"It should be noted that when he seizes a state the new ruler ought to determine all the injuries that he will need to inflict. He should inflict them once and for all, and not have to renew them every day.
Whoever acts otherwise, either through timidity or bad advice, is always forced to have the knife ready in his hand.... Violence should be inflicted once and for all; people will then forget what it tastes like and so be less resentful."
Afghanistan in 2001 is much Much MUCH more like Vietnam in 1961 than it is like Europe in 1941 or America in 1861."
No it isn't, and saying that it is doesn't make it true. The moral arguments for war in Vietnam were murky. In this case we have group of mass murderers who have expressed their desire and intent to keep on indiscriminately killing.
"know who the enemy is, and where they are? Problem."
Intelligence is a fundamental problem in any war. The fact that the enemy is not going to line up holding bullseyes is not a sufficient argument to say that it is somehow immoral for us to fight this war. It would only suggest that we devote more resources to developing better intelligence.
"prevent the enemy from rising up later? Problem."
If someone is going to say that they are driven by some supernatural force to kill you, then regardless of what you do, they are going to try to kill you. You can't sit down and have a rational argument with someone who's motovations are irrational.
According to your reasoning, if someone comes into your house, kills your family, and eats your pizza, you should just sit there and hand them a beer lest you run the risk of pissing them off.
If you really feel this way, let me ask you:
Should we have listened to the protectionists during WWII and not gotten involved?
Should we have not fought the Civil War?
What about the Revolutionary War, would it have been better to sit on our hands lest we run the risk of angering good King George?
In short, if we are a nation that claims to believe in a set of principles above all else, but we are unwilling to fight for these principles, then we are a nation of hypocrites.
NASA actually does spend a lot of time and money on reaching out to kids and enthusiasts alike. Yes, there is room for improvement, but give me a break, they are fighting a loosing battle just to get funding to safely deorbit spacecraft. And as for the simplicity of some of the displays at the centers, well I'm sorry that they don't have astrophysicits manning all the exhibits, they're off doing important science and engineering. If you really want to be a space enthusiast, support full funding so they have the money to do even more public outreach.
Blaiming Employees for walking away with some post-its when the company lays them off is nothing compared to the outright theft being perpetrated by the CEOs and boards of these companies. Take a look at Yahoo's 2000 financials. They lost 10s of Millions of dollars and their stock price has dropped 92%.
Now take a look at the executive compensation for YAHOO for 2000. Looking at Koogle walking away with ~$30 million while the company looses it's shirt, you understand the name: "YAHOO, we can screw all the investors and employees!"
I never said anything about global warming (including what my stance may be), I merely made a point about logic and what it takes to "prove" that something is true. You somehow take this to be some kind of political stance motivated by the Illuminati. I would recommend that you peruse a few treatise on logic to try to bone up on the concepts you are railing against. The summary of which is that "belief" of truth (as in - the world is flat) and "necessity" of truth (as in - 2+2=4) are 2 different beasts all together. You may really want to read this treatese on modal logic to give you some insight into what positive evidence says of a theories "truth".
It's not like proving that the sun is going to come up tommorow I think everybody agrees on that."
I don't think that you understand the point of my post. I am saying that it is a simple fact of predicate logic that positive evidence for a universally quantified sentence is not proof of this sentence. You make my point in the above quote. It is in fact not a truth that the sun is going to rise tommorow. By saying that "everybody agrees that the sun is going to rise tommorow" you are not proving anything about the statement "the sun will rise tommorow", you are just saying that it is some set of peoples beliefs. I seem to recall a time that "everybody agreed" that the earth was flat and that the moon was made out of cheese. "People's" beliefs did not prove these statements, they just defined these same "people's" perspective on the world.
Now back to the point about Sagan. By saying that he required "extrodinary evidence" to believe "extrodinary claims" is no more or less valid than saying that someone requires "giant man eating chickens to run through the streets of New York" before they believe that "the universe is expanding". In both cases, the person is just defining the threshold at which they will change their personal beliefs, they are not saying anything about the validity of the sentence.
So if it will take a few scientists positive opinions to change your opinion on a theory, so be it. If it will take the four horseman to change some other person's opinion, so be it. In either case, it's just your beliefs, it's not necessarily "truth". "Truth" is not something that "everybody agrees on", it exists regardless of people's beliefs.
"Either something is true or it's not just because the you deem the hypothesis to be "extraordinary" does not mean jack shit."
The problem is with the whole notion of what it takes to prove a theory. The climate change theories represent universally quantified sentences in temporal logic. Essentially, "From this time forward, human activity X will have impact Y on the enviornment". The problem is that no amount of positive/confirming evidence can prove that this statement is true (due to the universal quantification - "3, 5, and 7 are prime, thus all odds are prime"). The only thing that experimental evidence can do is disprove a theory ("look, X happened but Y did not happen"). Given this, there are only a few options as to how to handle this statement if you want to accept it:
Take it as an axiom (article of faith), thereby making it blasphemy to disagree.
Apply a degree of belief to it based on experiementation
Note that in either case, you have not proved the theory, you have provided yourself with a "warm and fuzzy" justification for your acceptance of it's validity.
In the first case, it's dogma, so there's no point in arguing. In the second case, it's up to you to decide how much positive evidence will make you think some theory is probably valid. If it will take one example to make you believe something ("look 3's prime, so all odds are prime"), and if it will take a few more examples to make someone else believe ("look 3 and 5 are prime, so all odds are prime"), it's just a matter of personal preference. So if Sagan wants "extrodinary proof", so be it, that's just his personal price. In the end, you haven't proved anything, you've just decided how much it will take for you to buy into some unproven idea.
But that is simply not how it works and that is not what he wants. The way publicly funded work makes it back to the public today is as follows:
1. Research is done with public funding
2. Research goes to the National Technology Transfer Center or some other tech transfer organization
3. Research is then "licensed" to company X
4. Company X repackages the research and then sells it back to the public
This model works well for company X because it can take someone else's research, paid for with public funds, and then sell it back to the public and the government. WOOHOO, FREE STUFF!
Now in this model, both the public and the researchers/developers get screwed. The public gets screwed because they are paying twice for the work. The researchers/developers get screwed because they see their years of work lining someone else's pockets and not contributing freely to the public good.
Under the GPL, company X cannot steal other peoples research without contributing to the public good. If the work is by definition free and open, company X cannot get semi-exclusive licensing rights. Given this, if X makes "BIG MONEY" repackaging the research, then all kinds of companies will crop up to get a cut. Eventually profit margins become minimal and X tries to figure out some other way to expl^H^H^H^H make money.
So in essence, if your business model is "BE THE BIGGEST PIMP", then the GPL is not your friend. However, if you are a researcher/developer or the public as a whole, then it's kinda nice not to get whored.
It's difficult, but not unreasonable, because we do have precise coordinates. Want to have a pretty good idea of where the ISS is right now? Here is a state vector, and this or this software will let you propagate that vector. The really difficult part in the whole process isn't tracking, it's getting escape velocity out of your nerf.
I would guess that many if not most of the applications for these machines are benign modelling problems (like astrodynamics and meteorology). The reason that so much computing has to been thrown at these problems is the accuracy that is required to answer some of these questions and the techniques involved.
For example, suppose that you are doing remote sensing with a satellite and need to calculate your sensor's position to within a 2 inch box at all points along the data track. This requires you to have an acurate track for your spacecraft along all of these points. To do this, you have to have a ridiculously accurate gravity models for the earth, moon, and sun, as well as models for all the other perturbative effects ( atmospheric effects, solar radiation pressure, etc... ). Most of these things are modelled as giant matrices. The solutions then involve manipulating all of these matrices with respect to your know positions umpty-squat-gagillion times(technical term). This is what a big vector processing machine buys you. Doing all of these inversions and other operations are just a few machine instructions vs. giant loops.
I'm sure that the reasons for so many of these machines that there are similar techniques in so many problem domains (fluid dynamics, etc...).
"The only thing we have a problem with is when the government funds open-source work. Government funding should be for work that is available to everybody."
You have to understand this quote from a "Captain of Industry" perspective. The relationship between the government and industry in terms of new technology has traditionally been that the government serves as a "free" R&D shop for industry. New technologies developed by the government make it into the public domain by being licensed/given to industry to then sell to the public (see the National Technology Transfer Center's site). What Ballmer is saying is that if the government releases new technology under some sort of open-licensing scheme, then anyone can use this technology, and any future enhancements will have to remain in the public domain. So from his perspective, this quote makes sense. If the government releases work under and open-licensing model, then the work of government scientists will not be available to people who wish to exclusively license the rights to someone else's research and then profit from selling this other person's work to the world.
All in all it's a funny system. You the taxpayer pay government scientists to do research and develop technology X. The government then licenses technology X to company Y. Company Y then packages technology X as product Z. Company Y then sells you and the government product Z (the product you already paid to the government to develop).
Most companies do provide you some sort of option to opt out of information sharing. The problem with this approach though is that there is no guarantee that your information will not actually be distributed. You are essentially putting your faith in some external orginization to have your best interests in mind, and not necissarily their own, when they make decissions. In general, this does not work. For an example of this, see this article where the person explicitely opted-out with SUN, but his information was still shared. Untill there are laws which make it so expensive an painful for organizations to violate their privacy policies, or untill there are actual real competitors to some of these companies (so customers can walk when they get shafted), companies will do what is in their best interest. If they get 100k for their information and get to say "whoops" to get off, then the privacy-policies are nothing but feel good statements to make you comfortable enough to give them money.
For the most part. Where you want to launch from depends on what type of orbit you would like to wind up in. If, for example, you would like to launch a communications or weather satellite into geosynch (parks it over some place on the earth), then by launching close to the equator, you don't have to use up fuel getting from some N/S lat to the equatorial plane (letting you use more of the payload for insturments rather than fuel). This is the motivation behind sea-launch, where a big platform is lugged into the middle of the ocean and a rocket is launched from it. Since a geosynchronous orbit is one of the most popular and valuable, this is why there is so much of an interest in launch areas close to the equator. (However for other types of orbits, Siberia would work quite nicely).
Re:A Clean Alternative
on
Solar Sails
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· Score: 1
Sailing was the most environmentally healthy way mankind ever developed to traverse large distances, and it seems appropriate that the same techniques be adapted to space travel. I am disturbed when I hear reports of engineers speculating on the construction of atomic weapon powered space craft, or such. We have already despoiled our own planet so utterly; we should keep space in its pristine purity.
I know the original post was most likely a troll but... ARE YOU KIDDING? Newsflash, the pristine space environment is a freaking vacuum that would kill puppies and kitties without human intervention. If we heretofore power every spacecraft sent up by all the nukes we got, we still wouldn't pump out anywhere near the radiation levels pumped out by the sun. You want to save the space environment, BAN STARS! Yeah, and if wasn't for that damn gravity, all that dust and crap wouldn't make planets on which evil sentient life forms would develop (pop into existence, your choice) who would then bring their evil polluting ways into space. YEAH, DAMN, BAN GRAVITY!
If your concerned about the "environment", be worried about the fact that the polluting effects of putting things into space come from: launch emissions; and getting rid of the payload once its useful life expires. If you really want to save the environment, talk about less polluting launch methods and about holding companies and governments liable for filling the gravity well with shrapnel.
What we want in software standards is exactly what we have in accounting standards--enforced by the government, but defined by the industry.
The problem with this argument is that the software and accounting industries are fundamentally different in the dynamism of their standards.
Accounting is, due to regulation, history, and external pressures, a largely static and conservative field. If it were not, then there would be no faith in our economy as there would be no yardstick by which to measure performance. This would cause our faith based economic system to collapse. This is the type of industry the government can effectively regulate. They are great at enforcing standards on conservative industries in which the natural movements are measured in decades and not months.
The software industry on the other hand is fundamentally a dynamic, fast paced, and "next best thing" industry. Standards come and go with the wind as new technologies are developed, making things dreamed of only a few years earlier suddenly possible. Government does not work fast enough to keep up with this pace of change. Laws can't be passed fast enough and regulating bodies can't hold hearings quick enough to keep up. The system is too dynamic.
Government does a great job setting and enforcing slow moving standards like "how to measure a second" and "what constitutes income". The software industry however moves too fast for the government to remain relevant and act as anything other than a drag on progress. If the converse were true, we would all be programming in ADA.
If you are really interested in playing around with looking at the constellation, take a look at one of the best product's around for visualization and prediction, AGI's STK. You can download a modelling limited version of their software for free from their "Resources" tab.
There is a definite tradeoff between software security and profit. To test a system to fail-safe levels requires a significant investment in time and resources that would eliminate any profit most firms would ever make on a product. The only projects that are really able to absorb these costs are mission critical projects in which the cost of failure is measured in human lives. For the rest of the projects out there, I have found that testing is the first thing to be jetisioned in the face of deadlines (and as we move to a RAD world, everything is done in the face of someone's deadline).
That said, I think that the idea is workable if it incorporates a sense of a graded scale that would imply security of the software engineering and testing process used by the company. Like the SEI, if you can document and demonstrate adherance to a certain set of processes, you can lable your product Level 2 or 3 certified. If defects are found in the deliverable product, you must be able to identify where the process broke down and how you plan to fix it to maintain your certification level. If you can't, your level gets revoked. That way, if you buy level 1 software and get burned, caveat emptor. If you buy level 5 software, you can have confidence that it's already been put through it's paces.
This is, I believe, pretty much the design of the pegasus? Also, given the fact that you have a mobile launch platform, seems like you can get tricky inclinations fairly cheaply.
The issue here seems not to be "developing windows apps is better than developing Linux apps" but "there are better IDEs on windows than on Linux". These are separate issues. Granted there may be a larger and more established set of IDEs for Windows, but when you get down to the core of programming on the 2 platforms, it comes down to:
"given an equal set of tools, which contains easier and more logical standards to which to code"
I have found the Win API and the MFC to be cumbersome at best and the support base to be lacking. On the other hand, I have found *nix programming to be better documented, have better adherence to standards, and to have a better support base. Further, with Linux, if you can't figure it out, look at the source.
Tools will come as the number of developers working on Linux boxes increases. Look at JBuilder for example. Excellent Java IDE with a Linux port.
Fundamentally though, I would hesitant to invest my time and effort mastering interfaces and techniques that are owned by a company which has shown no hesitation to arbitrarily change them. Probably the best example of this is a colleague who tried to compile some simple examples from "Mastering Visual C++ 5" with Visual C++ 6. The source wouldn't compile and the reasons weren't readily apparent. That to me is not good developer support.
Mindstorms would be great. I first got interested in programming with (?)Turtle Basic(?) on the Apple II. The goal was make a small simple program that would make the turtle move around. As a kid, it was something that was cool and I just happened to learn from it. Mindstorms are the best equivalent that I know of today.
"It's true that governments are sometimes clueless when it comes to regulating the internet, but there is still some regulation required. Otherwise, it becomes a total jungle."
I'm not sure that I believe this is true. Although I am not an anarchist (AIANAA), I think the internet has done just fine with minimal regulation (and less is better). I hear a lot of moaning about how hate-groups, porn-mongers, drug-addicts, [h,cr]ackers, etc... are ruining the internet and wasn't it all better before all those lusers showed up. From this we start down the slippery slope of letting "officials" determine which ideas are "good".
I think that in the absence of regulation, the internet has done a fairly good job of partitioning itself. hottastybooty.com is most likely a porn site and if you're not interested in seeing porn, don't go there. supernaziskickass.com is probably a hate group of some sort and if that's not your cup of tea, don't go there either. Based on the adventures of the [h,cr]ackers, the flaws in the underlying structure have become issues to be worked on and we all know that giving your credit card to crackmeplease.com is probably not a good idea.
I remember hearing about a couple in Florida who tried to rent their 11 year old daughter for sex via some chat room. The cops found out, broke down the door, and arrested the sick bastards. This is how it should work. If you break your local laws, screw you. If you break the laws of some foreign country, screw them. If they force their ISP's to block you or tell their citizens that they'll kick their asses if they look at your site, fine. If they don't, it's their own fault and you shouldn't feel an ounce of guilt.
The moral is, if you don't want to see it, don't look. If you're concerned that all of your young people will become nazi-pimp-junkies, talk to them and explain why it's wrong to whore their sisters. Don't form some global Farenheit-587 (whatever the flash point of a hard drive is). Outlawing ideas isn't going to fix people feeling a certain way, it'll just make ideas taboo, and we all know how well that works.
Slashdot Mirror
Soon to be seen on Animal Planet:
... CRYKIE TERRI, THAT LION JUST BIT ME DAMN LEG OFF ..."
"...and here we are in my native Australia, home to the koala, the kangaroo, and
Yes, and beyond technology, which is irrelevant from a users point of view, how is this any different from a scooter?"
Only differences I can think of:
I can carry groceries home on my scooter.
I can sit on my scooter.
Oh, and I can go a reasonable distance in less than an hour.
If your $8000 Segway to a new reality in personal transportation can't keep up with joggers, that's just sad.
"It should be noted that when he seizes a state the new ruler ought to determine all the injuries that he will need to inflict. He should inflict them once and for all, and not have to renew them every day.
Whoever acts otherwise, either through timidity or bad advice, is always forced to have the knife ready in his hand.... Violence should be inflicted once and for all; people will then forget what it tastes like and so be less resentful."
No it isn't, and saying that it is doesn't make it true. The moral arguments for war in Vietnam were murky. In this case we have group of mass murderers who have expressed their desire and intent to keep on indiscriminately killing.
"know who the enemy is, and where they are? Problem."
Intelligence is a fundamental problem in any war. The fact that the enemy is not going to line up holding bullseyes is not a sufficient argument to say that it is somehow immoral for us to fight this war. It would only suggest that we devote more resources to developing better intelligence.
"prevent the enemy from rising up later? Problem."
If someone is going to say that they are driven by some supernatural force to kill you, then regardless of what you do, they are going to try to kill you. You can't sit down and have a rational argument with someone who's motovations are irrational.
replace "protectionists" with "isolationists", damn submit and preview buttons are so close before my coffee.
If you really feel this way, let me ask you:
In short, if we are a nation that claims to believe in a set of principles above all else, but we are unwilling to fight for these principles, then we are a nation of hypocrites.
Why not NASA-sponsored rocketry competitions?
Why not recruit college students into NASA fellowships?
Why not a whole lot more visits to elementary schools?
Or maybe you'd like to see how:
NASA sponsors high school robotics
or how
NASA flies student designed experiements aboard the shuttle
NASA actually does spend a lot of time and money on reaching out to kids and enthusiasts alike. Yes, there is room for improvement, but give me a break, they are fighting a loosing battle just to get funding to safely deorbit spacecraft. And as for the simplicity of some of the displays at the centers, well I'm sorry that they don't have astrophysicits manning all the exhibits, they're off doing important science and engineering. If you really want to be a space enthusiast, support full funding so they have the money to do even more public outreach.
Now take a look at the executive compensation for YAHOO for 2000. Looking at Koogle walking away with ~$30 million while the company looses it's shirt, you understand the name: "YAHOO, we can screw all the investors and employees!"
I never said anything about global warming (including what my stance may be), I merely made a point about logic and what it takes to "prove" that something is true. You somehow take this to be some kind of political stance motivated by the Illuminati. I would recommend that you peruse a few treatise on logic to try to bone up on the concepts you are railing against. The summary of which is that "belief" of truth (as in - the world is flat) and "necessity" of truth (as in - 2+2=4) are 2 different beasts all together. You may really want to read this treatese on modal logic to give you some insight into what positive evidence says of a theories "truth".
I don't think that you understand the point of my post. I am saying that it is a simple fact of predicate logic that positive evidence for a universally quantified sentence is not proof of this sentence. You make my point in the above quote. It is in fact not a truth that the sun is going to rise tommorow. By saying that "everybody agrees that the sun is going to rise tommorow" you are not proving anything about the statement "the sun will rise tommorow", you are just saying that it is some set of peoples beliefs. I seem to recall a time that "everybody agreed" that the earth was flat and that the moon was made out of cheese. "People's" beliefs did not prove these statements, they just defined these same "people's" perspective on the world.
Now back to the point about Sagan. By saying that he required "extrodinary evidence" to believe "extrodinary claims" is no more or less valid than saying that someone requires "giant man eating chickens to run through the streets of New York" before they believe that "the universe is expanding". In both cases, the person is just defining the threshold at which they will change their personal beliefs, they are not saying anything about the validity of the sentence.
So if it will take a few scientists positive opinions to change your opinion on a theory, so be it. If it will take the four horseman to change some other person's opinion, so be it. In either case, it's just your beliefs, it's not necessarily "truth". "Truth" is not something that "everybody agrees on", it exists regardless of people's beliefs.
The problem is with the whole notion of what it takes to prove a theory. The climate change theories represent universally quantified sentences in temporal logic. Essentially, "From this time forward, human activity X will have impact Y on the enviornment". The problem is that no amount of positive/confirming evidence can prove that this statement is true (due to the universal quantification - "3, 5, and 7 are prime, thus all odds are prime"). The only thing that experimental evidence can do is disprove a theory ("look, X happened but Y did not happen"). Given this, there are only a few options as to how to handle this statement if you want to accept it:
- Take it as an axiom (article of faith), thereby making it blasphemy to disagree.
- Apply a degree of belief to it based on experiementation
Note that in either case, you have not proved the theory, you have provided yourself with a "warm and fuzzy" justification for your acceptance of it's validity.In the first case, it's dogma, so there's no point in arguing. In the second case, it's up to you to decide how much positive evidence will make you think some theory is probably valid. If it will take one example to make you believe something ("look 3's prime, so all odds are prime"), and if it will take a few more examples to make someone else believe ("look 3 and 5 are prime, so all odds are prime"), it's just a matter of personal preference. So if Sagan wants "extrodinary proof", so be it, that's just his personal price. In the end, you haven't proved anything, you've just decided how much it will take for you to buy into some unproven idea.
1. Research is done with public funding
2. Research goes to the National Technology Transfer Center or some other tech transfer organization
3. Research is then "licensed" to company X
4. Company X repackages the research and then sells it back to the public
This model works well for company X because it can take someone else's research, paid for with public funds, and then sell it back to the public and the government. WOOHOO, FREE STUFF!
Now in this model, both the public and the researchers/developers get screwed. The public gets screwed because they are paying twice for the work. The researchers/developers get screwed because they see their years of work lining someone else's pockets and not contributing freely to the public good.
Under the GPL, company X cannot steal other peoples research without contributing to the public good. If the work is by definition free and open, company X cannot get semi-exclusive licensing rights. Given this, if X makes "BIG MONEY" repackaging the research, then all kinds of companies will crop up to get a cut. Eventually profit margins become minimal and X tries to figure out some other way to expl^H^H^H^H make money.
So in essence, if your business model is "BE THE BIGGEST PIMP", then the GPL is not your friend. However, if you are a researcher/developer or the public as a whole, then it's kinda nice not to get whored.
It's difficult, but not unreasonable, because we do have precise coordinates. Want to have a pretty good idea of where the ISS is right now? Here is a state vector, and this or this software will let you propagate that vector. The really difficult part in the whole process isn't tracking, it's getting escape velocity out of your nerf.
For example, suppose that you are doing remote sensing with a satellite and need to calculate your sensor's position to within a 2 inch box at all points along the data track. This requires you to have an acurate track for your spacecraft along all of these points. To do this, you have to have a ridiculously accurate gravity models for the earth, moon, and sun, as well as models for all the other perturbative effects ( atmospheric effects, solar radiation pressure, etc... ). Most of these things are modelled as giant matrices. The solutions then involve manipulating all of these matrices with respect to your know positions umpty-squat-gagillion times(technical term). This is what a big vector processing machine buys you. Doing all of these inversions and other operations are just a few machine instructions vs. giant loops.
I'm sure that the reasons for so many of these machines that there are similar techniques in so many problem domains (fluid dynamics, etc...).
You have to understand this quote from a "Captain of Industry" perspective. The relationship between the government and industry in terms of new technology has traditionally been that the government serves as a "free" R&D shop for industry. New technologies developed by the government make it into the public domain by being licensed/given to industry to then sell to the public (see the National Technology Transfer Center's site). What Ballmer is saying is that if the government releases new technology under some sort of open-licensing scheme, then anyone can use this technology, and any future enhancements will have to remain in the public domain. So from his perspective, this quote makes sense. If the government releases work under and open-licensing model, then the work of government scientists will not be available to people who wish to exclusively license the rights to someone else's research and then profit from selling this other person's work to the world.
All in all it's a funny system. You the taxpayer pay government scientists to do research and develop technology X. The government then licenses technology X to company Y. Company Y then packages technology X as product Z. Company Y then sells you and the government product Z (the product you already paid to the government to develop).
Most companies do provide you some sort of option to opt out of information sharing. The problem with this approach though is that there is no guarantee that your information will not actually be distributed. You are essentially putting your faith in some external orginization to have your best interests in mind, and not necissarily their own, when they make decissions. In general, this does not work. For an example of this, see this article where the person explicitely opted-out with SUN, but his information was still shared. Untill there are laws which make it so expensive an painful for organizations to violate their privacy policies, or untill there are actual real competitors to some of these companies (so customers can walk when they get shafted), companies will do what is in their best interest. If they get 100k for their information and get to say "whoops" to get off, then the privacy-policies are nothing but feel good statements to make you comfortable enough to give them money.
For the most part. Where you want to launch from depends on what type of orbit you would like to wind up in. If, for example, you would like to launch a communications or weather satellite into geosynch (parks it over some place on the earth), then by launching close to the equator, you don't have to use up fuel getting from some N/S lat to the equatorial plane (letting you use more of the payload for insturments rather than fuel). This is the motivation behind sea-launch, where a big platform is lugged into the middle of the ocean and a rocket is launched from it. Since a geosynchronous orbit is one of the most popular and valuable, this is why there is so much of an interest in launch areas close to the equator. (However for other types of orbits, Siberia would work quite nicely).
I know the original post was most likely a troll but ... ARE YOU KIDDING? Newsflash, the pristine space environment is a freaking vacuum that would kill puppies and kitties without human intervention. If we heretofore power every spacecraft sent up by all the nukes we got, we still wouldn't pump out anywhere near the radiation levels pumped out by the sun. You want to save the space environment, BAN STARS! Yeah, and if wasn't for that damn gravity, all that dust and crap wouldn't make planets on which evil sentient life forms would develop (pop into existence, your choice) who would then bring their evil polluting ways into space. YEAH, DAMN, BAN GRAVITY!
If your concerned about the "environment", be worried about the fact that the polluting effects of putting things into space come from: launch emissions; and getting rid of the payload once its useful life expires. If you really want to save the environment, talk about less polluting launch methods and about holding companies and governments liable for filling the gravity well with shrapnel.
The problem with this argument is that the software and accounting industries are fundamentally different in the dynamism of their standards.
Accounting is, due to regulation, history, and external pressures, a largely static and conservative field. If it were not, then there would be no faith in our economy as there would be no yardstick by which to measure performance. This would cause our faith based economic system to collapse. This is the type of industry the government can effectively regulate. They are great at enforcing standards on conservative industries in which the natural movements are measured in decades and not months.
The software industry on the other hand is fundamentally a dynamic, fast paced, and "next best thing" industry. Standards come and go with the wind as new technologies are developed, making things dreamed of only a few years earlier suddenly possible. Government does not work fast enough to keep up with this pace of change. Laws can't be passed fast enough and regulating bodies can't hold hearings quick enough to keep up. The system is too dynamic.
Government does a great job setting and enforcing slow moving standards like "how to measure a second" and "what constitutes income". The software industry however moves too fast for the government to remain relevant and act as anything other than a drag on progress. If the converse were true, we would all be programming in ADA.
If you are not familiar with NORAD 2-line elements, look at celestrak's documentation. You can also look at celestrak's software archive.
Paper: An Operational and Performance Overview of the IRIDIUM Low Earth Orbit Satellite System -
Stephen R. Pratt, Richard A. Raines, Carl E. Fossa Jr., and Michael A. Temple Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Air Force Institute of Technology
If you are really interested in playing around with looking at the constellation, take a look at one of the best product's around for visualization and prediction, AGI's STK . You can download a modelling limited version of their software for free from their "Resources" tab.
That said, I think that the idea is workable if it incorporates a sense of a graded scale that would imply security of the software engineering and testing process used by the company. Like the SEI, if you can document and demonstrate adherance to a certain set of processes, you can lable your product Level 2 or 3 certified. If defects are found in the deliverable product, you must be able to identify where the process broke down and how you plan to fix it to maintain your certification level. If you can't, your level gets revoked. That way, if you buy level 1 software and get burned, caveat emptor. If you buy level 5 software, you can have confidence that it's already been put through it's paces.
This is, I believe, pretty much the design of the pegasus? Also, given the fact that you have a mobile launch platform, seems like you can get tricky inclinations fairly cheaply.
"given an equal set of tools, which contains easier and more logical standards to which to code"
I have found the Win API and the MFC to be cumbersome at best and the support base to be lacking. On the other hand, I have found *nix programming to be better documented, have better adherence to standards, and to have a better support base. Further, with Linux, if you can't figure it out, look at the source.
Tools will come as the number of developers working on Linux boxes increases. Look at JBuilder for example. Excellent Java IDE with a Linux port.
Fundamentally though, I would hesitant to invest my time and effort mastering interfaces and techniques that are owned by a company which has shown no hesitation to arbitrarily change them. Probably the best example of this is a colleague who tried to compile some simple examples from "Mastering Visual C++ 5" with Visual C++ 6. The source wouldn't compile and the reasons weren't readily apparent. That to me is not good developer support.
Mindstorms would be great. I first got interested in programming with (?)Turtle Basic(?) on the Apple II. The goal was make a small simple program that would make the turtle move around. As a kid, it was something that was cool and I just happened to learn from it. Mindstorms are the best equivalent that I know of today.
I'm not sure that I believe this is true. Although I am not an anarchist (AIANAA), I think the internet has done just fine with minimal regulation (and less is better). I hear a lot of moaning about how hate-groups, porn-mongers, drug-addicts, [h,cr]ackers, etc... are ruining the internet and wasn't it all better before all those lusers showed up. From this we start down the slippery slope of letting "officials" determine which ideas are "good".
I think that in the absence of regulation, the internet has done a fairly good job of partitioning itself. hottastybooty.com is most likely a porn site and if you're not interested in seeing porn, don't go there. supernaziskickass.com is probably a hate group of some sort and if that's not your cup of tea, don't go there either. Based on the adventures of the [h,cr]ackers, the flaws in the underlying structure have become issues to be worked on and we all know that giving your credit card to crackmeplease.com is probably not a good idea.
I remember hearing about a couple in Florida who tried to rent their 11 year old daughter for sex via some chat room. The cops found out, broke down the door, and arrested the sick bastards. This is how it should work. If you break your local laws, screw you. If you break the laws of some foreign country, screw them. If they force their ISP's to block you or tell their citizens that they'll kick their asses if they look at your site, fine. If they don't, it's their own fault and you shouldn't feel an ounce of guilt.
The moral is, if you don't want to see it, don't look. If you're concerned that all of your young people will become nazi-pimp-junkies, talk to them and explain why it's wrong to whore their sisters. Don't form some global Farenheit-587 (whatever the flash point of a hard drive is). Outlawing ideas isn't going to fix people feeling a certain way, it'll just make ideas taboo, and we all know how well that works.