Ah. Just out of curiosity, how would you get all of that there? Truck and trains? All those truck and trains converging into one mega-city?
Not gonna happen - even if this were Star Trek days and they could do it with those flying transport thingys.
Sorry just to clarify, this is a hypothetical, although I could probably make a good case for it if I set my mind to it, we use a ridiculously small amount of the total rainfall that lands, and aqueducts are a technology thousands of years old, plus if they can supply gas from Russia to most of Europe by pipe they can certainly do so for water. No, the intention is to highlight that the earth's resources aren't even mildly stretched, there is plenty of capacity unused, and we are on the cusp of tapping the resources of the solar system, and what a day that will be!
The answer seems to be to make life better for all those people. As quality of living goes up, population growth seems to go down. We have low, even negative, growth in many first world nations.
Bingo, thats it in a nutshell. The future lies not in slums but in creating conditions such that everyone experiences or has the chance to experience a "first world" lifestyle. This is likely to send many environmentalists into a fit, but it is the only possible solution barring mass extermination which some *cough malthusians* might in fact favour.
Can the earth handle such a solution? Sure, the earth doesn't care one way or the other, its a ball of insensate rock. Will the resources available be sufficient? Yes, if they aren't immediately available more difficult to reach ones become economical to plumb. As far as energy goes we are swimming in the stuff, literally, food, there is already more than enough to make sure everyone has a good meal three times a day. The rest comes down to planning and socioeconomic strategy.
You should read up on Byzantine (thats the Eastern Roman Empire city) efforts to control population many many hundreds of years ago - the more things change, the more they stay the same. As the population expands, so too does our ability to deal with its demands. You could fit the entire population of the earth very comfortably in an area the size of Texas, thats a plot of land for each man, woman and child. Obviously something like that would need careful planning and probably subsurface transport infrastructure etc, not that I'm advocating a single megacity. Their food and energy needs could be readily taken care of by using the rest of North America, leaving everywhere else completely empty.
*Knowing* they dream of slums of totally impoverished illegal aliens is even more frightening.
It is indeed getting very worrying. The use of hate and fear is a well known political tool, and the increasing proficiency of these groups in using this tool along with media manipulation techniques is quite dangerous. They would have us hate and fear the air that we breathe (carbon emissions), our quality of life (just about everything), even hate and fear our own children (malthusian nuts, I'm looking at you).
There are issues with the environment, yes. We should reduce harmful pollutants, of course, and aim to reduce our general ecological footprint since we don't need to reduce biodiversity in order to thrive, not any more at least. Its just not best practise. But we don't need to go into a self flagellating spiral of self destruction in order to achieve that, far from it.
I find it interesting that you mention Stalinists also, since there is in my experience a strong connection between extreme leftist groups and eco-extremists. It is established doctrine among overtly communist organisations to infiltrate new movements and co-opt them into pushing their own agenda. Case in point the Green party here in Ireland has "redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor" as a central focus of their party constitution, what does that have to do with Green issues? Not to go all McCarthyist on the situation, but it is irksome to see perfectly good new ideas and movements utterly ruined by these bearded cultists.
After a while the pigeon(s) had all created their own unique an complex dance that they would start endlessly performing whenever the dispenser was introduced to their cage.
As for measuring time - you can have instances where nothing changes BUT the time - so thus begs the question, what is time if nothing changes?
Time has effectively ceased if nothing has changed, therefore time is nothing. You've answered your own question, time does not exist, only matter and energy. Rates of change are simply questions of quantities of energy applied.
Okay, just to clarify a few things, as others have pointed out NASA is already open sourcing much of its technology, thats how SpaceShipOne and those built and launched as they have. These were not developed independently as you assert. Also the proposal contains many elements which do exactly as you outline, except instead of an X Prize you get your financial benefit in lower taxes instead of a lump sum, just as good if not better. This does not preclude mutliple competing designs, far from it.
Some technical elements would be completely useless for anything but space however, and so might need to be directly subsidised. The open source idea you mention was also mentioned in the proposal, if you look above you there, Legislation for the open sharing of relevant information within existing intellectual property laws would also be needed to further cooperation between private and public organisations.
I honestly have no idea where you got communism out of that, unless you just didn't understand how thse things usually work. Its a standard public private partnership like the one which built the roads in the US among other things, spread internationally.
I'm simply saying, you're proposing a grand unified activity for a large group of people, when you can't even find a sample of a subset of, I'd even bet 100,000 people, who agree on that vision. I'd bet you'd find at least one person among every 100,000 who would fight to the death to sustain some backwards belief like, the sun revolves around the earth, or the earth is 5000 years old, and there's no need to colonize space because the saints are all going to be raptured by their savior.
Its a point well made, but the endgame of what I'm proposing is 100" plasma TVs for a few dollars; I'd wager those beliefs will waver in the face of a deal like that. Its not what you're selling, its how you sell it.;-)
tin-pot dictator in a country that can currently afford to buy a Boeing 727 had easy access to orbit for about the same price, it would only be a matter of time before someone loaded up one of those ships with as much ceramic coated rebar as the thing could carry.
Without the risk of being nuked or rebar-ed in retaliation?
Your over-thinking this. It is highly unlikely that this politician even read the plan (which he claims lacks any vision) that has been put on the table. So, would modifying the plan with a better vision or strategy or other additional elements really help? He will not read the new plan either.
I kind of left him behind after the first paragraph.;-) Besides, who knows, many people read slashdot.
I think the idea of a global plan is a bad idea. First, we only have one example of international cooperation on a space project of that scale, the International Space Station. IMHO, it's international nature has been one of the crucial reasons (dependence on the Shuttle being another one) for a tremendous cost run up.
Indeed, we only have one example.
It's worth noting here that NASA has generated a tremendous amount of value in exploring this technology tree. There's no question that recent vehicle developments have been due to prior NASA research. Yet at the same time, it is clear that NASA itself doesn't have the same capability to develop vehicles.
Which is why the public-private partnership model is proposed above. Pressure governments to provide incentives for this prgramme, in terms of taxation and legislation, and let private companies do the rest. Although some of it like microgee manufacturing probably wouldn't have any practical uses on earth and so would have to be directly subsidised.
For there to be a next wave, we have to make some fundamental scientific progress. E.g. a space elevator is not merely a matter of improved engineering, we need some real breakthroughs in material sciences.
Ah but therein lies the rub. Once we know what we are going to do up there (mine and refine available resources, extending to highly automated manufacturing) we have in fact got engineering goals which can be attained and used to build towards the milestones. For example, if we were to set up a LEO fuel dump, launched via cannon or similar mechanism, it would resolve many difficult problems by itself. Similarly, a railgun-type macrolauncher stretching for several tens of kilometers might divide launch costs by a large amount. I've never been a fan of the space elevator concept myself, for reasons you have outlined, but many small step will a journey make.
What this proposal endeavours to do is make as many of those steps profitable as we go along - for example a new kind of crane arm mechanism might be funded by this agency and sold to construction companies, but much of the engineering would be perfectly applicable to manipulating rough ore loads prior to refinement in orbit, etc.
SpaceX and Virgin Galactic have already created launch systems independently. They could do much more if they had access to NASA's vast collections of information about what does and doesn't work for spaceflight.
How much of the existing knowledge of space flight would even be there in the first place if not for government investment? This isn't the internal combustion engine we're talking about, its a very long and deep tree of technology with limited practical uses until you reach a reasonably high level. This plan attempts to isolate the profitable parts of the tree en route and subisidise the rest, with the whol ultimately becoming not just self sustaining but a source of infinite resources for the population of earth.
Out of curiosity, why is the survival of the human race so important?
Why is the survival of life so important? Because as far as we know, humanity is the one and only chance for some of the earths biodiversity to ultimately survive. It took maybe more than half of the earths history for sentient life to arise, if it gets wiped out what are the odds it will happen again? Stewards indeed. On the other hand if you are content to see all life as we know it wiped out, theres not much more that can be said.
Are we that important to the galaxy or the universe that the survival of the human race is of such paramount importance? Seems like a bit of hubris to me.
The galaxy and earth in general are pretty hostile places. Why should we care what they think?
Its probably a more well thought out overall plan he had in mind. While the many successes achieved by groups like NASA are well worth celebrating, I share the dismay no doubt many people hold at recent and ongoing setbacks in the development of the future goals of space exploration. The central issuing facing Space groups, as I see it, is a lack of a single unified plan, a step by step global strategy to move mankind into space which takes account of commercial, economic, resource based and political realities, which is achievable within a reasonable timeframe. The piecemeal method of pushing progress forward is effective only insofar as there is public and governmental momentum in the area - something which has been falling off of late. In the face of such an environment, piecemeal efforts might not be as effective as otherwise.
What I would propose for the future, therefore, is the formulation of such a strategy, clearly laid out and with recognisable milestones, goals, estimated returns on investment, and timelines. I think that the provision of such a structure will remove the dependence space exploration has on fragmented projects and provide a key benefit that has so far been absent - direction, in cooperation with other national space agencies.
In addition to the points mentioned above, an official strategy group could talk to politicians and businesspeople in a language they can understand. One of the first goals after the strategy would be agreed upon would be to confirm its legitimacy at the international level, in the USA, EU, UN and other international forums. The next step would be to get an international fund set up in order to secure a set percentage of GDP of each nation (possibly only developed nations) to be put towards space exploration. Even if one thosandth of national GDP was set aside by each nation, that would come to some $60 billion annually, or several times the budget of the combined existing space agencies.
This would be similar to foreign aid funds, although probably of a lesser amount, and would instantly multiply the budget available to space exploration groups by a fairly serious amount. Legislation would also be needed in order to provide international tax incentives for corporations and governments to focus their efforts on areas that would be conducive to space exploration and resource realisation, even tangentially. Legislation for the open sharing of relevant information within existing intellectual property laws would also be needed to further coopeation between private and public organisations, plus and this a vital part of the effort, the standardisation of equipment and systems to make them interchangeable.
A few further points:
Why would my nation wish to contribute to this effort?
In addition to the well known issues of potentially life threatening hazards on earth, whether environmental, asteroid strikes, or contagion, and it is not a question of if but when they will recur - they have already happened many times previously - there is the question of the vast resources available in space. By contributing on an annual basis according to its means, each nation and its citizens has a legitimate claim on the unfathomable amount of raw material which can be accessed by a properly run space programme.
What would this Global Space Initiative involve?
This group and strategy would have several purposes.
1. To create a master strategy for the human colonisation of space, taking into account the many different social and economic factors that would be involved.
2. To identify key early technologies that would be needed to realise the strategy, provide funding to create these technologies, and pressure governments to provide legislative and taxation benefits to groups developing them. There are a wide array of scientific and engineering feats that must be overcome before the reality of space exploration is commonly available. These would include things like semi autonomous robotics in order to take advantage of
It's also a western state old-timer in joke. The Irish immigrants actually WERE at the bottom of the social totem pole, below blacks and Chinese.
Despite which they managed to put eight presidents (around a fifth of the total number of US presidents) and many more generals into power. The seventh president of the US, Andrew Jackson, had parents born and raised in Ireland - does not compute, I'm afraid.
(Much of Oregon, for instance, was settled by people who moved en masse from Boston, after a government driven by the Irish instituted pro-Catholic religious persecution and book censorship - in that former bastion of revolutionary freedom.)
Now switch the image of the typical individual from a thin ascetic to a big, strong, alcoholic, street-mob brawler. THAT is how the Irish were perceived.
To be honest I think that perception was held by a lot fewer people than you're making out here, unless you're talking about those who would have been doing the persecution back in Europe (WASPs). How else does an Irishman become Father of the United States Navy?
Look again. That 32.1c for "Publisher's Paper, Printing and Editorial Costs" includes "record keeping, billing, publisher’s offices, employee’s salaries and benefits". Most of that is still going to be applicable to eBooks.
It also says distribution, although distribution is its own section on their money chart. Also correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't all that stuff paid out of the publisher's cut? Which also has its own section? And it doesn't give a percentage breakdown of costs within each section - other posts in this thread (including one from an accountant in publishing) seem to put the paper part at around 30%, which isn't too far out.
All this aside, at the end of the day I still don't see it as being a really viable long term career to be an author or publisher. E-ink has killed it.
To give you an idea of the cost breakdown, look here. Diagram is for textbooks; trade publishing is a bit different, but not wildly so. As you can see, freight is a very small part of the cost, and (it's not clear from the diagram) but printing is not a huge contributor, either. It's mostly editorial and administrative fees, author royalties, sub-licensing, and taxes
Printing looks like its around a third of the cost of the book, add in store costs and distribution and you could probably half the cost of an ebook all in. I know that digital distribution and storage aren't cost free, but there is a huge difference between that and the infrastrcuture required to grow, transport, process, and produce all the elements required in a normal book, enough that its fair to say its essentially cost free. When you have videos being uploaded for nothing and shown to the general population, books are trivial. As for transcripting to ebook format, if thats not done automatically as part of the production process, something is very wrong with your process.
What I'd imagine the future looks like for the literary or publishing world would be small, independent editing and marketing companies competing alongside shopfronts to produce works of literature, and authors will be able to move easily (less contractual obligations) from one to the next depending on quality of service and cost. Less well known authors might have to pay upfront, better known authors will be able to negotiate a percentage of sales, sales which will be higher in volume because of the ease of access you get via the internet.
As for DRM, thats always going to be broken, which combined with ebook reading qualities is going to make it difficult to make a living as an author in the future. The technology will ultimately be there, make no mistake. If something is going for free on the torrent networks, you'll always get a certain, perhaps large, percentage of people who will take that first rather than pay for an ebook. Musicians can make up the difference through live performances, movies will make money via the cinemas (another form of live performance), books, well thats a different story if you will excuse the pun.
If you can vat-grow organs in the first place, whyever would you choose to grow them in *space* where the gravity field is wonky and muscles and bones atrophy?
Same reason you would put any industrial processes and plants in space, its something you'd rather not have on earth. Plus from orbit you can land on any spot on earth within minutes, a huge advantage for medical applications. Gravity is fairly easy to deal with even today by spinning the stations or infrstructure that needs spinning.
Cheaper and healthier all round to just deploy that same technology on Earth.
Not if all or most of your dirt cheap resources are in space!;-)
The only thing space has more of is sunlight, vacuum, and microgravity.
And those effectively infinite resources floating around waiting for someone to take them.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only do I think this is a little sick on the part of the blackhats
A little sick? These swine are long overdue a greeting from a gnarled set of knuckles, methinks.
Ah. Just out of curiosity, how would you get all of that there? Truck and trains? All those truck and trains converging into one mega-city?
Not gonna happen - even if this were Star Trek days and they could do it with those flying transport thingys.
Sorry just to clarify, this is a hypothetical, although I could probably make a good case for it if I set my mind to it, we use a ridiculously small amount of the total rainfall that lands, and aqueducts are a technology thousands of years old, plus if they can supply gas from Russia to most of Europe by pipe they can certainly do so for water. No, the intention is to highlight that the earth's resources aren't even mildly stretched, there is plenty of capacity unused, and we are on the cusp of tapping the resources of the solar system, and what a day that will be!
The answer seems to be to make life better for all those people. As quality of living goes up, population growth seems to go down. We have low, even negative, growth in many first world nations.
Bingo, thats it in a nutshell. The future lies not in slums but in creating conditions such that everyone experiences or has the chance to experience a "first world" lifestyle. This is likely to send many environmentalists into a fit, but it is the only possible solution barring mass extermination which some *cough malthusians* might in fact favour.
Can the earth handle such a solution? Sure, the earth doesn't care one way or the other, its a ball of insensate rock. Will the resources available be sufficient? Yes, if they aren't immediately available more difficult to reach ones become economical to plumb. As far as energy goes we are swimming in the stuff, literally, food, there is already more than enough to make sure everyone has a good meal three times a day. The rest comes down to planning and socioeconomic strategy.
You should read up on Byzantine (thats the Eastern Roman Empire city) efforts to control population many many hundreds of years ago - the more things change, the more they stay the same. As the population expands, so too does our ability to deal with its demands. You could fit the entire population of the earth very comfortably in an area the size of Texas, thats a plot of land for each man, woman and child. Obviously something like that would need careful planning and probably subsurface transport infrastructure etc, not that I'm advocating a single megacity. Their food and energy needs could be readily taken care of by using the rest of North America, leaving everywhere else completely empty.
*Knowing* they dream of slums of totally impoverished illegal aliens is even more frightening.
It is indeed getting very worrying. The use of hate and fear is a well known political tool, and the increasing proficiency of these groups in using this tool along with media manipulation techniques is quite dangerous. They would have us hate and fear the air that we breathe (carbon emissions), our quality of life (just about everything), even hate and fear our own children (malthusian nuts, I'm looking at you).
There are issues with the environment, yes. We should reduce harmful pollutants, of course, and aim to reduce our general ecological footprint since we don't need to reduce biodiversity in order to thrive, not any more at least. Its just not best practise. But we don't need to go into a self flagellating spiral of self destruction in order to achieve that, far from it.
I find it interesting that you mention Stalinists also, since there is in my experience a strong connection between extreme leftist groups and eco-extremists. It is established doctrine among overtly communist organisations to infiltrate new movements and co-opt them into pushing their own agenda. Case in point the Green party here in Ireland has "redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor" as a central focus of their party constitution, what does that have to do with Green issues? Not to go all McCarthyist on the situation, but it is irksome to see perfectly good new ideas and movements utterly ruined by these bearded cultists.
After a while the pigeon(s) had all created their own unique an complex dance that they would start endlessly performing whenever the dispenser was introduced to their cage.
I would pay good money to see that.
As for measuring time - you can have instances where nothing changes BUT the time - so thus begs the question, what is time if nothing changes?
Time has effectively ceased if nothing has changed, therefore time is nothing. You've answered your own question, time does not exist, only matter and energy. Rates of change are simply questions of quantities of energy applied.
There is no time. Only mass and energy.
Okay, just to clarify a few things, as others have pointed out NASA is already open sourcing much of its technology, thats how SpaceShipOne and those built and launched as they have. These were not developed independently as you assert. Also the proposal contains many elements which do exactly as you outline, except instead of an X Prize you get your financial benefit in lower taxes instead of a lump sum, just as good if not better. This does not preclude mutliple competing designs, far from it.
Some technical elements would be completely useless for anything but space however, and so might need to be directly subsidised. The open source idea you mention was also mentioned in the proposal, if you look above you there, Legislation for the open sharing of relevant information within existing intellectual property laws would also be needed to further cooperation between private and public organisations.
I honestly have no idea where you got communism out of that, unless you just didn't understand how thse things usually work. Its a standard public private partnership like the one which built the roads in the US among other things, spread internationally.
I'm simply saying, you're proposing a grand unified activity for a large group of people, when you can't even find a sample of a subset of, I'd even bet 100,000 people, who agree on that vision. I'd bet you'd find at least one person among every 100,000 who would fight to the death to sustain some backwards belief like, the sun revolves around the earth, or the earth is 5000 years old, and there's no need to colonize space because the saints are all going to be raptured by their savior.
Its a point well made, but the endgame of what I'm proposing is 100" plasma TVs for a few dollars; I'd wager those beliefs will waver in the face of a deal like that. Its not what you're selling, its how you sell it. ;-)
tin-pot dictator in a country that can currently afford to buy a Boeing 727 had easy access to orbit for about the same price, it would only be a matter of time before someone loaded up one of those ships with as much ceramic coated rebar as the thing could carry.
Without the risk of being nuked or rebar-ed in retaliation?
Your over-thinking this. It is highly unlikely that this politician even read the plan (which he claims lacks any vision) that has been put on the table. So, would modifying the plan with a better vision or strategy or other additional elements really help? He will not read the new plan either.
I kind of left him behind after the first paragraph. ;-) Besides, who knows, many people read slashdot.
I think the idea of a global plan is a bad idea. First, we only have one example of international cooperation on a space project of that scale, the International Space Station. IMHO, it's international nature has been one of the crucial reasons (dependence on the Shuttle being another one) for a tremendous cost run up.
Indeed, we only have one example.
It's worth noting here that NASA has generated a tremendous amount of value in exploring this technology tree. There's no question that recent vehicle developments have been due to prior NASA research. Yet at the same time, it is clear that NASA itself doesn't have the same capability to develop vehicles.
Which is why the public-private partnership model is proposed above. Pressure governments to provide incentives for this prgramme, in terms of taxation and legislation, and let private companies do the rest. Although some of it like microgee manufacturing probably wouldn't have any practical uses on earth and so would have to be directly subsidised.
For there to be a next wave, we have to make some fundamental scientific progress. E.g. a space elevator is not merely a matter of improved engineering, we need some real breakthroughs in material sciences.
Ah but therein lies the rub. Once we know what we are going to do up there (mine and refine available resources, extending to highly automated manufacturing) we have in fact got engineering goals which can be attained and used to build towards the milestones. For example, if we were to set up a LEO fuel dump, launched via cannon or similar mechanism, it would resolve many difficult problems by itself. Similarly, a railgun-type macrolauncher stretching for several tens of kilometers might divide launch costs by a large amount. I've never been a fan of the space elevator concept myself, for reasons you have outlined, but many small step will a journey make.
What this proposal endeavours to do is make as many of those steps profitable as we go along - for example a new kind of crane arm mechanism might be funded by this agency and sold to construction companies, but much of the engineering would be perfectly applicable to manipulating rough ore loads prior to refinement in orbit, etc.
SpaceX and Virgin Galactic have already created launch systems independently. They could do much more if they had access to NASA's vast collections of information about what does and doesn't work for spaceflight.
How much of the existing knowledge of space flight would even be there in the first place if not for government investment? This isn't the internal combustion engine we're talking about, its a very long and deep tree of technology with limited practical uses until you reach a reasonably high level. This plan attempts to isolate the profitable parts of the tree en route and subisidise the rest, with the whol ultimately becoming not just self sustaining but a source of infinite resources for the population of earth.
Out of curiosity, why is the survival of the human race so important?
Why is the survival of life so important? Because as far as we know, humanity is the one and only chance for some of the earths biodiversity to ultimately survive. It took maybe more than half of the earths history for sentient life to arise, if it gets wiped out what are the odds it will happen again? Stewards indeed. On the other hand if you are content to see all life as we know it wiped out, theres not much more that can be said.
Are we that important to the galaxy or the universe that the survival of the human race is of such paramount importance? Seems like a bit of hubris to me.
The galaxy and earth in general are pretty hostile places. Why should we care what they think?
Its probably a more well thought out overall plan he had in mind. While the many successes achieved by groups like NASA are well worth celebrating, I share the dismay no doubt many people hold at recent and ongoing setbacks in the development of the future goals of space exploration. The central issuing facing Space groups, as I see it, is a lack of a single unified plan, a step by step global strategy to move mankind into space which takes account of commercial, economic, resource based and political realities, which is achievable within a reasonable timeframe. The piecemeal method of pushing progress forward is effective only insofar as there is public and governmental momentum in the area - something which has been falling off of late. In the face of such an environment, piecemeal efforts might not be as effective as otherwise.
What I would propose for the future, therefore, is the formulation of such a strategy, clearly laid out and with recognisable milestones, goals, estimated returns on investment, and timelines. I think that the provision of such a structure will remove the dependence space exploration has on fragmented projects and provide a key benefit that has so far been absent - direction, in cooperation with other national space agencies.
In addition to the points mentioned above, an official strategy group could talk to politicians and businesspeople in a language they can understand. One of the first goals after the strategy would be agreed upon would be to confirm its legitimacy at the international level, in the USA, EU, UN and other international forums. The next step would be to get an international fund set up in order to secure a set percentage of GDP of each nation (possibly only developed nations) to be put towards space exploration. Even if one thosandth of national GDP was set aside by each nation, that would come to some $60 billion annually, or several times the budget of the combined existing space agencies.
This would be similar to foreign aid funds, although probably of a lesser amount, and would instantly multiply the budget available to space exploration groups by a fairly serious amount. Legislation would also be needed in order to provide international tax incentives for corporations and governments to focus their efforts on areas that would be conducive to space exploration and resource realisation, even tangentially. Legislation for the open sharing of relevant information within existing intellectual property laws would also be needed to further coopeation between private and public organisations, plus and this a vital part of the effort, the standardisation of equipment and systems to make them interchangeable.
A few further points:
Why would my nation wish to contribute to this effort?
In addition to the well known issues of potentially life threatening hazards on earth, whether environmental, asteroid strikes, or contagion, and it is not a question of if but when they will recur - they have already happened many times previously - there is the question of the vast resources available in space. By contributing on an annual basis according to its means, each nation and its citizens has a legitimate claim on the unfathomable amount of raw material which can be accessed by a properly run space programme.
What would this Global Space Initiative involve?
This group and strategy would have several purposes.
1. To create a master strategy for the human colonisation of space, taking into account the many different social and economic factors that would be involved.
2. To identify key early technologies that would be needed to realise the strategy, provide funding to create these technologies, and pressure governments to provide legislative and taxation benefits to groups developing them. There are a wide array of scientific and engineering feats that must be overcome before the reality of space exploration is commonly available. These would include things like semi autonomous robotics in order to take advantage of
Apple just removed support for porn. Sell your shares now.
Please, reconsider exactly what it is that you are supporting.
Right backatcha.
My great great grandmother for example brought herself over from Ireland in 1847.
Look up "coffin ships".
It's also a western state old-timer in joke. The Irish immigrants actually WERE at the bottom of the social totem pole, below blacks and Chinese.
Despite which they managed to put eight presidents (around a fifth of the total number of US presidents) and many more generals into power. The seventh president of the US, Andrew Jackson, had parents born and raised in Ireland - does not compute, I'm afraid.
(Much of Oregon, for instance, was settled by people who moved en masse from Boston, after a government driven by the Irish instituted pro-Catholic religious persecution and book censorship - in that former bastion of revolutionary freedom.)
Em, was it not the puritans with their witch-hunts causing religious tolerance problems?
Now switch the image of the typical individual from a thin ascetic to a big, strong, alcoholic, street-mob brawler. THAT is how the Irish were perceived.
To be honest I think that perception was held by a lot fewer people than you're making out here, unless you're talking about those who would have been doing the persecution back in Europe (WASPs). How else does an Irishman become Father of the United States Navy?
This whole thing, the glorious promise, the free internet, is turning into some sort of totalitarian nightmare alright.
Will nobody rid us of these troublesome companies?
Look again. That 32.1c for "Publisher's Paper, Printing and Editorial Costs" includes "record keeping, billing, publisher’s offices, employee’s salaries and benefits". Most of that is still going to be applicable to eBooks.
It also says distribution, although distribution is its own section on their money chart. Also correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't all that stuff paid out of the publisher's cut? Which also has its own section? And it doesn't give a percentage breakdown of costs within each section - other posts in this thread (including one from an accountant in publishing) seem to put the paper part at around 30%, which isn't too far out.
All this aside, at the end of the day I still don't see it as being a really viable long term career to be an author or publisher. E-ink has killed it.
To give you an idea of the cost breakdown, look here. Diagram is for textbooks; trade publishing is a bit different, but not wildly so. As you can see, freight is a very small part of the cost, and (it's not clear from the diagram) but printing is not a huge contributor, either. It's mostly editorial and administrative fees, author royalties, sub-licensing, and taxes
Printing looks like its around a third of the cost of the book, add in store costs and distribution and you could probably half the cost of an ebook all in. I know that digital distribution and storage aren't cost free, but there is a huge difference between that and the infrastrcuture required to grow, transport, process, and produce all the elements required in a normal book, enough that its fair to say its essentially cost free. When you have videos being uploaded for nothing and shown to the general population, books are trivial. As for transcripting to ebook format, if thats not done automatically as part of the production process, something is very wrong with your process.
What I'd imagine the future looks like for the literary or publishing world would be small, independent editing and marketing companies competing alongside shopfronts to produce works of literature, and authors will be able to move easily (less contractual obligations) from one to the next depending on quality of service and cost. Less well known authors might have to pay upfront, better known authors will be able to negotiate a percentage of sales, sales which will be higher in volume because of the ease of access you get via the internet.
As for DRM, thats always going to be broken, which combined with ebook reading qualities is going to make it difficult to make a living as an author in the future. The technology will ultimately be there, make no mistake. If something is going for free on the torrent networks, you'll always get a certain, perhaps large, percentage of people who will take that first rather than pay for an ebook. Musicians can make up the difference through live performances, movies will make money via the cinemas (another form of live performance), books, well thats a different story if you will excuse the pun.
If you can vat-grow organs in the first place, whyever would you choose to grow them in *space* where the gravity field is wonky and muscles and bones atrophy?
Same reason you would put any industrial processes and plants in space, its something you'd rather not have on earth. Plus from orbit you can land on any spot on earth within minutes, a huge advantage for medical applications. Gravity is fairly easy to deal with even today by spinning the stations or infrstructure that needs spinning.
Cheaper and healthier all round to just deploy that same technology on Earth.
Not if all or most of your dirt cheap resources are in space! ;-)
The only thing space has more of is sunlight, vacuum, and microgravity.
And those effectively infinite resources floating around waiting for someone to take them.