After a lot of years writing code, as well as reading and tuning a lot of other peoples code I've found the best solution is, as it usually is, in the middle. C with classes (C++ without advanced features) is almost always the best solution. You really need some encapsulation and some inheritence to write powerful, maintainable, readable, code especially as the code base grows in size.
On the other hand I've seen code from C++ zealots who just aren't happy unless they are pushing every bleeding edge and are spending way to much time trying to write code that is in exact conformance to some bleeding edge school of coding style. They have no problem if there code breaks most compilers, especially ones that haven't just been released, or maybe its even a badge of honor that they break compilers. They will routinely abuse templates and complex constructs to the point that the code is impossible to read, debug or performance tune. STL may be good, powerful, efficient code but if you ever step through it, it is an absolute coding horror.
Two of the biggest culprits behind "everyone is doing it" are Accenture and Mackenzie. I like one of Accenture's services "Human Performance" and of course they also list "Outsourcing". They are making a lucrative business out of going from company to company telling them which parts of the company to offshore and how to do it. Unfortunately HR consulting can't be easily offshored so they can't get a taste of their own medicine. If you see these snakes...errr...people coming in the door, get your resume and unemployment insurance paperwork in order.
Unfortunately, from the perspective of the overpaid executives the argument is unavoidably compelling. Labor costs are so integral to profit margin that there has always been constant pressure to reduce labor costs. American labor made a lot of gains in the 20th century which started out with conditions about as dismal as most of the third world has now. Unfortunately with the development of free trade, cheap telecommunications and a very efficient air and sea freight expensive American labor has become largely a liability unless you're in a service business that requires you're body be in the U.S. Of course there is also a solution for service, immigrants legal or illegal. Its no secret why there is so little enforcement of immigration law in the U.S and why H1B visas are so popular. It provides a vast pool of ultra cheap labor for service jobs, labor that by definition can't compain about poor working conditions. If you work for a living in the U.S. the good times are over.
Dell's action is commendable until you read that they apparently didn't sack anybody in India so presumably they just shifted all of their inferior customer service in India to individuals who haven't got the clout to effectively complain.
Here is the text of an article which appeared just last month in the New Hampshire Gazette, by John Buchanan who recently rediscovered documents in the national archives proving the substance of the Bush family's links to the Nazi party and its financeers
Bush - Nazi Link Confirmed
By by John Buchanan
from The New Hampshire Gazette Vol. 248, No. 1, October 10, 2003
By John Buchanan
Exclusive to The New Hampshire Gazette
WASHINGTON - After 60 years of inattention and even denial by the U.S. media, newly-uncovered government documents in The National Archives and Library of Congress reveal that Prescott Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush, served as a business partner of and U.S. banking operative for the financial architect of the Nazi war machine from 1926 until 1942, when Congress took aggressive action against Bush and his "enemy national" partners.
The documents also show that Bush and his colleagues, according to reports from the U.S. Department of the Treasury and FBI, tried to conceal their financial alliance with German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, a steel and coal baron who, beginning in the mid-1920s, personally funded Adolf Hitler's rise to power by the subversion of democratic principle and German law.
Furthermore, the declassified records demonstrate that Bush and his associates, who included E. Roland Harriman, younger brother of American icon W. Averell Harriman, and George Herbert Walker, President Bush's maternal great-grandfather, continued their dealings with the German industrial baron for nearly eight months after the U.S. entered the war.
No Story?
For six decades these historical facts have gone unreported by the mainstream U.S. media. The essential facts have appeared on the Internet and in relatively obscure books, but were dismissed by the media and Bush family as undocumented diatribes. This story has also escaped the attention of "official" Bush biographers, Presidential historians and publishers of U.S. history books covering World War II and its aftermath.
The White House did not respond to phone calls seeking comment.
The Summer of '42
The unraveling of the web of Bush-Harriman-Thyssen U.S. enterprises, all of which operated out of the same suite of offices at 39 Broadway under the supervision of Prescott Bush, began with a story that ran in the New York Herald-Tribune on July 30, 1942. By then, the U.S. had been at war with Germany for nearly eight months.
"Hitler's Angel Has $3 Million in U.S. Bank," declared the headline. The lead paragraph characterized Fritz Thyssen as "Adolf Hitler's original patron a decade ago." In fact, the steel and coal magnate had aggressively supported and funded Hitler since October 1923, according to Thyssen's autobiography, I Paid Hitler. In that book, Thyssen also acknowledges his direct personal relationships with Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and Rudolf Hess.
The Herald-Tribune also cited unnamed sources who suggested Thyssen's U.S. "nest egg" in fact belonged to "Nazi bigwigs" including Goebbels, Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, or even Hitler himself.
Business is Business
The "bank," founded in 1924 by W. Averell Harriman on behalf of Thyssen and his Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V. of Holland, was Union Banking Corporation (UBC) of New York City. According to government documents, it was in reality a clearing house for a number of Thyssen-controlled enterprises and assets, including as many as a dozen individual businesses. UBC also bought and shipped overseas gold, steel, coal, and U.S. Treasury and war bonds. The company's activities were administered for Thyssen by a Netherlands-born, naturalized U.S. citizen named Cornelis Lievense, who served as president of UBC. Roland Harriman was chairman and Prescott Bush a managing director.
The Herald-Tribune article did not identify Bush or Harriman as executives of UBC, or Brown Brothers Harriman, in which they were partners, as UBC's private banker.
The book is heavily footnoted with verifiable sources. Some parts of the book are tenuous but others are a matter of record.
No mainstream publisher would dream of publishing this book because the Bush family and friends would put them out of business.
The Union Banking scandal is most certainly not fiction. You can amazingly enough verify it from Fox News a month ago:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,100474,00.ht ml
Apparently many of the Union Banking documents and the trading with the enemy charges were just declassified and released. They ought to be some interesting reading for an enterprising journalist.
No discussion of the Bush family is complete without reading Tarpley's unauthorized biography:
http://tarpley.net/bush2.htm
Their history is largely suppressed by the main stream media but the fact is Bert Walker and Prescott Bush, George W's Great Grandfather and Grandfather were actively involved in funding the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party. The assets of Union Banking which they headed was seized in 1942 for trading with the enemy. The prominent Nazi's Thyssen and Flick were their partners in this enterprise. Thyssen wrote a famous book "I Paid Hitler". Powerful friends of the Bush family managed to have the investigation in to their pro Nazi activities suppressed in 1942 claiming it was a diversion from the war effort and the truth never did see the light of day.
The other chapters of Tarpley's work are a pretty good read too if you want to develop a keen appreciation for how dangerous the Bush family is especially working in tandem with the powerful people in the secret Yale society, Skull and Bones. Democracies should actively discourage election to high office of people whose loyalties lie with secret societies first and serve the interests of that society and its members before they serve the nation.
Not sure how much truth there is to it, but apparently Ronald Reagen didn't even trust the Bush family and there were some eleventh hour shenanigans , possibly involving the Iranian hostage and their release, which forced him to nominate George H.W. Bush to be his VP. There is an odd footnote, Neil Bush, George Bush's brother was apparently new the brother of John Hinkley, who tried and failed to assassinate Reagan.
As you suggest I'm pretty sure Red Hat's new strategy is fatally flawed. They failed to appreciate that the success of the Enterprise edition is pretty intimately tied to the success of their brand and being a leader. Their boxed set is an integral part of their brand whether they like it or not.
I was really floored by his comment that the box set was profitable, it just wasn't profitable enough. That is a classic example of an exec who has been taken over by Wall Street analyst mind control. Wall Street is constantly pushing companies to jack up their margins and grow explosively even though it often leads to very unsound long term business strategy.
Matthew please come to your senses and undo your company's idiocy in recent months. If you dont want your company to die you have to support a full Linux distribution, maintain your leadership and maintain your brand.. If you want to improve profitability scale back putting boxes on store shelves and focus sales online. I can see that putting boxes on shelves must be really expensive especially when a new version comes out and all the old stock instantly turns to garbage.
I've gone out of my way over the years to buy Red Hat box sets and up2date subscriptions. I wanted to give money to Red Hat because they were pretty cool in the early days when they seemed to have a long view and had what it would take to make Linux successful. After recent events and reading Matthew's BS I'm afraid I made a mistake. For what ever reason the executives at Red Hat have mutated in to the same kind of slimeballs that populate companies the world over and they certanily don't "get it" anymore. Its a really great idea to dump your flagship producton, and customers, on the backs of a bunch of unpaid volunteers, while you try to cash in on the peices you can charge an arm and a leg for. Red Hat's strategy of making a product based on free labor worked when they were making an affordable and convenient package. Now that they are orphaning a big segment of their loyal customer base and still leveraging free labor but are now charging rates rivaling Microsoft's and are starting to look just as slimy and unappealing. It was a really great idea to sign a bunch of people for up2date and then immediately kick the chair out from under it leaving paying customers hanging.
I imagine this can be attributed to the disease that inflicts every company after it goes public. They stop prioritizing making good products and cultivating happy customers who in turn give them money with joy in their hearts because they like the product.
Instead, like most public companies, the only people they start caring about are the analysts sitting in Wall Street and the one and only priority is making the revenue projections each quarter so the stock price goes up and they get rich when they cash in the options. Just being profitable isn't good enough either. MUST GROW FAST AND CONSTANTLY whether its sound business or not. Customers, rather than being the top priority, turn in to a necessary evil who must be constantly milk for cash and they must be constantly manipulated.
Priority #1, must get customers to sign up for subscriptions. Just selling good software is too unpredictable. If we screw the pooch and a new release sucks people don't buy it, we miss our numbers and Wall Street is unhappy. If we make customers pay us a constant amount of money each year then we ALWAYS make our numbers even if our product sucks sometimes.
Priority #2, a key component of subscriptions is support. But damnit support is expensive. Must cut support costs. Lets hire a bunch of people in India who are dirt cheap. Nothing wrong with that if they actually know what they are doing. The problem is they are usually hired iike cattle and handed a bunch of preprinted FAQ's. As long as the customers question is precisely answered on the FAQ service is great, unfortunately the FAQ's only work half the time and the rest of the time your support staff exercises their one true skill, using the buttons on their phone to constantly forward or put on hold anyone who has an actual problem until they eventually give up and hang up.
Priority #3, make sure all your competitors are also publicly traded and also implement Priority #1 and #2 so they suck just as bad as you do so customers are left choosing between the lesser evils and will pay you even though your company's products have started to suck. Thats what competition is all about. Everybody competes to be equally shitty.
After some consideration I've deduced that Capitalism was an interesting experiment but its reached the point its flaws are starting to far outweigh its benefits. Fact is its become 100% about overpaid and unscrupulous execs striving to make as much money as possible as easily as possible. Screwing labor and customers is job 1. Those with ethics and interested in producing a good product at a fair price need not apply. All of Capitalism's competitors have also proven to suck so maybe we should go back to the drawing board and try to come up with a economic system where people are actually rewarded based on the merit of their work.
Here is another good read that somehow hasn't seen any mainstream media play:
http://www.tarpley.net/bush2.htm
The gist of it is Prescott Bush, George W's grandfather, was a business partner of the Thyssen and Flick families, who helped bankroll the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party from 1923-1942. Flick funded the S.S. and S.A. in their early years. Thyssen wrote a book "I Paid Hitler" describing his financial support for Hitler from 1923.
It is quite possible the Bush family helped make the rise of Hitler possible.
In 1942 the U.S. Government seized the assets of Union Bank, Seemless Steel and Holland American trading, all run by Prescott Bush, for the Harriman family, for being Nazi fronts which were at the time trading with the enemy. Among other things it appears Union bank was a front for Flick and the German Steel Trust which was the major manufacturer of steel and explosives for the Nazi war machine.
It kind of sounds like the Bush family were rather fond of totalitarian governments and were particularly fond of them in the 30's when the western democracies were in collapse and there was a lot of money to be made in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. They may well have endorsed the rise of Hitler as they saw it as a chance to make a lot of money banking and trading with Germany.
There's plenty of dissent on the homefront, and if you can't see it, there's nothing I can do about it.
There is a little toothless dissent. The little dissent there is in the U.S., is so powerless the administration can quite safely ignore it. What dissent do you really see that makes a difference?
One place dissent would count would be in the congress but the Republicans have taken to completely ignoring the opposition in closed doors, Republican only, conferences where legistation is now being written. Again, the Senate fillibuster is the only tool left to stop Republiucans from writing laws at their whim. Judicial review is the only other restraint but it becomes increasingly ineffective as Bush stacks the court with rightwing judges. Politicians who do anything that can be construed as opposing the "War on Terrorism" or the "War in Iraq" are routinely branded as unpatriotic. This is why the $87 billion in Iraq funding passed by voice vote since no one wanted to be on the record voting against it.
There are a few people speaking out like Vidal and Michael Moore but they are always painted as being on the lunatic fringe. Meanwhile Ann Coulter does the talkshow rounds spewing non stop right wing venom and she goes largely unchallenged.
There are polls showing Bush's popularity is suffering but the only poll that counts is the one next November. He's going in to that one with an unprecedented war chest, a probably inept opponent, suspect electronic voting machines and an economy being artificially buoyed by a half a trillion dollars in defecit spending.
There are on going court cases against the Secret Service for cordoning off anti Bush protestors in areas where the President and noone else sees them when he travels. Pro Bush demonstrators are always placed in areas where they are actually seen.
There are an unknown number of people, some U.S. citizens, in indefinite detention in the U.S., with no access to lawyers, family or anyone else. They have no charges laid against them and have no mechanism to prove their inoccence. As Vidal said we are in a position now or will soon be where the FBI can "disappear" anyone they chose, put them in solitary confinement, run them in front of a stacked deck in a secret military tribunal and execute them without restraint. They will also soon be able to strip the citizenship of anyone they choose and deport you to parts unknown. There is a well known case recently where a Canadian citizen, a programmer, of Syrian descent was taken off a flight passing through New York on the way home to Montreal. He was detained, interrogated and eventually deported to Syria where he was tortured for a year before Canadian pressure secured his release. The U.S. may or may not be torturing people yet but we are most certainly, knowingly, shipping people to countries where they are tortured.
An anti Bush protestor was recently detained by the FBI as a suspect in the Earth Liberation Front SUV trashing case based on a grainy surveillance camera. He didn't even look much like the guy in the film. The message was to stop the protesting because the FBI is watching him and they will drum up a case against him if he doesn't shut up.
There have been a few big protest marches, but they are sound and fury for a day. The administration ignores them because they know they don't count for anything at their current level. If they did reach a level where they are threatening they will, no doubt, be suppressed with force.
Clinton lies about blowjob? IMPEACH!(if "Right"), FORGIVE!(if "Left"). Bush lies about WMDs? CONDEMN!(if "Left"), IGNORE!(if "Right"). Sound similar? They are!
They may sound similar but they really aren't. Clinton lied about a personal sexual affair, like just about every married man would've. The right wing response was impeachment which was an insane overreaction designed to massively damage the Democratic party and help the Republican's win the next election which they did, by hook or crook. They got away with it because they controlled the House at the time. The founding fathers designed impeachement as a tool of last resort, not as a poltical tool to be used in such a petty manner.
Contrast this with Bush's big lie on Iraq where there was apparently an intentional campaign of deception to fabricate a case for a war. It led to tens of thousands of people, and hundreds of Americans, getting killed and 100's of billions of dollars disappearing in a quagmire. It may well lead to more attacks against the U.S. in the long run, not less, since most of the world is now inflamed against the U.S. and now views the U.S. as the biggest threat to a stable, peaceful world. It is also unfathomable how anyone thinks Iraq will be a stable pro Western democracy anytime soon . The majority in Iraq are Shia who will eventually vote for an Islamic republic, like Iran's. The Sunni and Kurd minorities are unlikely to ever tolerate Shia dominance. I doubt the Bush administration really thought any of this out past "shock and awe".
The Democratic response to Bush's big lie has been nothing but empty rhetoric since they are completely devoid of power at present. If the Republican's succeed in rigging or buying future elections, in stacking the Judiciary with right wingers and in doing away with the fillibuster in the Senate the last checks and balances the founding fathers designed to restrain them will be gone. Today's bizarre 30 hour session in the Senate is all about eliminating the last checks against their unrestrained power, the Senate fillibuster and a balanced judiciary.
It is true both political parties, or more likely all political parties are corrupt. But today's Republican party is going off the scale both in its fanaticism and its willingness to use any means necessary to take and hold power. The Republicans appear to be dedicated to a goal of a white male dominated, far right, fundementalist Christian global empire pandering to a plutocracy, small in number but vast in wealth. They also have control of an extremely powerful military, intelligence and police apparatus that can and may well be suppressing dissent at home and abroad.
I posted this last time this subject came up and it will probably be modded down as a conspiracy theory again but there is way too much smoke here for there not to be a fire.
Chances are since at least 9/11 and probably since 2000 the Republican's in concert with Machiavellians in the defense/intelligence establishment with their flunkies Diebold and Batelle have opted to rig American elections to insure Republican's take and hold power.
There's been one case after another where Republican's are gaining power in national, state and local elections under suspect circumstances. For example the recent win in California almost certainly was engineered by the white house and their friends at Enron when the engineered the California electricity crisis to destroy its economy and its encumbent Governor. The suspicious faliure of the VNS exit polls in 2002, which are engineered by Batelle, is another.
Just look at the quotes from the fundementalist christian extremist 3 star general who is now head of DOD's intelligence and special operations about how its "God's will" that George Bush is President with the implication democracy had nothing to do with it. Its standard special operations doctrine to "engineer" elections in other countries. They just figured out they could do the same thing in the U.S. because we are too stupid and lazy to stop them.
There are unfortunately some extremists in power now that think they have to defend America from Islam or any other convenient threat. Sacrificing Democracy is a small price to pay in their small minds. They'll be plenty happy to institute an increasingly repressive police state to keep them in power and everyone else in line and silent
You may love or hate Michael Moore but one thing to his credit he is one of the few with access to a TV camera that is pointing out we are already standing on the same slippery slope that lead to Nazi Germany.
To paraphrase Joseph Stalin, its not who casts the votes that matters, its who counts them.
I don't think its wise to keep creating one embedded GUI after another. There is already Qte, NanoX, NanoGTK, DirectFB, and wxWindows that I can think of off the top of my head. I know people are going to reply to this about how great it is to have choices. But in this area as in desktops it would be wise to settle on one project, put everyone's effort behind, get good hardware support and a develop a full set of consistent apps, in other words do it well instead of having a dozen half baked efforts none of which achieve critical mass.
It seems to be a trait of open source development that too many people want to be a lead developer doing their own thing rather than learn to work together on one project.
Email Carly and tell here how great an idea it is for HP to fund SCO, and you will will be reconsidering purchasing HP's hardware:
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/execteam/email/fiorina/in dex.html
Here is a thought provoking article on the possibility that recent U.S. elections have already been stolen. Its quite interesting that a company called Battelle which has close ties to U.S. intelligence and defense agencies also has ties to Diebold and is a contractor heavily involved in VNS(Voter News Service). VNS is the service all the networks rely on to get the exit poll results they use to predict the outcome of elections. As you recall VNS mysteriously failed in the 2002 elections. If you were going to rig a modern election it would be necessary to either rig or sabotage the exit polls as well. It would be suspicious if the exit polls disagreed with the actual result of a race.
Electronic voting machines, without paper audit trails and control of exit polls would go a long way in letting those in power control close elections. The only check against widespread election rigging is that races where independent polls show a clear winner can't be rigged without danger of exposing the conspiracy. It just happens a lot of races in recent elections are very close, for some reason, and rigging a few has been enough to tip the balance of power in the Senate and presidential races in particular.
Its just conjecture but its quite possible that the Republican administration, with their heads bent by 9/11, are acting in concert with elements in intelligence or defence to keep the Democrats out of power in Congress because the Democrats are perceived as too weak to defend America from its enemies which are now behind every bush. They might well have rationalized to themselves that it was OK to destroy the most fundemental underpinning of freedom in America in order to defend America.
During these tumultuous times its quite possible the Bush administartion and its allies have decided to do whatever it takes to maintain control of the Presidency and Congress, which will eventually lead to control of the judiciary. We could well be witnessing the end of the last pretense of Democracy in America. If the Reuplicans maintain control of the congress and the presidency in 2004, you may as well stop wasting your time voting after that.
It also quite suspicious Democratic senatorial candidates keep dying in plane crashes. Mel Carnahan in 2000 and Paul Goldstone in 2002 whose seat was subsequently won by a Republican tipping in the balance of power in the Senate.
Just look at the string of disturbing visible Republican power plays, the Clinton impeachment, the Florida debacle, redistricting in Texas and Colorado, the California recall and the possibility the California energy crisis was rigged by Enron and its allies in the White house to create turmoil in one of the last remaining Democratic strongholds. You can easily envision the possibility the Republicans are engaged in a no holds barred campaign to seize and hold power.
There is a pretty good chance Microsoft is, behind closed doors, delighted with the consequences of this patent. Why? Because they may be planning to build their plugins into IE, in particular.NET and Windows Media Player. If this circumvention works then the companies that will be screwed by this patent are Microsoft's competitors, in particular Java, Real, QuickTime, Macromedia or anyone else Microsoft doesn't build in to the browser. If users have a high pain threshold to run Real, QuickTime, or Java but not WMP and.NET Microsoft will dance a monopolostic jig and they can point out a court is making them indulge in monopolistic behavior.
Microsoft, haveing the dominant browser, can coerce companies like Macromedia into major concessions if Macromedia wants Flash built in to IE.
There is a pretty good chance they will have to ship a new version of IE to come in to compliance with a court injunction over the Eolas patent. Its rather hard to predict what that might be since no one seems to understand exactly what the Eolas patent really covers but I'm wagering they will integrate WMD...errr..WMP and.NET and do away with ActiveX plugins. It just happens it would be a convenient way to remove Real, Quicktime and Java support from IE. Presumably they might also integrate Flash, some PDF reader and a few other essentials.
Unfortunately George W. Bush is no John F. Kennedy. He generally hates big government unless its in the Defense, Justice, or Homeland Security departments. He is a complete zero when it comes to interest in science or space. He is 100% about making money for himself and his friends and at present none of them has pitched any business plan for space:
1. Shoot rockets into space
2. ?????
3. Profit
Its no accident George's appointment as head of NASA is an accountant, with no clue about engineering or space, whose main goal was/is to cut spending at NASA. What little space program there is primarily to transfer money to big aerospace/defense contractors. Not sure anyone cares if they actually do anything useful with the money before they pocket their cut.
For the U.S. to have a space program that matters again there would need to be a visionary leader like JFK, a mission that matters (one beyond low earth orbit), a lead engineer like Kelly Johnson and a lean, mean organization like the Skunk Works of old.
Having NASA design yet another space plane is just wasting billions of dollars, and another decade and when your done, if they even manage to finish it this time, you'll still just be going back and forth to LEO. We wont have moved a single step forward.
A new space plane program has been started every couple of year at least since I worked there in the early 90's and everyone of them has been scraped after wasting money and time.
I'm afraid the ISS and space shuttle aren't doing anything remotely resembling space exploration. They aren't doing anything that wasn't done 20 years ago. Spending vast sums to achieve LEO is embarrassing, its not exploration. Some things that would qualify as exploration are missions to the moon, mars and the asteroid belt.
I'm 100% in favor of space exploration and I wasn't saying it needs a provable case, I just don't think NASA's manned space program does any of it any more. The remnants of exploration are a handful of unmanned probes and observatories launched from expendable rockets.
It appears the only hope our species has for doing space exploration again lies in places like China since they will have the economic wherewithall and they are setting challenging goals in the same way the U.S. did in the 60's.
You can certainly blame some of NASA's problems on politicians, and the Air Force. But from my view the huge bureaucracy behind the space shuttle and the space station simply don't deserve any more funding. Don't try to tell me the problem is they aren't getting enough money. They are spending huge sums on the space shuttle and space station, but they aren't accomplishing anything with either.
The GAO, in 2002, estimated the total cost of the space station will be $100 billion dollars and it now appears that will be a crippled subset of the original design. It may well house just enough people to maintain it and its unlikely it will accomplish any useful science. When was the last time you heard of a scientific breakthrough coming out of Spacelab or the ISS to justify the vast sums being spent?
These two programs are bleeding the rest of NASA white and will continue to do so for ever unless someone stops them because they are entrenched bureaucracies living on pork barrel politics. They are starving programs that might do something useful. Real cases can be made for investing in all new cheap launch vehicles, and to funding a moon base or a Mars colony. The latter two would revive some sense of adventure in space exploration which is completely lost in what NASA is doing now. There current goal appears to be "lets just get a few people to low earth orbit and back again without killing them".
I think the whole agency, along with their political overseers, needs to step back and develop a real and provable case for why what there doing now is worth the amount of money being spent. If they can't, the shuttle and ISS should be scraped and the money should be poured in to programs that matter. It would also help if the whole entrenched bureaucracy in these two programs were sacked and they start rehiring for new programs fom scratch based on merit and rebellious can-do attitude.
> It might be a good idea to write to the Utah attorney general office as well.
I did this last week as well as the AG in NY, Eliot Spitzer and my home state AG. I received a reply from Utah yesterday. The gist of the response was they viewed it as a Federal copyright law issue and not in their domain, it was up to the courts to decide or congress to change the copyright laws. They suggested I contact a congressman.
I haven't given up yet since they overlooked the main issue in my inquiry, that SCO is demanding money from consumers under threat of legal action, which borders on extortion, and that they today have shown their infringement claims are, at least so far, false. I also pointed out the possibility Microsoft is using SCO as a proxy in an effort to exterminate one of the few remaining threats to their monopoly.
> They should think first on getting men on Mars. And then back to Earth. Alive.
This is the same kind of flawed logic that will make it unlikely we will do anything useful on Mars for a really long time. The goal should be to get people to Mars as quickly as possible, keep them alive there and send more people and supplies to follow them. Round trips are way harder than a one way trip. Once you get people there its way more useful to keep them there to start a colony than it is to try and get them back. They'll be ruined for a 1G environment after all that time anyway.
The Russians have, as is there pragmatic way, nailed one critical component to keeping people alive there, abundant power to keep them warm, to grow food and manufacture the essentials they'll need to survive.
NASA by contrast squanders vast sums on their goofy space station, zero G research to make a round trip feasible and searching for life on Mars. Life on mars is academicly interesting but has little value for doing anything useful on Mars (excepting if there is life it might be dangerous and you'd have to be dealt with it).
Me, I'll take the Russians over NASA anyday. I wish we could give NASA's entire budget to them. If we did some amazing things might happen in space again. Just look at Mir, they did a whole lot more for a whole lot less a whole lot sooner than the ISS debacle.
For one thing the Flash 5 Linux player had a lot of stability problems so it ticked off a lot of Linux users. The Flash 6 player is a lot better, though it still needs audio work, but many people wrote it off during the Flash 5 era. For another thing a lot of clueless advertising droids misuse Flash and tick people off with it which gives it a bad rep that all the entertaining and interesting uses don't compensate for. And, of course, its not open source which qualifies as a fact of life at the moment so the Slashdot crowd turns to SVG instead, but for some reason no one seems to produce much interesting content in SVG, yet.
The state of affairs of space exploration
on
Ask Larry Niven
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Do you have any strong views or insight on the state of space exploration today and in the near future? If you were appointed NASA administrator and given a free hand to set its direction along with a healthy budget and no political interference what would you do? In particular, what are your views on manned missions to and colonization of Mars.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand I've seen code from C++ zealots who just aren't happy unless they are pushing every bleeding edge and are spending way to much time trying to write code that is in exact conformance to some bleeding edge school of coding style. They have no problem if there code breaks most compilers, especially ones that haven't just been released, or maybe its even a badge of honor that they break compilers. They will routinely abuse templates and complex constructs to the point that the code is impossible to read, debug or performance tune. STL may be good, powerful, efficient code but if you ever step through it, it is an absolute coding horror.
Unfortunately, from the perspective of the overpaid executives the argument is unavoidably compelling. Labor costs are so integral to profit margin that there has always been constant pressure to reduce labor costs. American labor made a lot of gains in the 20th century which started out with conditions about as dismal as most of the third world has now. Unfortunately with the development of free trade, cheap telecommunications and a very efficient air and sea freight expensive American labor has become largely a liability unless you're in a service business that requires you're body be in the U.S. Of course there is also a solution for service, immigrants legal or illegal. Its no secret why there is so little enforcement of immigration law in the U.S and why H1B visas are so popular. It provides a vast pool of ultra cheap labor for service jobs, labor that by definition can't compain about poor working conditions. If you work for a living in the U.S. the good times are over.
Dell's action is commendable until you read that they apparently didn't sack anybody in India so presumably they just shifted all of their inferior customer service in India to individuals who haven't got the clout to effectively complain.
Here is the text of an article which appeared just last month in the New Hampshire Gazette, by John Buchanan who recently rediscovered documents in the national archives proving the substance of the Bush family's links to the Nazi party and its financeers
Bush - Nazi Link Confirmed
By by John Buchanan
from The New Hampshire Gazette Vol. 248, No. 1, October 10, 2003
By John Buchanan
Exclusive to The New Hampshire Gazette
WASHINGTON - After 60 years of inattention and even denial by the U.S. media, newly-uncovered government documents in The National Archives and Library of Congress reveal that Prescott Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush, served as a business partner of and U.S. banking operative for the financial architect of the Nazi war machine from 1926 until 1942, when Congress took aggressive action against Bush and his "enemy national" partners.
The documents also show that Bush and his colleagues, according to reports from the U.S. Department of the Treasury and FBI, tried to conceal their financial alliance with German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, a steel and coal baron who, beginning in the mid-1920s, personally funded Adolf Hitler's rise to power by the subversion of democratic principle and German law.
Furthermore, the declassified records demonstrate that Bush and his associates, who included E. Roland Harriman, younger brother of American icon W. Averell Harriman, and George Herbert Walker, President Bush's maternal great-grandfather, continued their dealings with the German industrial baron for nearly eight months after the U.S. entered the war.
No Story?
For six decades these historical facts have gone unreported by the mainstream U.S. media. The essential facts have appeared on the Internet and in relatively obscure books, but were dismissed by the media and Bush family as undocumented diatribes. This story has also escaped the attention of "official" Bush biographers, Presidential historians and publishers of U.S. history books covering World War II and its aftermath.
The White House did not respond to phone calls seeking comment.
The Summer of '42
The unraveling of the web of Bush-Harriman-Thyssen U.S. enterprises, all of which operated out of the same suite of offices at 39 Broadway under the supervision of Prescott Bush, began with a story that ran in the New York Herald-Tribune on July 30, 1942. By then, the U.S. had been at war with Germany for nearly eight months.
"Hitler's Angel Has $3 Million in U.S. Bank," declared the headline. The lead paragraph characterized Fritz Thyssen as "Adolf Hitler's original patron a decade ago." In fact, the steel and coal magnate had aggressively supported and funded Hitler since October 1923, according to Thyssen's autobiography, I Paid Hitler. In that book, Thyssen also acknowledges his direct personal relationships with Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and Rudolf Hess.
The Herald-Tribune also cited unnamed sources who suggested Thyssen's U.S. "nest egg" in fact belonged to "Nazi bigwigs" including Goebbels, Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, or even Hitler himself.
Business is Business
The "bank," founded in 1924 by W. Averell Harriman on behalf of Thyssen and his Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V. of Holland, was Union Banking Corporation (UBC) of New York City. According to government documents, it was in reality a clearing house for a number of Thyssen-controlled enterprises and assets, including as many as a dozen individual businesses. UBC also bought and shipped overseas gold, steel, coal, and U.S. Treasury and war bonds. The company's activities were administered for Thyssen by a Netherlands-born, naturalized U.S. citizen named Cornelis Lievense, who served as president of UBC. Roland Harriman was chairman and Prescott Bush a managing director.
The Herald-Tribune article did not identify Bush or Harriman as executives of UBC, or Brown Brothers Harriman, in which they were partners, as UBC's private banker.
No mainstream publisher would dream of publishing this book because the Bush family and friends would put them out of business.
The Union Banking scandal is most certainly not fiction. You can amazingly enough verify it from Fox News a month ago:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,100474,00.ht ml
Apparently many of the Union Banking documents and the trading with the enemy charges were just declassified and released. They ought to be some interesting reading for an enterprising journalist.
http://tarpley.net/bush2.htm
Their history is largely suppressed by the main stream media but the fact is Bert Walker and Prescott Bush, George W's Great Grandfather and Grandfather were actively involved in funding the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party. The assets of Union Banking which they headed was seized in 1942 for trading with the enemy. The prominent Nazi's Thyssen and Flick were their partners in this enterprise. Thyssen wrote a famous book "I Paid Hitler". Powerful friends of the Bush family managed to have the investigation in to their pro Nazi activities suppressed in 1942 claiming it was a diversion from the war effort and the truth never did see the light of day.
The other chapters of Tarpley's work are a pretty good read too if you want to develop a keen appreciation for how dangerous the Bush family is especially working in tandem with the powerful people in the secret Yale society, Skull and Bones. Democracies should actively discourage election to high office of people whose loyalties lie with secret societies first and serve the interests of that society and its members before they serve the nation.
Not sure how much truth there is to it, but apparently Ronald Reagen didn't even trust the Bush family and there were some eleventh hour shenanigans , possibly involving the Iranian hostage and their release, which forced him to nominate George H.W. Bush to be his VP. There is an odd footnote, Neil Bush, George Bush's brother was apparently new the brother of John Hinkley, who tried and failed to assassinate Reagan.
I was really floored by his comment that the box set was profitable, it just wasn't profitable enough. That is a classic example of an exec who has been taken over by Wall Street analyst mind control. Wall Street is constantly pushing companies to jack up their margins and grow explosively even though it often leads to very unsound long term business strategy.
Matthew please come to your senses and undo your company's idiocy in recent months. If you dont want your company to die you have to support a full Linux distribution, maintain your leadership and maintain your brand.. If you want to improve profitability scale back putting boxes on store shelves and focus sales online. I can see that putting boxes on shelves must be really expensive especially when a new version comes out and all the old stock instantly turns to garbage.
I imagine this can be attributed to the disease that inflicts every company after it goes public. They stop prioritizing making good products and cultivating happy customers who in turn give them money with joy in their hearts because they like the product.
Instead, like most public companies, the only people they start caring about are the analysts sitting in Wall Street and the one and only priority is making the revenue projections each quarter so the stock price goes up and they get rich when they cash in the options. Just being profitable isn't good enough either. MUST GROW FAST AND CONSTANTLY whether its sound business or not. Customers, rather than being the top priority, turn in to a necessary evil who must be constantly milk for cash and they must be constantly manipulated.
Priority #1, must get customers to sign up for subscriptions. Just selling good software is too unpredictable. If we screw the pooch and a new release sucks people don't buy it, we miss our numbers and Wall Street is unhappy. If we make customers pay us a constant amount of money each year then we ALWAYS make our numbers even if our product sucks sometimes.
Priority #2, a key component of subscriptions is support. But damnit support is expensive. Must cut support costs. Lets hire a bunch of people in India who are dirt cheap. Nothing wrong with that if they actually know what they are doing. The problem is they are usually hired iike cattle and handed a bunch of preprinted FAQ's. As long as the customers question is precisely answered on the FAQ service is great, unfortunately the FAQ's only work half the time and the rest of the time your support staff exercises their one true skill, using the buttons on their phone to constantly forward or put on hold anyone who has an actual problem until they eventually give up and hang up.
Priority #3, make sure all your competitors are also publicly traded and also implement Priority #1 and #2 so they suck just as bad as you do so customers are left choosing between the lesser evils and will pay you even though your company's products have started to suck. Thats what competition is all about. Everybody competes to be equally shitty.
After some consideration I've deduced that Capitalism was an interesting experiment but its reached the point its flaws are starting to far outweigh its benefits. Fact is its become 100% about overpaid and unscrupulous execs striving to make as much money as possible as easily as possible. Screwing labor and customers is job 1. Those with ethics and interested in producing a good product at a fair price need not apply. All of Capitalism's competitors have also proven to suck so maybe we should go back to the drawing board and try to come up with a economic system where people are actually rewarded based on the merit of their work.
http://www.tarpley.net/bush2.htm
The gist of it is Prescott Bush, George W's grandfather, was a business partner of the Thyssen and Flick families, who helped bankroll the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party from 1923-1942. Flick funded the S.S. and S.A. in their early years. Thyssen wrote a book "I Paid Hitler" describing his financial support for Hitler from 1923.
It is quite possible the Bush family helped make the rise of Hitler possible.
In 1942 the U.S. Government seized the assets of Union Bank, Seemless Steel and Holland American trading, all run by Prescott Bush, for the Harriman family, for being Nazi fronts which were at the time trading with the enemy. Among other things it appears Union bank was a front for Flick and the German Steel Trust which was the major manufacturer of steel and explosives for the Nazi war machine.
It kind of sounds like the Bush family were rather fond of totalitarian governments and were particularly fond of them in the 30's when the western democracies were in collapse and there was a lot of money to be made in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. They may well have endorsed the rise of Hitler as they saw it as a chance to make a lot of money banking and trading with Germany.
There is a little toothless dissent. The little dissent there is in the U.S., is so powerless the administration can quite safely ignore it. What dissent do you really see that makes a difference?
One place dissent would count would be in the congress but the Republicans have taken to completely ignoring the opposition in closed doors, Republican only, conferences where legistation is now being written. Again, the Senate fillibuster is the only tool left to stop Republiucans from writing laws at their whim. Judicial review is the only other restraint but it becomes increasingly ineffective as Bush stacks the court with rightwing judges. Politicians who do anything that can be construed as opposing the "War on Terrorism" or the "War in Iraq" are routinely branded as unpatriotic. This is why the $87 billion in Iraq funding passed by voice vote since no one wanted to be on the record voting against it.
There are a few people speaking out like Vidal and Michael Moore but they are always painted as being on the lunatic fringe. Meanwhile Ann Coulter does the talkshow rounds spewing non stop right wing venom and she goes largely unchallenged.
There are polls showing Bush's popularity is suffering but the only poll that counts is the one next November. He's going in to that one with an unprecedented war chest, a probably inept opponent, suspect electronic voting machines and an economy being artificially buoyed by a half a trillion dollars in defecit spending.
There are on going court cases against the Secret Service for cordoning off anti Bush protestors in areas where the President and noone else sees them when he travels. Pro Bush demonstrators are always placed in areas where they are actually seen.
There are an unknown number of people, some U.S. citizens, in indefinite detention in the U.S., with no access to lawyers, family or anyone else. They have no charges laid against them and have no mechanism to prove their inoccence. As Vidal said we are in a position now or will soon be where the FBI can "disappear" anyone they chose, put them in solitary confinement, run them in front of a stacked deck in a secret military tribunal and execute them without restraint. They will also soon be able to strip the citizenship of anyone they choose and deport you to parts unknown. There is a well known case recently where a Canadian citizen, a programmer, of Syrian descent was taken off a flight passing through New York on the way home to Montreal. He was detained, interrogated and eventually deported to Syria where he was tortured for a year before Canadian pressure secured his release. The U.S. may or may not be torturing people yet but we are most certainly, knowingly, shipping people to countries where they are tortured.
An anti Bush protestor was recently detained by the FBI as a suspect in the Earth Liberation Front SUV trashing case based on a grainy surveillance camera. He didn't even look much like the guy in the film. The message was to stop the protesting because the FBI is watching him and they will drum up a case against him if he doesn't shut up.
There have been a few big protest marches, but they are sound and fury for a day. The administration ignores them because they know they don't count for anything at their current level. If they did reach a level where they are threatening they will, no doubt, be suppressed with force.
They may sound similar but they really aren't. Clinton lied about a personal sexual affair, like just about every married man would've. The right wing response was impeachment which was an insane overreaction designed to massively damage the Democratic party and help the Republican's win the next election which they did, by hook or crook. They got away with it because they controlled the House at the time. The founding fathers designed impeachement as a tool of last resort, not as a poltical tool to be used in such a petty manner.
Contrast this with Bush's big lie on Iraq where there was apparently an intentional campaign of deception to fabricate a case for a war. It led to tens of thousands of people, and hundreds of Americans, getting killed and 100's of billions of dollars disappearing in a quagmire. It may well lead to more attacks against the U.S. in the long run, not less, since most of the world is now inflamed against the U.S. and now views the U.S. as the biggest threat to a stable, peaceful world. It is also unfathomable how anyone thinks Iraq will be a stable pro Western democracy anytime soon . The majority in Iraq are Shia who will eventually vote for an Islamic republic, like Iran's. The Sunni and Kurd minorities are unlikely to ever tolerate Shia dominance. I doubt the Bush administration really thought any of this out past "shock and awe".
The Democratic response to Bush's big lie has been nothing but empty rhetoric since they are completely devoid of power at present. If the Republican's succeed in rigging or buying future elections, in stacking the Judiciary with right wingers and in doing away with the fillibuster in the Senate the last checks and balances the founding fathers designed to restrain them will be gone. Today's bizarre 30 hour session in the Senate is all about eliminating the last checks against their unrestrained power, the Senate fillibuster and a balanced judiciary.
It is true both political parties, or more likely all political parties are corrupt. But today's Republican party is going off the scale both in its fanaticism and its willingness to use any means necessary to take and hold power. The Republicans appear to be dedicated to a goal of a white male dominated, far right, fundementalist Christian global empire pandering to a plutocracy, small in number but vast in wealth. They also have control of an extremely powerful military, intelligence and police apparatus that can and may well be suppressing dissent at home and abroad.
I posted this last time this subject came up and it will probably be modded down as a conspiracy theory again but there is way too much smoke here for there not to be a fire.
Chances are since at least 9/11 and probably since 2000 the Republican's in concert with Machiavellians in the defense/intelligence establishment with their flunkies Diebold and Batelle have opted to rig American elections to insure Republican's take and hold power.
There's been one case after another where Republican's are gaining power in national, state and local elections under suspect circumstances. For example the recent win in California almost certainly was engineered by the white house and their friends at Enron when the engineered the California electricity crisis to destroy its economy and its encumbent Governor. The suspicious faliure of the VNS exit polls in 2002, which are engineered by Batelle, is another.
Just look at the quotes from the fundementalist christian extremist 3 star general who is now head of DOD's intelligence and special operations about how its "God's will" that George Bush is President with the implication democracy had nothing to do with it. Its standard special operations doctrine to "engineer" elections in other countries. They just figured out they could do the same thing in the U.S. because we are too stupid and lazy to stop them.
There are unfortunately some extremists in power now that think they have to defend America from Islam or any other convenient threat. Sacrificing Democracy is a small price to pay in their small minds. They'll be plenty happy to institute an increasingly repressive police state to keep them in power and everyone else in line and silent
You may love or hate Michael Moore but one thing to his credit he is one of the few with access to a TV camera that is pointing out we are already standing on the same slippery slope that lead to Nazi Germany.
To paraphrase Joseph Stalin, its not who casts the votes that matters, its who counts them.
I don't think its wise to keep creating one embedded GUI after another. There is already Qte, NanoX, NanoGTK, DirectFB, and wxWindows that I can think of off the top of my head. I know people are going to reply to this about how great it is to have choices. But in this area as in desktops it would be wise to settle on one project, put everyone's effort behind, get good hardware support and a develop a full set of consistent apps, in other words do it well instead of having a dozen half baked efforts none of which achieve critical mass.
It seems to be a trait of open source development that too many people want to be a lead developer doing their own thing rather than learn to work together on one project.
I wager this is violating Microsoft's newly issued patent on crash reporting.
Email Carly and tell here how great an idea it is for HP to fund SCO, and you will will be reconsidering purchasing HP's hardware:n dex.html
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/execteam/email/fiorina/i
Electronic voting machines, without paper audit trails and control of exit polls would go a long way in letting those in power control close elections. The only check against widespread election rigging is that races where independent polls show a clear winner can't be rigged without danger of exposing the conspiracy. It just happens a lot of races in recent elections are very close, for some reason, and rigging a few has been enough to tip the balance of power in the Senate and presidential races in particular.
Its just conjecture but its quite possible that the Republican administration, with their heads bent by 9/11, are acting in concert with elements in intelligence or defence to keep the Democrats out of power in Congress because the Democrats are perceived as too weak to defend America from its enemies which are now behind every bush. They might well have rationalized to themselves that it was OK to destroy the most fundemental underpinning of freedom in America in order to defend America.
During these tumultuous times its quite possible the Bush administartion and its allies have decided to do whatever it takes to maintain control of the Presidency and Congress, which will eventually lead to control of the judiciary. We could well be witnessing the end of the last pretense of Democracy in America. If the Reuplicans maintain control of the congress and the presidency in 2004, you may as well stop wasting your time voting after that.
It also quite suspicious Democratic senatorial candidates keep dying in plane crashes. Mel Carnahan in 2000 and Paul Goldstone in 2002 whose seat was subsequently won by a Republican tipping in the balance of power in the Senate.
Just look at the string of disturbing visible Republican power plays, the Clinton impeachment, the Florida debacle, redistricting in Texas and Colorado, the California recall and the possibility the California energy crisis was rigged by Enron and its allies in the White house to create turmoil in one of the last remaining Democratic strongholds. You can easily envision the possibility the Republicans are engaged in a no holds barred campaign to seize and hold power.
There is a pretty good chance Microsoft is, behind closed doors, delighted with the consequences of this patent. Why? Because they may be planning to build their plugins into IE, in particular .NET and Windows Media Player. If this circumvention works then the companies that will be screwed by this patent are Microsoft's competitors, in particular Java, Real, QuickTime, Macromedia or anyone else Microsoft doesn't build in to the browser. If users have a high pain threshold to run Real, QuickTime, or Java but not WMP and .NET Microsoft will dance a monopolostic jig and they can point out a court is making them indulge in monopolistic behavior.
Microsoft, haveing the dominant browser, can coerce companies like Macromedia into major concessions if Macromedia wants Flash built in to IE.
I'm pretty sure 80% of the lines in your program are stolen from SCO's source. Man you are so screwed now....Darl.....Darl.....come look at this.
There is a pretty good chance they will have to ship a new version of IE to come in to compliance with a court injunction over the Eolas patent. Its rather hard to predict what that might be since no one seems to understand exactly what the Eolas patent really covers but I'm wagering they will integrate WMD...errr..WMP and .NET and do away with ActiveX plugins. It just happens it would be a convenient way to remove Real, Quicktime and Java support from IE. Presumably they might also integrate Flash, some PDF reader and a few other essentials.
Unfortunately George W. Bush is no John F. Kennedy. He generally hates big government unless its in the Defense, Justice, or Homeland Security departments. He is a complete zero when it comes to interest in science or space. He is 100% about making money for himself and his friends and at present none of them has pitched any business plan for space:
1. Shoot rockets into space
2. ?????
3. Profit
Its no accident George's appointment as head of NASA is an accountant, with no clue about engineering or space, whose main goal was/is to cut spending at NASA. What little space program there is primarily to transfer money to big aerospace/defense contractors. Not sure anyone cares if they actually do anything useful with the money before they pocket their cut.
For the U.S. to have a space program that matters again there would need to be a visionary leader like JFK, a mission that matters (one beyond low earth orbit), a lead engineer like Kelly Johnson and a lean, mean organization like the Skunk Works of old.
Having NASA design yet another space plane is just wasting billions of dollars, and another decade and when your done, if they even manage to finish it this time, you'll still just be going back and forth to LEO. We wont have moved a single step forward.
A new space plane program has been started every couple of year at least since I worked there in the early 90's and everyone of them has been scraped after wasting money and time.
I'm afraid the ISS and space shuttle aren't doing anything remotely resembling space exploration. They aren't doing anything that wasn't done 20 years ago. Spending vast sums to achieve LEO is embarrassing, its not exploration. Some things that would qualify as exploration are missions to the moon, mars and the asteroid belt.
I'm 100% in favor of space exploration and I wasn't saying it needs a provable case, I just don't think NASA's manned space program does any of it any more. The remnants of exploration are a handful of unmanned probes and observatories launched from expendable rockets.
It appears the only hope our species has for doing space exploration again lies in places like China since they will have the economic wherewithall and they are setting challenging goals in the same way the U.S. did in the 60's.
You can certainly blame some of NASA's problems on politicians, and the Air Force. But from my view the huge bureaucracy behind the space shuttle and the space station simply don't deserve any more funding. Don't try to tell me the problem is they aren't getting enough money. They are spending huge sums on the space shuttle and space station, but they aren't accomplishing anything with either.
The GAO, in 2002, estimated the total cost of the space station will be $100 billion dollars and it now appears that will be a crippled subset of the original design. It may well house just enough people to maintain it and its unlikely it will accomplish any useful science. When was the last time you heard of a scientific breakthrough coming out of Spacelab or the ISS to justify the vast sums being spent?
These two programs are bleeding the rest of NASA white and will continue to do so for ever unless someone stops them because they are entrenched bureaucracies living on pork barrel politics. They are starving programs that might do something useful. Real cases can be made for investing in all new cheap launch vehicles, and to funding a moon base or a Mars colony. The latter two would revive some sense of adventure in space exploration which is completely lost in what NASA is doing now. There current goal appears to be "lets just get a few people to low earth orbit and back again without killing them".
I think the whole agency, along with their political overseers, needs to step back and develop a real and provable case for why what there doing now is worth the amount of money being spent. If they can't, the shuttle and ISS should be scraped and the money should be poured in to programs that matter. It would also help if the whole entrenched bureaucracy in these two programs were sacked and they start rehiring for new programs fom scratch based on merit and rebellious can-do attitude.
> It might be a good idea to write to the Utah attorney general office as well.
I did this last week as well as the AG in NY, Eliot Spitzer and my home state AG. I received a reply from Utah yesterday. The gist of the response was they viewed it as a Federal copyright law issue and not in their domain, it was up to the courts to decide or congress to change the copyright laws. They suggested I contact a congressman.
I haven't given up yet since they overlooked the main issue in my inquiry, that SCO is demanding money from consumers under threat of legal action, which borders on extortion, and that they today have shown their infringement claims are, at least so far, false. I also pointed out the possibility Microsoft is using SCO as a proxy in an effort to exterminate one of the few remaining threats to their monopoly.
> They should think first on getting men on Mars. And then back to Earth. Alive.
This is the same kind of flawed logic that will make it unlikely we will do anything useful on Mars for a really long time. The goal should be to get people to Mars as quickly as possible, keep them alive there and send more people and supplies to follow them. Round trips are way harder than a one way trip. Once you get people there its way more useful to keep them there to start a colony than it is to try and get them back. They'll be ruined for a 1G environment after all that time anyway.
The Russians have, as is there pragmatic way, nailed one critical component to keeping people alive there, abundant power to keep them warm, to grow food and manufacture the essentials they'll need to survive.
NASA by contrast squanders vast sums on their goofy space station, zero G research to make a round trip feasible and searching for life on Mars. Life on mars is academicly interesting but has little value for doing anything useful on Mars (excepting if there is life it might be dangerous and you'd have to be dealt with it).
Me, I'll take the Russians over NASA anyday. I wish we could give NASA's entire budget to them. If we did some amazing things might happen in space again. Just look at Mir, they did a whole lot more for a whole lot less a whole lot sooner than the ISS debacle.
For one thing the Flash 5 Linux player had a lot of stability problems so it ticked off a lot of Linux users. The Flash 6 player is a lot better, though it still needs audio work, but many people wrote it off during the Flash 5 era. For another thing a lot of clueless advertising droids misuse Flash and tick people off with it which gives it a bad rep that all the entertaining and interesting uses don't compensate for. And, of course, its not open source which qualifies as a fact of life at the moment so the Slashdot crowd turns to SVG instead, but for some reason no one seems to produce much interesting content in SVG, yet.
Do you have any strong views or insight on the state of space exploration today and in the near future? If you were appointed NASA administrator and given a free hand to set its direction along with a healthy budget and no political interference what would you do? In particular, what are your views on manned missions to and colonization of Mars.