You might be able to tap asteroids for mineral resources. I think the odds of you tapping Mars for resources and shipping them to Earth are slim indeed. Chances are you will have to go the other direction for a long time to even keep a small colony going on Mars. You would certainly need space elevators on both ends, and I imagine it would still be prohibitively expensive until there are some major advances in propulsion and assorted other technologies.
Only way Earth survives long term is if we control the population one way or another, and its equally delusional to think you are going to move enough people to Mars or anywhere else in space to make a dent.
It is maybe a positive sign that advanced countries are stabilizing population growth but poor countries simply aren't and that is going to be the thing that kills Earth. Climate change is just one manifestation of overpopulation, so even if you fixed CO2 emissions if you don't fix population growth the planet is still in for a really nasty crash when you run out of fresh water, food, living space, etc. As long as you have major religions like Catholicism and Islam promoting, nay compelling, unrestrained breeding, and other assorted religious fundamentalists blocking birth control programs, especially in poor countries, our civilization is inevitably going to crash in the not so distant future.
I think Google is designing phones for ordinary people to use. 99.99% of cell phone users don't give a rats ass about most of the things on your list. I grew up on X11 but I can see no good rationale for putting it on a mobile device for ordinary people to use.
I imagine some people want Flash in a browser but Android is adding that. Me personally I suspect Flash on a mobile device will just drain the battery, hog the CPU and memory and make browsing generally sluggish up to the point your battery is dead. Might be OK if you are plugged in to a wall socket 90% of the time but at that points its not really mobile anymore is it. Video is the only compelling reason to have Flash, unless you have a taste for stupid Flash sprite games. Video in a mobile device would better be done by an optimized player in hardware like iPhone does on YouTube or like you could have with HTML/5. Unfortunately this requires the web to stop being so Flash centric.
I doubt anyone really cares about Firefox. They want a browser that works and ViewKit or Opera is just as good or probably better in a mobile device than Firefox.
MPlayer might be worthwhile but everyone has video players of one degree of quality and performance or another.
I think I'm saying that everything about this thread coming from Maemo fanboys, including the original article, is probably an advertisement for why Android will win in the real world, while Maemo will thrive in the tiny little niche of open source fanatics, that the rest of the world is mostly indifferent to. Not to mention Maemo is locking you in to one hardware manufacturer and an incredibly small range of hardware, while Android is now on dozens of different platforms. How exactly is that freedom.....
Only case I can make for manned space flight is for when the fossil fuels lobbies in the U.S. or China kill any effective caps on carbon emissions, we eventually hit a tipping point in CO2 levels and the runaway green house effect starts. Then there would be a compelling case for having a colony on Mars to keep our species alive when we make Earth uninhabitable. Of course as badly as our species is botching this planet not sure we deserve the reprieve. Its become pretty clear the intense greed in our species is a fatal flaw in our evolutionary development that needs to be eliminated by natural selection. Greed is a desirable trait for motivation but its become clear in our species it drives people to indulge in pathological behavior with complete disregard for the long term consquences of short term gains. Let's just hope that enough other species survive that evolution can start over on Earth, and in a few hundred million years plants will have sequestered enough CO2 to return the planet to stability and new intelligent life forms develop that don't suck as bad as homo sapiens.
The only other rationale for manned space exploration is it does restore a sense of adventure and frontiers to conqueror which is something our species has always had until the last century, and life is a little bleak when we become rutted as a species. There are no longer any frontiers on this planet with the possible exception of the deep oceans. Of course NASA in particular has turned the manned space program in to such a complete yawner no one believes they will break through any frontiers if you did give them the funding. Robotic spacecraft are the only ones breaking frontiers at this point so they deserve the money until you are going to commit to colonizing Mars.
Solid-fuel boosters keep jobs in the state of Utah so you can count on Orrin Hatch, very powerful senator from Utah supporting NASA's budget....
Someone said on a previous thread the Ares 1 has such a goofy look because the SRB's built in Utah have to pass through a train tunnel so they can't be increased in diameter which is why it looks so top heavy.
There is certainly a benefit to SRB's in that you don't have all the complexities of cryogenic fuels, and having to fuel before launch. That's why the Air Force uses them in ICBM's, they are extremely simple to launch. They are also somewhat safer than liquid fuels in some respects. It certainly remains to be seen if they will work the way NASA is trying to use them, especially how bad the vibration will be.
It certainly would have been better if NASA could have finished the SRB facility in Mississippi, which was killed twice, so they could be shipped to Kennedy on barges and the diameter constraints would have been removed. I wager Utah's senators helped kill it to keep the jobs in Utah.
NASA's manned space program is 90% jobs program, 10% space program at this point, in case you hadn't noticed.
Well they do pay withholding and payroll taxes. Payroll taxes are 6.25% on top of the 6.25% the comes out of the employee side of the paycheck for a total of 12.5%. Its been 12.5% since the early 80's. Most of todays seniors paid almost no payroll taxes working prior to 1980 though they are reaping a huge windfall from Medicare and Social Security as they often live 20 and 30 years in retirement now. They are pretty much living on the backs of younger workers who will be lucky to get any Medicare or Social Security in another 20 years unless they jack up the taxes on the young again to even more obscene levels. Social Security was running huge surpluses for most of the years since 1980 but all of that surplus disappeared in to funding Federal deficits never to be seen again. To put it another way workers since pretty much 1980 have been fleeced in a truly spectacular way. It was pretty much organized crime between politically potent seniors and politicians.
There is irony that corporations usually duck most of their taxes, their top executives duck most of their taxes, and the capital gains for shareholders are taxed at 15%. A hedge fund manager making billions is also taxed 15% on most of it and they tax their customer 20% on profits and 2% on their capital. Meanwhile ordinary working people are almost always taxed at least a third of their income and those taxes are very nearly inescapable, often more if you count state income taxes and sales taxes (sales tax being regressive and hitting wage earners much harder than the wealthy). Kind of tells you who this tax system was design by and for. The wealthy like to complain about their taxes but after the Bush tax cuts and you factor in payroll taxes which hammer wage earners, wage earners are paying pretty much the same tax rate as the very rich, often more by the time the rich get done exploiting loopholes and offshore shelters. Former Senator Phil Graham who was a key architect of the deregulation that recently destroyed the global economy was a senior exec at UBS a leading architect of Swiss tax shelters for tens of thousands of wealthy Americans.
Obama ran on a campaign to roll back the tax cuts for the wealthy but talk of those roll backs have largely disappeared, "you can't raise taxes during a recession", though our deficits are now going to be over 1 trillion a year from now on. Only big change in taxes are the ones on employer insurance programs and penalties on the uninsured which are going to hammer middle income workers.
Building an isolated network covering the entire nation is very expensive. Just about all network activity is running over the same backbone. I think by saying virtual private network I was saying what you are saying. But, when you have hundreds of thousands of computers on a private network its exceptionally easy for someone to hang one of them on their LAN too and open the whole thing up to the Internet. If completely private networks were so easy I don't think you would read so many stories of defense contractors and the military getting hacked and losing huge quantities of sensitive, though not highly classifed, weapons design information.
Air traffic control and power grids are inherently networked operations. You need to transfer planes from one control center to another, and to report loads or faults on the grid to various control centers, or turn generators on and off to balance load across wide areas. Only way you wouldn't have these functions on the Internet is if you go back to using phones to call people which is brutally inefficient and error prone. One hopes these networks are very secure VPN's but who knows.
Not sure if big dams have their flood gates under computer control but I know for a fact some smaller ones have some gates under computer control, especially ones with irrigation canals hooked to them.
What exactly are you proposing "government" do about it. Even if the U.S. "government" did something about it that leaves about a hundred other countries where it can originate. Its kind of sad when people want the nanny state to solve all their problems for them. Like I said Google solved the problem so there is no reason any other big email service can't, and if you are an admin running your own email server and you can't solve it then that is probably the most compelling argument I've heard for moving your email to the cloud.
Not sure that is actually Time Machine. Whomever wrote that Wikipedia article did their best to completely confuse the feature so not sure if its just confusing wiki or Microsoft actually packaged the feature so badly no one knows what it does.
Time Machine backs up hourly by default and I send it to an external USB disk drive. I don't actually back up hourly I plug it in daily or when I have stuff I want to save. It has a UI that lets you easily click on the backup at a date/time and you can easily restore just one file or many files.
The classic examples are hacking in to the computers that control the power grid(s) and causing a widespread blackout, taking down the air traffic control system, opening flood gates on a dam, or causing a wide spread phone/cell phone outage. Its open to debate how feasible these are but they are certainly plausible and the systems involved may all interact with the Internet now in one form or another.
I find this statement amusing to no end:
"A very rough estimate would say that there is a lag of three and eight years between the capabilities developed by advanced intelligence agencies and the capabilities available for purchase or rental in the cybercrime black market."
It basically implies that advanced intelligence agencies are years ahead in developing the tools for Cyberterrorism. If that were actually true, which I doubt, then why wouldn't you still be "afraid" some advanced intelligence agency will launch a cyber terror attack, or is this submission implying that just because a nation state does it, its not terrorism?
For example, does Windows 7 have something like Time Machine to do automatic, continuous backups. If so that would be a feature almost worth upgrading for.
Well I've never used Windows 7 and the Vista CD's that came with my last PC were never opened, so I certainly can't actually comment. I was just observing some of the psychology that has to be at play. My PC dual boots Linux and XP for games and I wont upgrade Windows until a game comes out I want to play that requires it. My desktop is a Mac and I wont upgrade to Snow Leopard until I have to because its kind of marketing hype and Apple revenue enhancement too.
Maybe Windows 7 really is a great OS, but your observation doesn't exactly explain away mine. If you are completely committed in your heart to Windows, your only options are to love Windows 7 or be stuck on XP a few more years while the rest of the world moves on. Me I like to clinge to old OS's that do the job, while must most geeks crave the opportunity to upgrade and coo about their new conquest, even if it really isn't any better than the old one. So chances are that early adopter crowd almost had to like Windows 7, and say they like it, as long as it doesn't completely suck, which is kind of a low bar. And of course it doesn't hurt that CPU's and graphics are more powerful now and people have more and faster RAM so it probably does run great now. But... if you are gonna introduce massive new bloat and hardware requirements in your OS wouldn't you actually like to get some new features out of it... but that's just me.
I think Windows 7 is a Microsoft marketing and PR brilliance myself. They basically just slapped a lucky #7 on Vista, added just enough new features that they could say it wasn't Vista with a straight face and apparently succeeded in transforming from complete failure to at least a reasonable, if not raging success. Its a tribute to the power of marketing to make lemonade out of lemons. It will probably open an opportunity for them to end of life XP, which they desperately want to do, and force everyone to upgrade to Vista... err... Windows 7, which will massively boost their profitability and stock price.
They are also skillfully playing the psychology of all the Windows fanboys who know deep down in their heart that they don't really like Vista, and Windows 7 is really just a slightly updated Vista, but are desperate to not be embarrassed about Windows anymore, so you KNOW they are gonna say its the greatest thing ever even if it really isn't. Microsoft marketing had a huge tail wind on Windows 7 since all the pro Windows bloggers, press and early adopters were going to sing praises of it even if Microsoft did just put a different title on a Vista box, which is practically what they did. If they'd put Vista 2.0 on the same box that is now Windows 7 it would have gone down in flames.
The Mississippi facility was killed twice in different flavors, once for the advanced SRB when it was killed and again to move the current SRB nozzle construction. Don't think it will ever be built at this point. It was probably just Mississippi's Congresmen (i.e. Trent Lott) versus Utah's anyway.
From a pure logistics stand point it makes vastly more sense for it to be in Mississippi if they are going to Florida and if it were they wouldn't have had to make some of the really poor design choices in Aries they had to make. Of course the test next week may prove the vibration is so severe in the current design it will be unusable anyway.
A. Government intervention was bad, it destroyed moral hazard
B. Total deregulation would be bad too, only thing good about it was it restores moral hazard.
I think I was arguing for a middle road. For example Brooksley Born wanted to force derivative trading on to an open market during the Clinton administration and Wall Street used Rubin, Summers, Graham and Greenspan to crush her. It is a place where a little regulation creating transparency and an open market would have been overwhelmingly good. You go total Libertarianism on derivatives which is what we basically did and a dark market with hundreds of trillions of opaque risk was created. AIG in particular and Long Term Capital both sold vastly more derivatives than they had the capital reserves to cover and created crisis. A little regulation could have forced capital requirements so derivatives didn't become a complete fantasy which is what they were at AIG and LTCM. Don't recall any intervention on the part of the government in that market, it was pure unbridled rapacious Capitalism, up until the point it collapsed and we faced either massive bailout or smoldering ruin if we let moral hazard be preserved.
Unfortunately a middle road proves impossible in practice. As soon as the government regulates anything it is almost immediately captured by special interests and lobbyists who pervert the regulations and regulators so they end up inflicting more damage than good.
Maybe the bottom line is there is no economic/political scheme that actually works. Its human nature for some people to seek power and advantage, while most are just taken advantage of. You create governments to control it, the governments are corrupted and become the conduit for oppression. You do away with the government and wealthy individuals, corporations, syndicates, crime families or gangs just fill the void and its as bad or worse.
Maybe the illusion of Libertarians, Fascists, Communists, Republicans and Democrats is that there system is "better" when in fact they are all equally bad, they are just different, and the winners just sit in different places in the system.
"Any serious and sustainable long-term exploration of the solar system will require staging/refueling at Lagrange points"
Fine. When you are ready to stage there send some fuel there and stage there. I'm just pointing out that if you fly to an empty point in space and fly back to Earth and make that out to be a "goal" the vast majority of the world and the press will skewer you. I can even see you flying there and back if you have an immediate follow on mission that stages there but this report is vague on that part. They make the LaGrange points in to an end in themselves which is misguided, if for no other reason than the PR angle. To the public its going to look like you want billions to fly to empty points in space for no reason and it simply wont sell. I also think its quite open to debate if you will stage there anytime soon enough for it to even be worth talking about now.
"It's seems that the public reaction to the first manned lunar flyby was pretty positive. As long as the public understands that the flyby is a step on the way to an actual landing (which it will be), they will accept it."
I doubt the public will accept it when they see the price tag, and this report leaves the actual landing part as a vague out there kind of thing. Again it makes the goal seem to be to fly there and not land. Its partially how its spun. The lunar flyby was clearly an immediate precursor to a landing. The lunar flyby also had amazing color pictures of earth which were a rarity at the time. We have satellites and robots now, everyone has seen both Earth and Mars in excruciating detail. Phobos ain't that much to look at.
Kennedy made it crystal clear what the goal was and he sold it to the public. He understood marketing better than any President ever. This report and NASA are completely failing to sell it and chances are very high they will never get the funding to do anything that matters as a result. They HAVE to SELL something that people will buy in to, and stuff all the LaGrange point orbital mechanics part down in there where the public wont see it and wont care. If you want to put a base on Phobos that is awesome but it wont sell unless it is part of clearly defined path to landing on and colonizing Mars. Not sure it will even sell then.
You might of sold more manned space exploration when the U.S. was on top of the world but now the U.S. is mired in debt, educational system is failing, its struggling to compete and we are looking inward and not liking what we see. We are not a nation looking to the stars any more unfortunately. Not sure that is a bad thing. Apollo was bad in that it made too many people have Star Trek dreams that were just that... dreams.
I should add Paul Volcker is saying exactly what I just said, that you have to restore Glass Steigel and go back to banks being banks, and force all the Wall Street gamblers out of the Fed and FDIC. If they want to be investment banks and Wall Street gamblers let them, but let them do it on their own dime, lock them out of the banking system, and make it clear if they fail they end in Chapter 11. Unfortunately Larry Summers, Geitner and Obama are completely ignoring Volcker and letting Goldman and JP Morgan run the government. Geitner and Summers are tools of Wall Steet and are doing what Wall Street wants, which is letting them loot the Fed and FDIC to fuel their obscene profits and the current bubble in the stock and bond markets. Not sure if Obama is just naive and being led by the nose, or he is a tool too.
This is something I kind of agree with it but not really. I doubt the TARP money is the major problem, it was repealing Glass-Steagel and letting stock market gamblers have access to Fed money, compounded by letting them access it at zero percent interest. You can thank Phil Graham, Alan Greenspan, Bob Rubin and Bill Clinton for that piece of insanity.
Letting Goldman and Morgan have bank charters in particular was completely, utterly, over the top, obscene. Preceeding than and just as bad was letting Citigroup be both a bank and stock market gambler which is where it started and you see where they ended.
You CAN'T let FDIC insurance, peoples savings, and free money from the Fed go in to the pockets of stock market swindlers. You are letting them buy on margin with money at ZERO percent. There is no way that wont end badly, either in another catastrophic collapse, collapse of the dollar because its bascially printing money to prop up the stock and bond markets, or they will become obscenely rich while everyone else ends up destitute.
Little banks play by the 70+ year old banking rules, Citi, JP Morgan, Goldman and Morgan are playing by the 10 year old rules, they pillage savings accounts, loot the Fed, loan shark and gamble it all at the casino and small banks simply can't compete with that. The ones that tried playing the same game mostly failed and the FDIC is basically insolvent as a result of all the bank failures.
"someone can buy one of these and "repurpose" it to a non-legal copy of Windows"
Chances are the Chinese government is doing this for precisely this reason...
The thing they don't want is anyone buying Windows or a Windows PC and sending ANY money to the U.S. I wager all the "qualifying" netbooks are probably manufactured in China as well, they aren't paying the Microsoft tax on them and there is a 13% discount to boot so no one in China buys anything U.S. They can't openly promote pirating Windows without causing WTO issues so they do the next best thing. They promote computers with Linux and look the other way at the massive pirating of Windows. If people actually run Linux that's OK too. The one thing they DON'T want is for someone to actually buy anything from the U.S. and cut in to their massive trade surplus.
Their long term strategy is to destroy the U.S. and to a lesser extent Europe by maintaining a massive and unsustainable trade surplus and by undercutting and destroying all manufacturing and business in the West. This is why they peg their currency to the dollar. If it weren't pegged it would have gone way up in the face of the huge trade imbalance. If their currency was floating the U.S. would be competitive again and all our jobs would stop flowing to China. China wants to prevent that at all costs. Japan was killing the U.S. economically in the 80's but they let their currency float, the Yen soared, Japanese competitiveness declined and the Japanese ended in two decades of stagnation and are deeper in debt than the U.S. percentage wise. The Chinese learned that lesson so they won't let their currency float until they finish off the U.S.
They don't want to destroy the U.S. immediately, they want to suck every last dime out of it they can, and when there isn't any more to take then they start dumping all their dollars, stop pegging their currency, and watch the U.S. go down and down hard. In a lot of ways this is how they win the cold war. They couldn't win militarily so they just opted for somewhat slower economic warfare and the retarded political and business leaders in the West are falling for it hook, line and sinker.
"and the banks are in even worse shape than before"
It boggles the mind that you just painted big banks as somehow a "victim" in this and got moderated informative.
The only big banks that are in bad shape are the ones who should have collapsed due to their own stupidity(Citigroup) or which acquired large businesses which should have collapsed due to their own stupidity(B of A buying Countrywide and Merrill Lynch). JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs are in better shape than they have ever been. Goldman Sachs was a huge beneficiary of billions of dollars that came at the expense of tax payers, and they got it no strings attached(through AIG bailout or from the Fed).
If you are a big bank the Fed and Treasury have made it incredibly easy to make money. Big banks can borrow money from the fed at zero percent(a.k.a. free money) and are pouring it in to stocks and bonds which are, as a result, in another huge bubble and they are making huge profits. There are a lot of small banks in really bad shape but that is because they drank the koolaid the big banks handed them and no one is throwing them a life line for the most part. The price of this free money and making Goldman Sachs rich, they are destroying the dollar and wiping out the savings of everyone who is holding dollars instead of riding the new bubble on the stock market.
The last couple of years of rampant greed on Wall Street probably should have clued you in there is a problem with Libertarianism. You can certainly argue a factor in the recent collapse was due to government intervention but Wall Street, has for nearly 30 years, managed to completely eviscerate any regulation of their organized crime syndicate and its pretty obvious if you actually let Wall Street function with no oversight they would devour the world. The are a legal organized crime syndicate at this point, load sharking and usury being their specialty.
The only positive about implementing Libertarianism lately is you would have let AIG, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, GM, Chrysler, GE etc. end in Chapter 11. It would have have ended in the Greatest Depression ever seen but if you are going to have free market Capitalism either you let stupid companies fail or you eliminate moral hazard and without moral hazard Capitalism ends up completely broken which is where we sit today (regulating exec pay is a feeble attempt to restore moral hazard, doomed to fail).
Bottom line the problem isn't government regulating pay at failed companies, its that the government didn't let them end in Chapter 11.
Great post. Just curious. Is there some actual physical reason you can think of preventing them from making SRM's in Florida so they could make them any size? I'm assuming the actual answer is Orrin Hatch, extremely powerful Senator from Utah, will kill any program where the SRM's aren't built in Utah and is probably supporting Ares precisely because it is keeping jobs in his state, even if its a horrible engineering choice. This country is doomed in science, engineering and tech if you make bad engineering decisions just to spread pork around. I've pretty much decided the U.S. Senate is an epic FAIL because one senator can often single handedly kill any program they oppose.
"...if we're going to really do worthwhile things in space..."
I'm kind of doubting we are going to do anything of scale in space until we build either a space elevator or an actual reusable space plane with days for turnaround instead of six months and a complete overhaul between every mission. You might reduce launch costs of rockets some, but I doubt you are ever going to get them to be cheap enough to do anything big in space that any economy on Earth can afford.
As for lessons learned on ISS... the only one I can think of is.... don't ever do that again. To be fair there were a lot of small and valuable lessons learned, but the big picture lesson is you must have spent at least $200 billion and going on 30 years and you have little to show for it other than a station that is running a 50/50 chance of being deorbited right after its completed. Those lessons were too expensive in time and money. If you are going to hit up tax payers for hundreds of billions of dollars you do need to do something that people actually GET or next time around you wont GET.
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You might be able to tap asteroids for mineral resources. I think the odds of you tapping Mars for resources and shipping them to Earth are slim indeed. Chances are you will have to go the other direction for a long time to even keep a small colony going on Mars. You would certainly need space elevators on both ends, and I imagine it would still be prohibitively expensive until there are some major advances in propulsion and assorted other technologies.
Only way Earth survives long term is if we control the population one way or another, and its equally delusional to think you are going to move enough people to Mars or anywhere else in space to make a dent.
It is maybe a positive sign that advanced countries are stabilizing population growth but poor countries simply aren't and that is going to be the thing that kills Earth. Climate change is just one manifestation of overpopulation, so even if you fixed CO2 emissions if you don't fix population growth the planet is still in for a really nasty crash when you run out of fresh water, food, living space, etc. As long as you have major religions like Catholicism and Islam promoting, nay compelling, unrestrained breeding, and other assorted religious fundamentalists blocking birth control programs, especially in poor countries, our civilization is inevitably going to crash in the not so distant future.
I think Google is designing phones for ordinary people to use. 99.99% of cell phone users don't give a rats ass about most of the things on your list. I grew up on X11 but I can see no good rationale for putting it on a mobile device for ordinary people to use.
I imagine some people want Flash in a browser but Android is adding that. Me personally I suspect Flash on a mobile device will just drain the battery, hog the CPU and memory and make browsing generally sluggish up to the point your battery is dead. Might be OK if you are plugged in to a wall socket 90% of the time but at that points its not really mobile anymore is it. Video is the only compelling reason to have Flash, unless you have a taste for stupid Flash sprite games. Video in a mobile device would better be done by an optimized player in hardware like iPhone does on YouTube or like you could have with HTML/5. Unfortunately this requires the web to stop being so Flash centric.
I doubt anyone really cares about Firefox. They want a browser that works and ViewKit or Opera is just as good or probably better in a mobile device than Firefox.
MPlayer might be worthwhile but everyone has video players of one degree of quality and performance or another.
I think I'm saying that everything about this thread coming from Maemo fanboys, including the original article, is probably an advertisement for why Android will win in the real world, while Maemo will thrive in the tiny little niche of open source fanatics, that the rest of the world is mostly indifferent to. Not to mention Maemo is locking you in to one hardware manufacturer and an incredibly small range of hardware, while Android is now on dozens of different platforms. How exactly is that freedom.....
"stop global Climate Change"
Only case I can make for manned space flight is for when the fossil fuels lobbies in the U.S. or China kill any effective caps on carbon emissions, we eventually hit a tipping point in CO2 levels and the runaway green house effect starts. Then there would be a compelling case for having a colony on Mars to keep our species alive when we make Earth uninhabitable. Of course as badly as our species is botching this planet not sure we deserve the reprieve. Its become pretty clear the intense greed in our species is a fatal flaw in our evolutionary development that needs to be eliminated by natural selection. Greed is a desirable trait for motivation but its become clear in our species it drives people to indulge in pathological behavior with complete disregard for the long term consquences of short term gains. Let's just hope that enough other species survive that evolution can start over on Earth, and in a few hundred million years plants will have sequestered enough CO2 to return the planet to stability and new intelligent life forms develop that don't suck as bad as homo sapiens.
The only other rationale for manned space exploration is it does restore a sense of adventure and frontiers to conqueror which is something our species has always had until the last century, and life is a little bleak when we become rutted as a species. There are no longer any frontiers on this planet with the possible exception of the deep oceans. Of course NASA in particular has turned the manned space program in to such a complete yawner no one believes they will break through any frontiers if you did give them the funding. Robotic spacecraft are the only ones breaking frontiers at this point so they deserve the money until you are going to commit to colonizing Mars.
Solid-fuel boosters keep jobs in the state of Utah so you can count on Orrin Hatch, very powerful senator from Utah supporting NASA's budget....
Someone said on a previous thread the Ares 1 has such a goofy look because the SRB's built in Utah have to pass through a train tunnel so they can't be increased in diameter which is why it looks so top heavy.
There is certainly a benefit to SRB's in that you don't have all the complexities of cryogenic fuels, and having to fuel before launch. That's why the Air Force uses them in ICBM's, they are extremely simple to launch. They are also somewhat safer than liquid fuels in some respects. It certainly remains to be seen if they will work the way NASA is trying to use them, especially how bad the vibration will be.
It certainly would have been better if NASA could have finished the SRB facility in Mississippi, which was killed twice, so they could be shipped to Kennedy on barges and the diameter constraints would have been removed. I wager Utah's senators helped kill it to keep the jobs in Utah.
NASA's manned space program is 90% jobs program, 10% space program at this point, in case you hadn't noticed.
Well they do pay withholding and payroll taxes. Payroll taxes are 6.25% on top of the 6.25% the comes out of the employee side of the paycheck for a total of 12.5%. Its been 12.5% since the early 80's. Most of todays seniors paid almost no payroll taxes working prior to 1980 though they are reaping a huge windfall from Medicare and Social Security as they often live 20 and 30 years in retirement now. They are pretty much living on the backs of younger workers who will be lucky to get any Medicare or Social Security in another 20 years unless they jack up the taxes on the young again to even more obscene levels. Social Security was running huge surpluses for most of the years since 1980 but all of that surplus disappeared in to funding Federal deficits never to be seen again. To put it another way workers since pretty much 1980 have been fleeced in a truly spectacular way. It was pretty much organized crime between politically potent seniors and politicians.
There is irony that corporations usually duck most of their taxes, their top executives duck most of their taxes, and the capital gains for shareholders are taxed at 15%. A hedge fund manager making billions is also taxed 15% on most of it and they tax their customer 20% on profits and 2% on their capital. Meanwhile ordinary working people are almost always taxed at least a third of their income and those taxes are very nearly inescapable, often more if you count state income taxes and sales taxes (sales tax being regressive and hitting wage earners much harder than the wealthy). Kind of tells you who this tax system was design by and for. The wealthy like to complain about their taxes but after the Bush tax cuts and you factor in payroll taxes which hammer wage earners, wage earners are paying pretty much the same tax rate as the very rich, often more by the time the rich get done exploiting loopholes and offshore shelters. Former Senator Phil Graham who was a key architect of the deregulation that recently destroyed the global economy was a senior exec at UBS a leading architect of Swiss tax shelters for tens of thousands of wealthy Americans.
Obama ran on a campaign to roll back the tax cuts for the wealthy but talk of those roll backs have largely disappeared, "you can't raise taxes during a recession", though our deficits are now going to be over 1 trillion a year from now on. Only big change in taxes are the ones on employer insurance programs and penalties on the uninsured which are going to hammer middle income workers.
Building an isolated network covering the entire nation is very expensive. Just about all network activity is running over the same backbone. I think by saying virtual private network I was saying what you are saying. But, when you have hundreds of thousands of computers on a private network its exceptionally easy for someone to hang one of them on their LAN too and open the whole thing up to the Internet. If completely private networks were so easy I don't think you would read so many stories of defense contractors and the military getting hacked and losing huge quantities of sensitive, though not highly classifed, weapons design information.
Air traffic control and power grids are inherently networked operations. You need to transfer planes from one control center to another, and to report loads or faults on the grid to various control centers, or turn generators on and off to balance load across wide areas. Only way you wouldn't have these functions on the Internet is if you go back to using phones to call people which is brutally inefficient and error prone. One hopes these networks are very secure VPN's but who knows.
Not sure if big dams have their flood gates under computer control but I know for a fact some smaller ones have some gates under computer control, especially ones with irrigation canals hooked to them.
What exactly are you proposing "government" do about it. Even if the U.S. "government" did something about it that leaves about a hundred other countries where it can originate. Its kind of sad when people want the nanny state to solve all their problems for them. Like I said Google solved the problem so there is no reason any other big email service can't, and if you are an admin running your own email server and you can't solve it then that is probably the most compelling argument I've heard for moving your email to the cloud.
Not sure that is actually Time Machine. Whomever wrote that Wikipedia article did their best to completely confuse the feature so not sure if its just confusing wiki or Microsoft actually packaged the feature so badly no one knows what it does.
Time Machine backs up hourly by default and I send it to an external USB disk drive. I don't actually back up hourly I plug it in daily or when I have stuff I want to save. It has a UI that lets you easily click on the backup at a date/time and you can easily restore just one file or many files.
Maybe you should just try switching to GMail. They seem to have completely beaten spam, at least I sure never get any since I switched.
"What are you going to on the internet,"
The classic examples are hacking in to the computers that control the power grid(s) and causing a widespread blackout, taking down the air traffic control system, opening flood gates on a dam, or causing a wide spread phone/cell phone outage. Its open to debate how feasible these are but they are certainly plausible and the systems involved may all interact with the Internet now in one form or another.
I find this statement amusing to no end:
"A very rough estimate would say that there is a lag of three and eight years between the capabilities developed by advanced intelligence agencies and the capabilities available for purchase or rental in the cybercrime black market."
It basically implies that advanced intelligence agencies are years ahead in developing the tools for Cyberterrorism. If that were actually true, which I doubt, then why wouldn't you still be "afraid" some advanced intelligence agency will launch a cyber terror attack, or is this submission implying that just because a nation state does it, its not terrorism?
"some new features out of it"
For example, does Windows 7 have something like Time Machine to do automatic, continuous backups. If so that would be a feature almost worth upgrading for.
Well I've never used Windows 7 and the Vista CD's that came with my last PC were never opened, so I certainly can't actually comment. I was just observing some of the psychology that has to be at play. My PC dual boots Linux and XP for games and I wont upgrade Windows until a game comes out I want to play that requires it. My desktop is a Mac and I wont upgrade to Snow Leopard until I have to because its kind of marketing hype and Apple revenue enhancement too.
Maybe Windows 7 really is a great OS, but your observation doesn't exactly explain away mine. If you are completely committed in your heart to Windows, your only options are to love Windows 7 or be stuck on XP a few more years while the rest of the world moves on. Me I like to clinge to old OS's that do the job, while must most geeks crave the opportunity to upgrade and coo about their new conquest, even if it really isn't any better than the old one. So chances are that early adopter crowd almost had to like Windows 7, and say they like it, as long as it doesn't completely suck, which is kind of a low bar. And of course it doesn't hurt that CPU's and graphics are more powerful now and people have more and faster RAM so it probably does run great now. But... if you are gonna introduce massive new bloat and hardware requirements in your OS wouldn't you actually like to get some new features out of it... but that's just me.
Ummmm. So are you. And since when is watching college football on the boob tube any indicator of having a life?
I think Windows 7 is a Microsoft marketing and PR brilliance myself. They basically just slapped a lucky #7 on Vista, added just enough new features that they could say it wasn't Vista with a straight face and apparently succeeded in transforming from complete failure to at least a reasonable, if not raging success. Its a tribute to the power of marketing to make lemonade out of lemons. It will probably open an opportunity for them to end of life XP, which they desperately want to do, and force everyone to upgrade to Vista... err ... Windows 7, which will massively boost their profitability and stock price.
They are also skillfully playing the psychology of all the Windows fanboys who know deep down in their heart that they don't really like Vista, and Windows 7 is really just a slightly updated Vista, but are desperate to not be embarrassed about Windows anymore, so you KNOW they are gonna say its the greatest thing ever even if it really isn't. Microsoft marketing had a huge tail wind on Windows 7 since all the pro Windows bloggers, press and early adopters were going to sing praises of it even if Microsoft did just put a different title on a Vista box, which is practically what they did. If they'd put Vista 2.0 on the same box that is now Windows 7 it would have gone down in flames.
The Mississippi facility was killed twice in different flavors, once for the advanced SRB when it was killed and again to move the current SRB nozzle construction. Don't think it will ever be built at this point. It was probably just Mississippi's Congresmen (i.e. Trent Lott) versus Utah's anyway.
From a pure logistics stand point it makes vastly more sense for it to be in Mississippi if they are going to Florida and if it were they wouldn't have had to make some of the really poor design choices in Aries they had to make. Of course the test next week may prove the vibration is so severe in the current design it will be unusable anyway.
I found which sure sounds like Hatch has gone to some considerable lengths to keep it from moving to Mississippi which would seem way more economical since they can ship by barge like the ET, and could build motors without the size restriction.
I think I meant to say:
A. Government intervention was bad, it destroyed moral hazard
B. Total deregulation would be bad too, only thing good about it was it restores moral hazard.
I think I was arguing for a middle road. For example Brooksley Born wanted to force derivative trading on to an open market during the Clinton administration and Wall Street used Rubin, Summers, Graham and Greenspan to crush her. It is a place where a little regulation creating transparency and an open market would have been overwhelmingly good. You go total Libertarianism on derivatives which is what we basically did and a dark market with hundreds of trillions of opaque risk was created. AIG in particular and Long Term Capital both sold vastly more derivatives than they had the capital reserves to cover and created crisis. A little regulation could have forced capital requirements so derivatives didn't become a complete fantasy which is what they were at AIG and LTCM. Don't recall any intervention on the part of the government in that market, it was pure unbridled rapacious Capitalism, up until the point it collapsed and we faced either massive bailout or smoldering ruin if we let moral hazard be preserved.
Unfortunately a middle road proves impossible in practice. As soon as the government regulates anything it is almost immediately captured by special interests and lobbyists who pervert the regulations and regulators so they end up inflicting more damage than good.
Maybe the bottom line is there is no economic/political scheme that actually works. Its human nature for some people to seek power and advantage, while most are just taken advantage of. You create governments to control it, the governments are corrupted and become the conduit for oppression. You do away with the government and wealthy individuals, corporations, syndicates, crime families or gangs just fill the void and its as bad or worse.
Maybe the illusion of Libertarians, Fascists, Communists, Republicans and Democrats is that there system is "better" when in fact they are all equally bad, they are just different, and the winners just sit in different places in the system.
"Any serious and sustainable long-term exploration of the solar system will require staging/refueling at Lagrange points"
Fine. When you are ready to stage there send some fuel there and stage there. I'm just pointing out that if you fly to an empty point in space and fly back to Earth and make that out to be a "goal" the vast majority of the world and the press will skewer you. I can even see you flying there and back if you have an immediate follow on mission that stages there but this report is vague on that part. They make the LaGrange points in to an end in themselves which is misguided, if for no other reason than the PR angle. To the public its going to look like you want billions to fly to empty points in space for no reason and it simply wont sell. I also think its quite open to debate if you will stage there anytime soon enough for it to even be worth talking about now.
"It's seems that the public reaction to the first manned lunar flyby was pretty positive. As long as the public understands that the flyby is a step on the way to an actual landing (which it will be), they will accept it."
I doubt the public will accept it when they see the price tag, and this report leaves the actual landing part as a vague out there kind of thing. Again it makes the goal seem to be to fly there and not land. Its partially how its spun. The lunar flyby was clearly an immediate precursor to a landing. The lunar flyby also had amazing color pictures of earth which were a rarity at the time. We have satellites and robots now, everyone has seen both Earth and Mars in excruciating detail. Phobos ain't that much to look at.
Kennedy made it crystal clear what the goal was and he sold it to the public. He understood marketing better than any President ever. This report and NASA are completely failing to sell it and chances are very high they will never get the funding to do anything that matters as a result. They HAVE to SELL something that people will buy in to, and stuff all the LaGrange point orbital mechanics part down in there where the public wont see it and wont care. If you want to put a base on Phobos that is awesome but it wont sell unless it is part of clearly defined path to landing on and colonizing Mars. Not sure it will even sell then.
You might of sold more manned space exploration when the U.S. was on top of the world but now the U.S. is mired in debt, educational system is failing, its struggling to compete and we are looking inward and not liking what we see. We are not a nation looking to the stars any more unfortunately. Not sure that is a bad thing. Apollo was bad in that it made too many people have Star Trek dreams that were just that... dreams.
I should add Paul Volcker is saying exactly what I just said, that you have to restore Glass Steigel and go back to banks being banks, and force all the Wall Street gamblers out of the Fed and FDIC. If they want to be investment banks and Wall Street gamblers let them, but let them do it on their own dime, lock them out of the banking system, and make it clear if they fail they end in Chapter 11. Unfortunately Larry Summers, Geitner and Obama are completely ignoring Volcker and letting Goldman and JP Morgan run the government. Geitner and Summers are tools of Wall Steet and are doing what Wall Street wants, which is letting them loot the Fed and FDIC to fuel their obscene profits and the current bubble in the stock and bond markets. Not sure if Obama is just naive and being led by the nose, or he is a tool too.
This is something I kind of agree with it but not really. I doubt the TARP money is the major problem, it was repealing Glass-Steagel and letting stock market gamblers have access to Fed money, compounded by letting them access it at zero percent interest. You can thank Phil Graham, Alan Greenspan, Bob Rubin and Bill Clinton for that piece of insanity.
Letting Goldman and Morgan have bank charters in particular was completely, utterly, over the top, obscene. Preceeding than and just as bad was letting Citigroup be both a bank and stock market gambler which is where it started and you see where they ended.
You CAN'T let FDIC insurance, peoples savings, and free money from the Fed go in to the pockets of stock market swindlers. You are letting them buy on margin with money at ZERO percent. There is no way that wont end badly, either in another catastrophic collapse, collapse of the dollar because its bascially printing money to prop up the stock and bond markets, or they will become obscenely rich while everyone else ends up destitute.
Little banks play by the 70+ year old banking rules, Citi, JP Morgan, Goldman and Morgan are playing by the 10 year old rules, they pillage savings accounts, loot the Fed, loan shark and gamble it all at the casino and small banks simply can't compete with that. The ones that tried playing the same game mostly failed and the FDIC is basically insolvent as a result of all the bank failures.
"someone can buy one of these and "repurpose" it to a non-legal copy of Windows"
Chances are the Chinese government is doing this for precisely this reason...
The thing they don't want is anyone buying Windows or a Windows PC and sending ANY money to the U.S. I wager all the "qualifying" netbooks are probably manufactured in China as well, they aren't paying the Microsoft tax on them and there is a 13% discount to boot so no one in China buys anything U.S. They can't openly promote pirating Windows without causing WTO issues so they do the next best thing. They promote computers with Linux and look the other way at the massive pirating of Windows. If people actually run Linux that's OK too. The one thing they DON'T want is for someone to actually buy anything from the U.S. and cut in to their massive trade surplus.
Their long term strategy is to destroy the U.S. and to a lesser extent Europe by maintaining a massive and unsustainable trade surplus and by undercutting and destroying all manufacturing and business in the West. This is why they peg their currency to the dollar. If it weren't pegged it would have gone way up in the face of the huge trade imbalance. If their currency was floating the U.S. would be competitive again and all our jobs would stop flowing to China. China wants to prevent that at all costs. Japan was killing the U.S. economically in the 80's but they let their currency float, the Yen soared, Japanese competitiveness declined and the Japanese ended in two decades of stagnation and are deeper in debt than the U.S. percentage wise. The Chinese learned that lesson so they won't let their currency float until they finish off the U.S.
They don't want to destroy the U.S. immediately, they want to suck every last dime out of it they can, and when there isn't any more to take then they start dumping all their dollars, stop pegging their currency, and watch the U.S. go down and down hard. In a lot of ways this is how they win the cold war. They couldn't win militarily so they just opted for somewhat slower economic warfare and the retarded political and business leaders in the West are falling for it hook, line and sinker.
"and the banks are in even worse shape than before"
It boggles the mind that you just painted big banks as somehow a "victim" in this and got moderated informative.
The only big banks that are in bad shape are the ones who should have collapsed due to their own stupidity(Citigroup) or which acquired large businesses which should have collapsed due to their own stupidity(B of A buying Countrywide and Merrill Lynch). JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs are in better shape than they have ever been. Goldman Sachs was a huge beneficiary of billions of dollars that came at the expense of tax payers, and they got it no strings attached(through AIG bailout or from the Fed).
If you are a big bank the Fed and Treasury have made it incredibly easy to make money. Big banks can borrow money from the fed at zero percent(a.k.a. free money) and are pouring it in to stocks and bonds which are, as a result, in another huge bubble and they are making huge profits. There are a lot of small banks in really bad shape but that is because they drank the koolaid the big banks handed them and no one is throwing them a life line for the most part. The price of this free money and making Goldman Sachs rich, they are destroying the dollar and wiping out the savings of everyone who is holding dollars instead of riding the new bubble on the stock market.
The last couple of years of rampant greed on Wall Street probably should have clued you in there is a problem with Libertarianism. You can certainly argue a factor in the recent collapse was due to government intervention but Wall Street, has for nearly 30 years, managed to completely eviscerate any regulation of their organized crime syndicate and its pretty obvious if you actually let Wall Street function with no oversight they would devour the world. The are a legal organized crime syndicate at this point, load sharking and usury being their specialty.
The only positive about implementing Libertarianism lately is you would have let AIG, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, GM, Chrysler, GE etc. end in Chapter 11. It would have have ended in the Greatest Depression ever seen but if you are going to have free market Capitalism either you let stupid companies fail or you eliminate moral hazard and without moral hazard Capitalism ends up completely broken which is where we sit today (regulating exec pay is a feeble attempt to restore moral hazard, doomed to fail).
Bottom line the problem isn't government regulating pay at failed companies, its that the government didn't let them end in Chapter 11.
Great post. Just curious. Is there some actual physical reason you can think of preventing them from making SRM's in Florida so they could make them any size? I'm assuming the actual answer is Orrin Hatch, extremely powerful Senator from Utah, will kill any program where the SRM's aren't built in Utah and is probably supporting Ares precisely because it is keeping jobs in his state, even if its a horrible engineering choice. This country is doomed in science, engineering and tech if you make bad engineering decisions just to spread pork around. I've pretty much decided the U.S. Senate is an epic FAIL because one senator can often single handedly kill any program they oppose.
"...if we're going to really do worthwhile things in space..."
I'm kind of doubting we are going to do anything of scale in space until we build either a space elevator or an actual reusable space plane with days for turnaround instead of six months and a complete overhaul between every mission. You might reduce launch costs of rockets some, but I doubt you are ever going to get them to be cheap enough to do anything big in space that any economy on Earth can afford.
As for lessons learned on ISS... the only one I can think of is.... don't ever do that again. To be fair there were a lot of small and valuable lessons learned, but the big picture lesson is you must have spent at least $200 billion and going on 30 years and you have little to show for it other than a station that is running a 50/50 chance of being deorbited right after its completed. Those lessons were too expensive in time and money. If you are going to hit up tax payers for hundreds of billions of dollars you do need to do something that people actually GET or next time around you wont GET.