price, then whoosh, they missed another train. People won't expose their credit cards to those they no longer trust.
Slashdot Mirror
That's exactly why I don't have children. I know my genetic code has some flaws in it. I will do what I can to make it through this life, and then die. The 'weird' and otherwise imperfect DNA will die with me instead of being perpetuated.
While your reproductive choice is, of course, your decision, no one is smart enough to second-guess evolution. "Survival of the fittest" is actually just shorthand for selection pressure, which favors different specific traits in different environments. As environments change, what was "fit" yesterday now fails. So over time, it is the range or diversity of traits within the species as a whole that determines its viability.
There are many examples: in humans, slow metabolic rates confer advantages in famine, sickle cell anemia combats malaria, etc. I speculate that severe depression and other mental illnesses are intimately tied to the processes required for creativity and cognition.
Evolution isn't your decision because you cannot know the future, or what selection pressures are in store for humanity.
"There is no beauty which hath not some strangeness in its proportion." - Shakespeare
Unless new models of distribution can be created which connect the content creators directly with the content users.
"Content creators/users" is totally corporate-centric terminology. The web already does a great job of linking (ahem) artists to their audiences. As you guessed, pay per view is not far from my specific distribution model. I update my main product about once a month. Customers get the original download and all updates (to the next full version) if they buy a copy. That also grants them access to support/friendly banter. But I don't mind at all if, for example, a teacher makes copies for an entire class, because all support/downloads route through the teacher. About the time the semester ends, I get a flurry of purchases (and fan letters) from the students, their friends and relatives.
Unlike pay-per-view, my model does let people own the downloads and do whatever they want with them. But the downloads start to seem stale in a few months; those who actually buy always have the slickest version.
As I understand it, this sort of "bootleg-friendly" distribution model worked well for the Greatful Dead, Metallica, and others, even before it was trivially easy (via www) to link artists with their audiences.
Yes, media companies will fight to own all distribution of old content. But watch out for the hardware companies. They're already trying to own all distribution of new content. It's slick. Just visit their online store, download the content, and it only runs on your phone/PDA/laptop/whatever. Until it breaks, that is.
As an artist, you'd think I'd just love this scheme. Hah! The problem is, once a company thinks it owns your distribution, it thinks it owns you! When I fell for DRM and the lure of easy money, all of a sudden I was spending months fighting to retain designs and customer relationships that had taken years to refine. All this fussing cut into my productivity, and my fans noticed.
For the record, when I dropped copy protection completely, sales doubled almost immediately.
So don't be fooled by the current battle between the media and hardware companies. They're just fighting for who gets to own the artists and milk their audience. I'm not falling for it again, and I hope you won't, either.
I see in my mind's eye several hawaiian shirt and sunglasses wearing citizens ... Is humankind so pathetic that the only reason we want to go into space is to expand the tourism industry?
Thanks for your application to the Celestial Fashion Police. Indeed, the Galaxy needs hand-picked uniformed police like you to turn away millions of ugly space tourists at the airlock.
We've heard reports that some of these unsightly revelers have been sneaking aboard shuttles under false credentials as space adventure travelers. As you know, this term is reserved for Buzz Aldrin, Captain Picard, and a handful of other hand-picked people who look good on TV.
As you know, everyone was born in the same big universe, and born curious about it. Yes, even the teeming masses of People with Too Much Hair Who Still Think Black Doc Martins Are Rad. Better that the cosmos should remain sterile and lifeless than populated with uncool people who overstay their welcome, and invent all sorts of unsanctioned space arts, sports and societies.
So Welcome, Sherrif. Welcome to the Celestial Fashion Constabulary. Say, is that an M-star in your badge? You know, with your eyes, you could probably get away with an O or B star, and those are soooo popular these days...
Dear Coward:
Every point is obvious once you get it, but you still don't. Don't pout! You're not in bad company. Every astronautics student I've ever met and even one astronaut candidate I know were off by at least an order of magnitude when they guessed the fuel cost of space access.
The consequence of this misconception is too much emphasis on fuel efficiency, and not enough on operational efficiency. For example, what if you built a shuttle that cost half as much to turn around between flights by having such massive tankage and engines that it had to burn 10x as much fuel to put each kg into orbit? The vehicle would be 2.15x bigger than the Shuttle in each dimension and its fixed cost would be 10x as much (per your intuition). But for Shuttle, fixed cost is on the order of 1% of the total cost when you run it out to 100 flights. OK, now your fixed cost is 16%, and fuel is 8%. By pink-slipping half the standing army of 6,000 people required to turn the Shuttle around, you've still managed to make space 65% more accessible on a fixed budget.
(BTW, this example is very unfair to Rutan, XCOR and a few others working on robust, reusable launch systems of moderate performance. These guys are targeting operations cost reductions well in excess of 90%, with much less mass gain than in my example. Also, reduced operational demand can result in a higher flight rate and longer vehicle life - a virtuous design cycle. Rutan et al are aiming to make space more than 1,000% more accessible.)
Engineers lured by the siren song of fuel efficiency have also often chosen exotic, toxic, low-density, and/or cryogenic fuels. All of these qualities increase dry mass a little and operations expense by a lot when compared to boring old kerosene or alcohol. All offer very modest gains in performance for a first stage or during early stages of flight, when you burn the most fuel.
So, Dude, to sum up, you correctly assumed fuel volume would relate to fixed cost, but incorrectly assumed fixed cost was dominant. You also did not even try the exercise I left for you in the prior post, so you flat-out missed the fact that operational costs dominate. Too bad. Operations is the most decisive factor WRT how soon you you'll be able to buy a ticket to orbit.
A very large portion of the overall mass (and price) of current space transport is just the fuel to get out of the atmosphere.
A perfect statement of one of the most persistent and erroneous misconceptions in astronautics. Price it out: rockets typically burn on the order of 200kg fuel to put a kg payload into orbit (double this for manned, halve it for simplest payloads). LOX is around $0.16 (USD)/kg and kerosene around $0.40 (USD)/kg. Burning 2.5:1, you pay $0.22/kg fuel, or $45 per kg into orbit. Now add tankage, engines/motors (hella pricey, used once and tossed or essentially rebuilt), systems integration, logistics, infrastructure, admin overhead, and you get ~$9,000/kg delivered. Fuel is only 0.5% of the total cost. It is left as an exercise to the reader to figure out why our space program is so inefficient.
To recap this week's lesson for rocket scientists and voters: know some numbers before throwing your weight behind multibillion USD expenditures.
Sources: astronautix.com; Wertz, Space Mission Analysis and Design, 2nd ed., Microcosm: 1992, p. 731.
I would like to see a more detailed analysis of his cost estimates -- $15 billion seems rather low for "developing a new, more flexible launch vehicle," designing a sophisticated (and large) long-life station, shipping the thing up to L1 point, and assembling it.
Yup. Building a new ISS and putting it 700 times farther away, out in the searing radiation beyond the Van Allen belts, is going to cost more. ISS cost $100 billion , so I shudder to think what Buzz' rig would cost. Throw in logistics and the usual geopolitical tug-of war, and you'd better tack on one or two more zeros to the price.
BTW, I've dined with Buzz. He's a hella nice guy who asks a lot of questions, is generous with his ideas, and is patient with the tongue-tied adoration of space freaks such as myself and the two others who joined us. That's why it's so shocking to see him suggest something with such completely bogus numbers as this.
Nothing gets America going more than a little competition.
Bah. Competition to do what? Have a few Taikonauts and Astronauts, hand-picked by Government Committees, plant a few flags and conduct sanitized, comittee-screened research? Old story. 45 years old. How much more accessible has space become since then?
If you want to celebrate your anniversary some day by getting wild in orbit, or see your children walk on the Moon or Mars, just hope this Moon Race blows over before too many people defect from X-prize teams to cushy, go-nowhere jobs with NASA.
XCOR isn't shooting for the X-prize, so there's nothing to bet about here. They seem to be following a longer-term strategy, aiming at markets with far greater value than the X-prize purse. That is probably why XCOR has been much more serious than the X-Prize teams about getting their regulatory ducks in line.
Regarding capability, Rutan hasn't built a rocket plane that's taken off and landed multiple times under its own rocket power. XCOR has, a couple years ago. Admittedly, they did it by modifying a Rutan kit plane of late 70's vintage. But the astonishing thing is XCOR achieved winged flight with two full-scale liquid rockets at something like 1/20 Rutan's rumored budget for SpaceShip One, which itself is slated to use a simpler composite rocket. Also note that XCOR's EZ Rocket was approved for use at an air show. Successful regulatory legwork, again. Tech is only half the battle when your real prize is taking the lead in a new industry.
As long as you're using rockets and not transporter beams or beanstalks, you have to fly through the air to get to orbit. That's the FAA's baliwick.
The FAA had its roots in the Air Commerce Act of 1926, a year before Lindberg's transatlantic flight. The Air Commerce Act created a series of agencies whose whole point was promoting safe air commerce. Emphasis on commerce. 45 years after the act was passed, you could fly just about anywhere in the world on a jet. That's what I call success, and this is lineage of agencies to talk to if you want to start selling tickets to orbit. Heaven forbid you should talk to NASA, which has been around for 45 years, thinks they own space itself, and distains commerce.
Several years ago I did some science enrichment work with a Boys and Girls' club in South Central LA. It was a mixed-gender group of 11-13 year-olds from the surrounding neighborhood (a scary 'hood, too: bars in every window, pit bulls in every yard, and burned-out vehicles and graffiti everywhere). The counselors held the children to very high standards of conduct, so we never encountered gender issues in the lab.
BTW, in several hundred presentations to groups ranging from pre-school through grad school, I have never seen students dive into a technology project with as much drive and intelligence. After 2 weeks with Lego Mindstorms and books about remote exploration, we held a final showcase. After my brief lecture about remote environments, every last student was just bursting with questions. Some questions were better than I had heard anywhere else. We then broke for technical demos. Because hardware was scarce, they had devised a team approach to tear-down and rebuild that let them accomplish it in 2 minutes flat (vs. typically 20-45 minutes for an adult). Thus they were able to showcase many original designs in less than an hour.
The highest-performing assembly was designed by a girl, a fact that none of the students thought unusual or remarkable. They just said, "We saved Nancy's for last because it's the fastest!"
To me, this experience is a strong argument for mixed-gender sci/tech enrichment, especially in neighborhoods with otherwise poor infrastructure.
For the love of sanity, the parent post has to be the stupidest one I've ever read!
"How would you feel if for the sake of arguement the eventual winner of the X-Prize were to become the MS of space exploration, with almost total control over who does what in space."
What you're describing, of course is NASA, an agency founded to beat the USSR and establish a monopoly on all space activity. Guess what? NASA succeeded! The only thing it failed to do is die gracefully when it accomplished its mission.
"What will the visa requirements be for landing on Planet Microsoft I wonder ?"
One hell of a lot less stringent than the process of getting into the Astronaut Corps. Americans have been paying billions a year for this elitist little club to play with food in space. When do we get to go? For 40 years, NASA has not reduced the price of manned space access by one blue cent, not that you could buy a ticket at any price. Dennis Tito tried. NASA laughed him off. So he went to the only place that believes in private space enterprise - Russia! And guess which agency fought him tooth and nail every step of the way? NASA!
Don't kid yourself. NASA has no incentive to make manned space flight cheap because that would weaken the barriers to competition - making their political mandate to control the space frontier that much less defensible.
If you want a visa to anywhere else in the universe, you'd better hope the private sector wins this battle against runaway bureaucracy. Just like a century ago, when you would have done well to place your transportation bets on greedy bastards like Henry Ford or the Wright Brothers.
It's not the bill "as introduced" that I fear as a small operator, it's the special interests who got it on the table in the first place and who are now trying to lower that $5M cap to $25K-$50K.
This would kill artists like me who might have only five different items for sale online. Maintaining fifty accounts and cutting and sending 200 forms and checks per year would put me the hell out of business. The accounting alone - not even the taxes - would run me an additional $3K-$10K/year.
The Internet let artists like me sell direct to our adoring fans, without having to be Big Media's little ho. Right now I keep 96% of every sale I make, and it's enough to live on. I'm in the game because my customers like my stuff, not because some Moneybags picked me out of 100 competing acts and offered me 8%.
Make no mistake. If you're an artist in any media including code, all the Moneybags in this biz (Mr. Bezos included) want is a whopping cut of your revenue stream, or to cut you out of the business entirely, so consumers are forced to buy their stuff. So they're buying all the channels and government officials they can, and trying like mad to shut down every alternative.
Average salary of a State Legislator: $30K. Average amount spent lobbying them: $130K - Harper's
If bad PR is the price, it's a relatively small one compared to the size of the problem.
Whoever said that has never sold music for a living.
Money is whatever we agree it is. Music customers agree to buy based on notoriously fickle perceptions. Lose the faith, lose the customer. That's why PR is delicate, and that's why it makes or breaks every act. How, then, did the promoters, who know this and who once owned the industry, let the lawyers seize control, and start running it into the ground?
As many posters have noted, pop music promotion, which is targeted at teens and pre-teens, has become blatantly sexualized.
As an (ahem) modest proposal, perhaps it would make sense to introduce a hostile amendment to the bill to identify and outlaw those communications companies and media which have the longest history of targeting children with sexual content, starting with the largest, most organized and egregious offenders: Sony Music and Universal Music.
Any bets on how long this bill would take to die in committee?
I stopped buying in 2001 when Sony and Universal started sneaking copy-protected CDs into stores. Doesn't matter how long it lasted or how many copies were tainted. They threatened my OS and lost my trust.
Trust = sales. I sell my art (and no one else's) as downloads. Sometimes people ask for a freebie. I just say get it from a friend (it's not copy-protected) or buy it from me with guarantees and the latest tweaks. I get googled a lot, and people figure I'm OK, so they buy. I keep 96% of each sale, and spend about a third of that on publicity. Sales have doubled each of four years running and it's become a good living.
So let the big boys death-spiral their shiny plastic all they want. If they think this is all about price, then whoosh, they missed another train. People won't expose their credit cards to those they no longer trust.