Actually the speed with which you kill people doesn't matter at all. Slow death in Hitler's concentration camps or Stalin's gulags are, if anything much worse, because they caused massive and prolonged suffering. At least nukes are quick except for the people who get high doses of radiation and burns and aren't killed instantly.
As for the collective guilt of Americans, I am relatively sure its non existent. All the interviews I've seen with the crews who dropped the bombs they were of the opinion the Japanese deserved it, and it was better than the carnage, and mass casualties that would have resulted from an invasion of the main Japanese islands. They'd also been pretty well propagandized in to hating the Japanese at that point. Obviously some American's were torn up over it, Oppenheimer included, but people were torn up by concentration camps, the Bataan death march, Dresden and Tokyo too.
You seem pretty confused about the position I'm advocating. I am not in the least advocating the use of nuclear weapons anywhere. I am just pointing out the hypocrisy of the people who somehow think they are exceptional. I'm mostly pointing out it doesn't matter how you do it, once you start killing civilians, and rationalizing it, you are pretty seriously fucked up and you don't deserve a free pass no matter who you are or how righteous you think you are.
So you are basically in the camp that there are good and righteous nukes and the ones the U.S. dropped are them?
I'm not sure you are actually disagreeing with my original point, which in case you missed it is that I think its quite plausible that someone could use nukes today and not be nuked in to the stone age in turn or end in eternal damnation.
Israel was danger close to using nukes in 1973. They were actively threatening it to get more aid from the U.S. and if the convenentional war hadn't suddenly turned in their favor they would almost certainly have rolled them on to the tarmac . Are you saying someone would have incinerated Israel if they had nuked Egypt or Syria, or would Israel using nukes be another one of your righteous and justified cases?
So you are seriously trying to grade how people die with nukes versus a fire storm and you think somehow dying in either one doesn't completely suck? If anything the nuke tends to be somewhat more merciful, at least for all the people near ground zero since the death is instantaneous, slow roasting or searing suffocation in a fire storm has to be one of the more brutal ways to kill someone.
Their are monuments in Tokyo and Dresden too. The Tokyo monument is a statue of a group of children.
The Dresden monument reads,
""How many died? Who knows the number? In your wounds one sees the agony of the nameless ones who burned here in the hellfire made by human hands.""
Once you start killing large numbers of civilians the details of how you go about it don't actually matter.
"It means you are able to criticize the government, and people who want to hear you can find a way to hear you."
Apologies, I'm not following your point. Are you saying Occupy somehow had no right to say the things they were saying?
The occupy movement was criticizing the U.S. government and just trying to be heard. As soon as they started being heard, and they started to cause discomfort to Wall Street and the government, they were systematically crushed in every place they had critical mess, New York, Oakland, UC Davis, Denver, Boston, LA etc.
The Federal government was actively aiding and coordinating the cities as they used riot police to break up the entire movement. How often have you heard anything about it since the last encampments were broken up by riot police.
Iran's supression was somewhat more brutal, but in terms of intent, goals and effect what the U.S. government did to the Occupy movement was exactly the same kind of oppression Iran's government did to the Green movement. The Green movement was actually trying to topple the regime in Iran. Occupy was just saying the current regime in the U.S. sucks (i.e. Wall Street seizing control of our government and using that control to loot America).
The Chinese don't exactly subscribe to Nazism but there was a counter revolution when Mao died and they did swing hard to state Capitalism and something closely resembling Fascism. Its comical for the Chinese to still claim they're Communists when their leadership are increasingly very wealthy and very successful capitalists.
The two regimes in the Middle East that were closely aligned to Fascism recently were the Ba'ath regimes, Saddam's Iraq and Assad's Syria. It is a real stretch to claim Turkey is anywhere close to being in the same class.
If you want to name another regime in the Middle East with issues with ethnic cleansing and far right leaning its probably Israel. Its ironic how similar they've become to their bitterest nemesis.
So by your standard you would agree that the U.S. has an oppressive government because it crushed every Occupy movement in every city in the U.S. last year, with mass arrests, tear gas and blackjacks, protests that were for the most part peaceful and just exercising their right to free speech.
Israel's done pretty much the same thing, in fact substantially worse to suppress free speech by Palestinians in the occupied territories and in Israel.
Saudi Arabia has one of the most repressive regimes in the world, heavy censorship, travel bans on dissidents in violation of international law.
Lovable Canada recently passed laws to suppress student protests in Quebec over massive tuition increases, including 10 year sentences for protestors for simply wearing masks.
So if you wanna be all holier than though about Iran you might wanna look around and notice that every government suppresses free speech the second they start feeling threatened by it.
"In Afghanistan the Taliban have been pushed into Pakistan"
In case you haven't heard the U.S. and NATO are going to cut and run on Afghanistan in 2014, France is leaving sooner than that according to Hollande. The current Afghan government, which is completely corrupt and despised by the Afghan people, is unlikely to last a week on its own. When it collapses the Taliban will inevitably return to power and they will have won a war that cost NATO over 12 years, over a trillion dollars, and 3,000 dead so far.
I'm pretty sure NATO knows the Taliban will return to power, they apparently consider that to be a lesser evil than continuing to squander blood and treasure to prop up Karzai and the warlords that always take power when the Taliban is out of power. When faced with a similar situation in Vietnam the U.S. assassinated Diám to try to install a government that wasn't completely hopeless, it didn't work either.
The Taliban's predecessor, the Mujahideen, was "pushed" in to Pakistan too, when the USSR occupied Afghanistan, or actually they used the tribal areas of Pakistan as a base for a very successful insurgency that ended when the Soviet Union fled and the loss contributed to the Soviet Union's collapse soon after.
Iraq didn't exactly "defeat" NATO. The Sunni insurgency did heavily bleed the U.S. for a number of years. The U.S. and NATO lost in Iraq because the whole invasion was deeply flawed from the get go. As soon as the U.S. and NATO let the Shia majority vote they inevitably voted in a Shia government which promptly aligned with Iran and told the U.S. and NATO to get out. By invading Iraq, NATO eliminated the dominant counterforce to Iran in the region which was Saddam, and replaced him with a pro Iranian regime. They lost another 10 year trillion dollar war, not on the battlefield, but by following the Bush administrations wildly misguided plan. Bush's dad actually had enough brains to realize toppling Sadam was a horrible idea if you were trying to contain Iran's theocracy which is why he didn't do it when he had the chance in the first gulf war.
All in all you don't seem to have a firm grasp on history or the current state of war and politics in the world.
I don't recall there being any backlash when the U.S. used nukes on Japan, they became one of Americas closest allies soon after.
The devestation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki wasn't really much different than the firebombings of Tokyo by the U.S. or Dresden by the British, excepting for radiation sickness and long term cancers, but fire bombing led to burns that were pretty much as bad. The nukes just required fewer air planes to do the damage, but they were still massively expensive to make.
Needless to say a fusion bomb on a large city would be horrific but very few nations have those. A fission bomb would certainly be worse than 9/11 if an Al Qaeda like group managed to set one off in a Western city so its obviously something to be avoided.
But the U.S., Britain and Russia have been killing large numbers of civilians since World War II with little repercussion so I think your statement "will always be beyond a last resort" is a little overly breathless.
You are seriously rambling now dude. If you want to restate your point clearly I will try to respond to it.
At this point the only point you seem to be making is you are some kind of hardware dude at Dell or HP and you are pissed at me for making light of the thing you do for a paycheck. If it helps, I am sorry you have to work at Dell or HP. Why dont you apply at Amazon or Google?
Dont think Intel has any more or less power in any scenario involving Open Computing. There is still a company called AMD around, and I think some data centers are seriously exploring ARM to reduce power consumption which would totally divorce them from Intel. R&D and fabs for high end CPU's are staggeringly expensive so you are not likely to do one from scratch on a whim though there are certainly a lot of lower end open designs around. Xilinx has PowerPC designs for their FPGA's.
Totally dont get your point if you actually had a valid one in the first place.
I'm willing to wager a long term habitat on the moon would look disturbingly similar to the ISS . . . . but on the moon.
I am williing to bet it would be operated with a supply chain disturbingly similar to the ISS with just about everything shipped from Earth. I suppose they could open a land fill and dump the trash on the Moon saving having to fly it back to Earth like ISS. Is that what you would call a "spinoff"? There will probably be objections from the environmentalists on that one.
If they really pushed the envelope they might mine water on the Moon and get some Oxygen and Hydrogen, but I think that would require you to put the base on the South Pole and its not clear yet if there are in fact large ice deposits there.
If they were to put a nuclear reactor in the base that would be interesting but I'm willing to bet the opposition to launching one and doing that would be massive. I'm willing to bet instead it will have a big array of solar panels, like ISS.
You are seriously kidding yourself if you think its a given there will be huge technological breakthroughs as a result of this particular program.
" All countries should be working together on this."
Excepting that multinational consortiums tend to turn in to bureaucratic quagmires. Haggling over who does what, who pays for what, whose astornauts get what rides. Some countries fall short on their commitments, others have to pick up the slack, schedules slip, budget soars. Just look at the history of the ISS.
If you want to do things fast, cheap and well a Kelly Johnson Skunkworks model is probably a much better choice than a bureaucratic quagmire. Find very talented engineers and program managers, give them a very precise goal and sufficient funds to do it, and keep the politicians as far away from it as possible.
Ones of NASA's now fatal flaws is politicians change the goal and the plan about every four years right before anything is actually done. They also dictate where and how things are done, not for engineering reasons but to insure they get pork in their states and districts. For example, every recent NASA proposed launcher has Shuttle SRB's in it just to insure Orrin Hatch wont try to kill it. That's why Ares I turned in to the monstrosity it was, and why Allient and Astrium have resuscitated the design that will not die as their proposed Liberty launcher.
We've spent well over $100 billion on a foray somewhat out of the bottom of a gravity well. So far it has produced almost nothing, its called ISS.
Chances are a base on the moon would be only slightly more productive than ISS.
The moon might be worthwhile for mining water or Helium isotopes though this has not yet been well established. The far side might be a good place for some observatories. It might be a place to train for a base on Mars. Then the use cases starts trailing off pretty quickly
Its pretty simple, you need to build a strong, well thought out, case that there is something on the Moon worth doing that would actually justify the significant expense of returning and building a base. This is the step that was completely missed in the Apollo program which is why everyone stopped caring around Apollo 12 and the program ended at Apollo 17. An emotional case about the coolness factor, and pointless space races with other countries, doesn't really cut it.
The spinoffs from Apollo did end up making it worthwhile but its not really clear you would get anything close to the same spinoffs going back. Apollo had to actually invent a lot of things to pull it off. If you go back to the moon you would mostly be revisiting technologies that have already been developed so the spinoffs would almost certainly be much less.
Mars would be a much harder destination but it would be substantially more worthwhile since it is an almost colonizable planet. A case can be made for the that though it wouldn't be easy. It might also produce some new spinoffs since it would be a much harder journey and much more challenging to do.
And needless to say they can hire the same people HP and Dell hire. In fact as shitty a place as HP and Dell have been to work for most of the last decade, and as bad as their stock options have been, Rackspace, Amazon, Google and Facebook probably have an easier time hiring better people than HP or Dell.
Dont think your link says anything about it working at a big corporate level. It looks like a FPGA PCI design. The question got three answers, two people using it, don't know how big they are, and one guy hawking his implementation which he is charging for, for commercial use. I am guessing you are the guy trying to sell his commercial use version right?
Actually they totally are boxes in a rack when you are talking purely about the hardware. Its reaching the point it is easier to swap it out than fix it unless its something easy to fix like a power supply, RAM or a disk. The companies with big data centers can field their own hardware and software people and probably get better service than A) paying Dell or HP and arm and a leg for support B) waiting for Dell or HP to send someone or or ship boxes back and forth.
I think one of the points of open computing is all the big centers are using the same hardware and the same drivers so they are sharing the burden of debugging the hardware and getting working drivers which are probably the biggest support burdens. Its almost got to be better to get rid of all the fragmentation in hardware designs and drivers and have everyone focus on a few of each and make them work really well. Hopefully open computing wont fragment as badly as Linux distributions and desktops have.
If it fragments then, no I dont really see the point to it.
Open source hardware totally makes sense in the hobbyist world. Its going like gangbusters at places like Adafruit, Sparkfun, etc.
Remains to be seen how well it works at the big corporate level, but I could see real benefit to putting an end to duplicative squandering of R&D resources by a hundred different companies on same, but different, designs for motherboards, power supplies, routers, etc.
I kind of doubt its going to help Cisco, HP or Dell though. Its just going to further commoditize hardware and cut profit margins. Once you have solid designs big data centers like Amazon, Google, Facebook and Rackspace will, if they haven't already, farm out the manufacturing to lowest bidder in China and cut out the middlemen which would be HP and Dell.
I really don't see what value HP and Dell add to anything at this point and their stock prices seem to concur. Microsoft and Linux own the software, and hardware just isn't a place to differentiate much any more except on the very high end. Apple was smart enough to hold on to the software, hardware and ecosystem and they are reaping huge profits as a result.
HP is especially sad. Apotheker knew their hardware business was going no where but down, his board apparently completely supported him in spinning it off, if it wasn't the boards idea in the first place. Leo announced it, stock tanked, media and social networks skewered them, and the board scapegoated Leo and claimed it was all his fault. Sad.
Another plus with open hardware, coupled with open software, is it might slow down the NSA, FBI and/or Huawei from backdooring all our computing and network infrastructure.
No one can buy out Facebook by buying shared on the open market. Only a tiny fraction of the shares are on the market at this point.
Zuckerberg appears to be planning to hold a majority of the shares for the forseeable future. His board has absolutely no power as a result. The only way to buy out Facebook and take it private again would be for Zuckerberg to sell it. For all practical purposes Facebook is still a private company, it just has a fraction of its shares on the market.
Its probably one source of unease with investing in their shares. One person has total control over the company, he can do pretty much whatever he wants with it and no one can stop him.
"The military is really not well suited to track down terrorists and bring them to justice."
That's why most of these activities have been moved in to the CIA. Its not exactly a secret that General Petreus took over as CIA director to run the secret wars the U.S. is waging across the Middle East, Africa and Asia. As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wind down, there are still going to be a bunch of secret little wars running all over the place that they are mostly going to be kept out of the press and away from Congress unless its in closed sessions with select committees of patsies.
These are mostly drone wars in the air and special ops on the ground. CIA gets way less scrutiny than either the DOD or DOJ since 9/11.
The CIA was hamstrung in the wake of the Church invesigations in the 70's but since 9/11 they can literally get away with murder again so that is where most of our wars will be fought from now on, including renditions and assassinations.
Zynga doesn't do anything right. Cowclicker proved exceptionally well exactly what they are doing. They are pushing pointless game that are engineered to have game mechanics that are very addictive for a large number of apparently gullible people.
Its mostly just sad that so many people squander so much of their time and their money on a pointless waste of a life.
I've been a gamer for decades and they all tend to be kind of a waste, but the Zynga/FB genre has taken gaming to a new and epic low. If they are in fact appealing to women more than men then I'm not sure that says something good about women.
I'm just wishing that there were companies IPO'ing with $100 billion market caps that actually make things, like railroads in the 19th century, or cars and airplanes in the 20th century.
I'm not fan of companies making billions pushing crap ads with time wasting BS.
Cuz central banks have printed so much money lately that there are trillions of dollars, euros, yen and yuan with no place to go?
Facebook looks to really suck as an investment:
1. Zuckerberg has total control, board and shareholders have none
2. The mobile revenue story is horrible, its mostly milking suckers with crap Zynga games on PC's
3. Ads on PC's are creepy and don't really work, no one ever touches them
But its a lot better than investing in Europe or China lately or on a whole bunch of even crappier dot com bubble progeny like Color who don't have any revenue and or no users.
An urbex group in London was exploring subways in the early morning a few days before the royal wedding when security was high, to put it mildly, and were arrested when they were seen on a security camera. Info here They are not allowed to speak to one another for the duration of the anti social order which is 10 years.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the speed with which you kill people doesn't matter at all. Slow death in Hitler's concentration camps or Stalin's gulags are, if anything much worse, because they caused massive and prolonged suffering. At least nukes are quick except for the people who get high doses of radiation and burns and aren't killed instantly.
As for the collective guilt of Americans, I am relatively sure its non existent. All the interviews I've seen with the crews who dropped the bombs they were of the opinion the Japanese deserved it, and it was better than the carnage, and mass casualties that would have resulted from an invasion of the main Japanese islands. They'd also been pretty well propagandized in to hating the Japanese at that point. Obviously some American's were torn up over it, Oppenheimer included, but people were torn up by concentration camps, the Bataan death march, Dresden and Tokyo too.
You seem pretty confused about the position I'm advocating. I am not in the least advocating the use of nuclear weapons anywhere. I am just pointing out the hypocrisy of the people who somehow think they are exceptional. I'm mostly pointing out it doesn't matter how you do it, once you start killing civilians, and rationalizing it, you are pretty seriously fucked up and you don't deserve a free pass no matter who you are or how righteous you think you are.
So you are basically in the camp that there are good and righteous nukes and the ones the U.S. dropped are them?
I'm not sure you are actually disagreeing with my original point, which in case you missed it is that I think its quite plausible that someone could use nukes today and not be nuked in to the stone age in turn or end in eternal damnation.
Israel was danger close to using nukes in 1973. They were actively threatening it to get more aid from the U.S. and if the convenentional war hadn't suddenly turned in their favor they would almost certainly have rolled them on to the tarmac . Are you saying someone would have incinerated Israel if they had nuked Egypt or Syria, or would Israel using nukes be another one of your righteous and justified cases?
So you are seriously trying to grade how people die with nukes versus a fire storm and you think somehow dying in either one doesn't completely suck? If anything the nuke tends to be somewhat more merciful, at least for all the people near ground zero since the death is instantaneous, slow roasting or searing suffocation in a fire storm has to be one of the more brutal ways to kill someone.
Their are monuments in Tokyo and Dresden too. The Tokyo monument is a statue of a group of children.
The Dresden monument reads,
""How many died? Who knows the number? In your wounds one sees the agony of the nameless ones who burned here in the hellfire made by human hands.""
Once you start killing large numbers of civilians the details of how you go about it don't actually matter.
The image you just painted IS hilarious.
"It means you are able to criticize the government, and people who want to hear you can find a way to hear you."
Apologies, I'm not following your point. Are you saying Occupy somehow had no right to say the things they were saying?
The occupy movement was criticizing the U.S. government and just trying to be heard. As soon as they started being heard, and they started to cause discomfort to Wall Street and the government, they were systematically crushed in every place they had critical mess, New York, Oakland, UC Davis, Denver, Boston, LA etc.
The Federal government was actively aiding and coordinating the cities as they used riot police to break up the entire movement. How often have you heard anything about it since the last encampments were broken up by riot police.
Iran's supression was somewhat more brutal, but in terms of intent, goals and effect what the U.S. government did to the Occupy movement was exactly the same kind of oppression Iran's government did to the Green movement. The Green movement was actually trying to topple the regime in Iran. Occupy was just saying the current regime in the U.S. sucks (i.e. Wall Street seizing control of our government and using that control to loot America).
The Chinese don't exactly subscribe to Nazism but there was a counter revolution when Mao died and they did swing hard to state Capitalism and something closely resembling Fascism. Its comical for the Chinese to still claim they're Communists when their leadership are increasingly very wealthy and very successful capitalists.
The two regimes in the Middle East that were closely aligned to Fascism recently were the Ba'ath regimes, Saddam's Iraq and Assad's Syria. It is a real stretch to claim Turkey is anywhere close to being in the same class.
If you want to name another regime in the Middle East with issues with ethnic cleansing and far right leaning its probably Israel. Its ironic how similar they've become to their bitterest nemesis.
So by your standard you would agree that the U.S. has an oppressive government because it crushed every Occupy movement in every city in the U.S. last year, with mass arrests, tear gas and blackjacks, protests that were for the most part peaceful and just exercising their right to free speech.
Israel's done pretty much the same thing, in fact substantially worse to suppress free speech by Palestinians in the occupied territories and in Israel.
Saudi Arabia has one of the most repressive regimes in the world, heavy censorship, travel bans on dissidents in violation of international law.
Lovable Canada recently passed laws to suppress student protests in Quebec over massive tuition increases, including 10 year sentences for protestors for simply wearing masks.
So if you wanna be all holier than though about Iran you might wanna look around and notice that every government suppresses free speech the second they start feeling threatened by it.
"In Afghanistan the Taliban have been pushed into Pakistan"
In case you haven't heard the U.S. and NATO are going to cut and run on Afghanistan in 2014, France is leaving sooner than that according to Hollande. The current Afghan government, which is completely corrupt and despised by the Afghan people, is unlikely to last a week on its own. When it collapses the Taliban will inevitably return to power and they will have won a war that cost NATO over 12 years, over a trillion dollars, and 3,000 dead so far.
I'm pretty sure NATO knows the Taliban will return to power, they apparently consider that to be a lesser evil than continuing to squander blood and treasure to prop up Karzai and the warlords that always take power when the Taliban is out of power. When faced with a similar situation in Vietnam the U.S. assassinated Diám to try to install a government that wasn't completely hopeless, it didn't work either.
The Taliban's predecessor, the Mujahideen, was "pushed" in to Pakistan too, when the USSR occupied Afghanistan, or actually they used the tribal areas of Pakistan as a base for a very successful insurgency that ended when the Soviet Union fled and the loss contributed to the Soviet Union's collapse soon after.
Iraq didn't exactly "defeat" NATO. The Sunni insurgency did heavily bleed the U.S. for a number of years. The U.S. and NATO lost in Iraq because the whole invasion was deeply flawed from the get go. As soon as the U.S. and NATO let the Shia majority vote they inevitably voted in a Shia government which promptly aligned with Iran and told the U.S. and NATO to get out. By invading Iraq, NATO eliminated the dominant counterforce to Iran in the region which was Saddam, and replaced him with a pro Iranian regime. They lost another 10 year trillion dollar war, not on the battlefield, but by following the Bush administrations wildly misguided plan. Bush's dad actually had enough brains to realize toppling Sadam was a horrible idea if you were trying to contain Iran's theocracy which is why he didn't do it when he had the chance in the first gulf war.
All in all you don't seem to have a firm grasp on history or the current state of war and politics in the world.
So maybe you could share with us the dire consequences the U.S. suffered for nuking Japan.
You can't can you, loser AC.
I don't recall there being any backlash when the U.S. used nukes on Japan, they became one of Americas closest allies soon after.
The devestation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki wasn't really much different than the firebombings of Tokyo by the U.S. or Dresden by the British, excepting for radiation sickness and long term cancers, but fire bombing led to burns that were pretty much as bad. The nukes just required fewer air planes to do the damage, but they were still massively expensive to make.
Needless to say a fusion bomb on a large city would be horrific but very few nations have those. A fission bomb would certainly be worse than 9/11 if an Al Qaeda like group managed to set one off in a Western city so its obviously something to be avoided.
But the U.S., Britain and Russia have been killing large numbers of civilians since World War II with little repercussion so I think your statement "will always be beyond a last resort" is a little overly breathless.
You are seriously rambling now dude. If you want to restate your point clearly I will try to respond to it.
At this point the only point you seem to be making is you are some kind of hardware dude at Dell or HP and you are pissed at me for making light of the thing you do for a paycheck. If it helps, I am sorry you have to work at Dell or HP. Why dont you apply at Amazon or Google?
Dont think Intel has any more or less power in any scenario involving Open Computing. There is still a company called AMD around, and I think some data centers are seriously exploring ARM to reduce power consumption which would totally divorce them from Intel. R&D and fabs for high end CPU's are staggeringly expensive so you are not likely to do one from scratch on a whim though there are certainly a lot of lower end open designs around. Xilinx has PowerPC designs for their FPGA's.
Totally dont get your point if you actually had a valid one in the first place.
I'm willing to wager a long term habitat on the moon would look disturbingly similar to the ISS . . . . but on the moon.
I am williing to bet it would be operated with a supply chain disturbingly similar to the ISS with just about everything shipped from Earth. I suppose they could open a land fill and dump the trash on the Moon saving having to fly it back to Earth like ISS. Is that what you would call a "spinoff"? There will probably be objections from the environmentalists on that one.
If they really pushed the envelope they might mine water on the Moon and get some Oxygen and Hydrogen, but I think that would require you to put the base on the South Pole and its not clear yet if there are in fact large ice deposits there.
If they were to put a nuclear reactor in the base that would be interesting but I'm willing to bet the opposition to launching one and doing that would be massive. I'm willing to bet instead it will have a big array of solar panels, like ISS.
You are seriously kidding yourself if you think its a given there will be huge technological breakthroughs as a result of this particular program.
" All countries should be working together on this."
Excepting that multinational consortiums tend to turn in to bureaucratic quagmires. Haggling over who does what, who pays for what, whose astornauts get what rides. Some countries fall short on their commitments, others have to pick up the slack, schedules slip, budget soars. Just look at the history of the ISS.
If you want to do things fast, cheap and well a Kelly Johnson Skunkworks model is probably a much better choice than a bureaucratic quagmire. Find very talented engineers and program managers, give them a very precise goal and sufficient funds to do it, and keep the politicians as far away from it as possible.
Ones of NASA's now fatal flaws is politicians change the goal and the plan about every four years right before anything is actually done. They also dictate where and how things are done, not for engineering reasons but to insure they get pork in their states and districts. For example, every recent NASA proposed launcher has Shuttle SRB's in it just to insure Orrin Hatch wont try to kill it. That's why Ares I turned in to the monstrosity it was, and why Allient and Astrium have resuscitated the design that will not die as their proposed Liberty launcher.
We've spent well over $100 billion on a foray somewhat out of the bottom of a gravity well. So far it has produced almost nothing, its called ISS.
Chances are a base on the moon would be only slightly more productive than ISS.
The moon might be worthwhile for mining water or Helium isotopes though this has not yet been well established. The far side might be a good place for some observatories. It might be a place to train for a base on Mars. Then the use cases starts trailing off pretty quickly
Its pretty simple, you need to build a strong, well thought out, case that there is something on the Moon worth doing that would actually justify the significant expense of returning and building a base. This is the step that was completely missed in the Apollo program which is why everyone stopped caring around Apollo 12 and the program ended at Apollo 17. An emotional case about the coolness factor, and pointless space races with other countries, doesn't really cut it.
The spinoffs from Apollo did end up making it worthwhile but its not really clear you would get anything close to the same spinoffs going back. Apollo had to actually invent a lot of things to pull it off. If you go back to the moon you would mostly be revisiting technologies that have already been developed so the spinoffs would almost certainly be much less.
Mars would be a much harder destination but it would be substantially more worthwhile since it is an almost colonizable planet. A case can be made for the that though it wouldn't be easy. It might also produce some new spinoffs since it would be a much harder journey and much more challenging to do.
And needless to say they can hire the same people HP and Dell hire. In fact as shitty a place as HP and Dell have been to work for most of the last decade, and as bad as their stock options have been, Rackspace, Amazon, Google and Facebook probably have an easier time hiring better people than HP or Dell.
Dont think your link says anything about it working at a big corporate level. It looks like a FPGA PCI design. The question got three answers, two people using it, don't know how big they are, and one guy hawking his implementation which he is charging for, for commercial use. I am guessing you are the guy trying to sell his commercial use version right?
Actually they totally are boxes in a rack when you are talking purely about the hardware. Its reaching the point it is easier to swap it out than fix it unless its something easy to fix like a power supply, RAM or a disk. The companies with big data centers can field their own hardware and software people and probably get better service than A) paying Dell or HP and arm and a leg for support B) waiting for Dell or HP to send someone or or ship boxes back and forth.
I think one of the points of open computing is all the big centers are using the same hardware and the same drivers so they are sharing the burden of debugging the hardware and getting working drivers which are probably the biggest support burdens. Its almost got to be better to get rid of all the fragmentation in hardware designs and drivers and have everyone focus on a few of each and make them work really well. Hopefully open computing wont fragment as badly as Linux distributions and desktops have.
If it fragments then, no I dont really see the point to it.
Open source hardware totally makes sense in the hobbyist world. Its going like gangbusters at places like Adafruit, Sparkfun, etc.
Remains to be seen how well it works at the big corporate level, but I could see real benefit to putting an end to duplicative squandering of R&D resources by a hundred different companies on same, but different, designs for motherboards, power supplies, routers, etc.
I kind of doubt its going to help Cisco, HP or Dell though. Its just going to further commoditize hardware and cut profit margins. Once you have solid designs big data centers like Amazon, Google, Facebook and Rackspace will, if they haven't already, farm out the manufacturing to lowest bidder in China and cut out the middlemen which would be HP and Dell.
I really don't see what value HP and Dell add to anything at this point and their stock prices seem to concur. Microsoft and Linux own the software, and hardware just isn't a place to differentiate much any more except on the very high end. Apple was smart enough to hold on to the software, hardware and ecosystem and they are reaping huge profits as a result.
HP is especially sad. Apotheker knew their hardware business was going no where but down, his board apparently completely supported him in spinning it off, if it wasn't the boards idea in the first place. Leo announced it, stock tanked, media and social networks skewered them, and the board scapegoated Leo and claimed it was all his fault. Sad.
Another plus with open hardware, coupled with open software, is it might slow down the NSA, FBI and/or Huawei from backdooring all our computing and network infrastructure.
One of those "future" missions is just sending another crew to the ISS to spin around in LEO for a while doing not much at a steep price.
One is just Landsat redux also not leaving LEO.
The third one is studying the Van Allen belts which isn't exactly going where no one has gone before.
MAVEN is the only mission that actually involves leaving Earth orbit.
No one can buy out Facebook by buying shared on the open market. Only a tiny fraction of the shares are on the market at this point.
Zuckerberg appears to be planning to hold a majority of the shares for the forseeable future. His board has absolutely no power as a result. The only way to buy out Facebook and take it private again would be for Zuckerberg to sell it. For all practical purposes Facebook is still a private company, it just has a fraction of its shares on the market.
Its probably one source of unease with investing in their shares. One person has total control over the company, he can do pretty much whatever he wants with it and no one can stop him.
"The military is really not well suited to track down terrorists and bring them to justice."
That's why most of these activities have been moved in to the CIA. Its not exactly a secret that General Petreus took over as CIA director to run the secret wars the U.S. is waging across the Middle East, Africa and Asia. As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wind down, there are still going to be a bunch of secret little wars running all over the place that they are mostly going to be kept out of the press and away from Congress unless its in closed sessions with select committees of patsies.
These are mostly drone wars in the air and special ops on the ground. CIA gets way less scrutiny than either the DOD or DOJ since 9/11.
The CIA was hamstrung in the wake of the Church invesigations in the 70's but since 9/11 they can literally get away with murder again so that is where most of our wars will be fought from now on, including renditions and assassinations.
Zynga doesn't do anything right. Cowclicker proved exceptionally well exactly what they are doing. They are pushing pointless game that are engineered to have game mechanics that are very addictive for a large number of apparently gullible people.
Its mostly just sad that so many people squander so much of their time and their money on a pointless waste of a life.
I've been a gamer for decades and they all tend to be kind of a waste, but the Zynga/FB genre has taken gaming to a new and epic low. If they are in fact appealing to women more than men then I'm not sure that says something good about women.
I'm just wishing that there were companies IPO'ing with $100 billion market caps that actually make things, like railroads in the 19th century, or cars and airplanes in the 20th century.
I'm not fan of companies making billions pushing crap ads with time wasting BS.
Cuz central banks have printed so much money lately that there are trillions of dollars, euros, yen and yuan with no place to go?
Facebook looks to really suck as an investment:
1. Zuckerberg has total control, board and shareholders have none
2. The mobile revenue story is horrible, its mostly milking suckers with crap Zynga games on PC's
3. Ads on PC's are creepy and don't really work, no one ever touches them
But its a lot better than investing in Europe or China lately or on a whole bunch of even crappier dot com bubble progeny like Color who don't have any revenue and or no users.
An urbex group in London was exploring subways in the early morning a few days before the royal wedding when security was high, to put it mildly, and were arrested when they were seen on a security camera. Info here They are not allowed to speak to one another for the duration of the anti social order which is 10 years.