"Having people permanently on it is good practice for living in a vacuum"
The ISS is good practice for living in a vacuum. We've already spent more than a hundred billion dollars and decades doing it to the exclusion of all else, and its mostly been a gigantic waste of time and money. It is one of the most expensive science projects in history and NASA has pretty much NOTHING to show for it and they want to deorbit it right after its finished because they know its a giant money sink.
This new report's apparent suggestion we should send missions to EMPTY POINTS in space is pretty DELUSIONAL too. You fly people to Lagrange points, so they stare at a vacuum, and come back is going to leave the entire planet laughing or slapping their foreheads for the stupidity of it. Lagrange points are interesting as places to put satellites, telescopes, etc, but there is NO reason to send people to them for a sightseeing trip.
If you are going to keep spending billions putting men in space you need to have an actual goal and stop with the "stepping stones" to no where BS. It smacks of just to keeping the jobs program going. Only actual goals justifying a manned space program I can think of, and which are reasonably feasible, at the moment are:
- colonizing Mars - laying the groundwork to mine asteroids or deflect them if they are on a collision course with Earth - large solar power station in orbit
Another Apollo like stunt flying to the Mars, planting a flag, collecting rocks and flying home doesn't work either. If that's all you are going to do send robots. Sending people to Mars to permanently colonize it is one of the few missions that actually justifies sending people. Most everything else would be better done with robots. Not sure you are going to be able to find the money or the guts to do it unfortunately.
"They have spent around a trillion dollars with no end in sight."
Actually I think the end is very much in sight in Iraq, 2011 all U.S. combat forces are supposed to be out of Iraq. There is talk they might accelerate the withdrawal by another brigade soon. Iraq mostly wants the U.S. out so they can finish their civil war, the U.S. doesn't want to be in the middle of their looming civil war.
The war with no end in sight is in Afghanistan. They just added 21,000 more troops added this year and rumors today McChrystal may request more next year. I think there we will be fighting a forever war because we are trying to prop up a completely corrupt government the Afghan people hate so much they often prefer the Taliban.
It should be remembered the war in Vietnam played a pretty key role in Nixon killing Apollo and sending NASA on a road to no where (the ISS and Shuttle) since Vietnam was bankrupting the U.S. in parallel with Apollo.
Considering we spent $100 billion on the ISS, its one of the most expensive science projects in history, and it doesn't do anything useful I'm not really sure building a 2001 class space station would have really been any better even if we hadn't blown the money on wars. Maybe there would be a tourism case but I think its dubious you will get real space tourism anywhere close to a break even point any time soon, other than flying the super rich.
Before anyone dreams of a 2001 space station we need to get LEO launch cost down, way down, to like $1 a pound instead of $1000-$10000 a pound. Virgin Galactic is talking $200K for a 200 lb person to suborbital for a few minutes. That's $1000 a lb for not much. At present a space elevator is probably the only thing that will make getting out of Earth's gravity well economical and that still faces some enormous hurdles that throwing money at it may or may not solve.
I think the problem with Apollo, 2001, Star Trek, Star Wars syndrome, especially in the U.S., is they created a lot of dreamers who dwell on how romantic space travel is, when most of the time it wouldn't be anything like that. Space is an empty vacuum, it has all the appeal of a vacuum. It is mostly a nasty place, and working and traveling in space will for a long time to come be tedious, boring, stressful and dangerous. Only things interesting in space are the other rocks in space and most of them are no picnic.
I predict manned space travel will continue to have a really rocky future until A) we take all the inflated romance out of the idea and B) figure out ways to utilize space that are actually useful and make sense. Some early leaks out of the upcoming Augustine report worry me. There was talk they were going to propose manned space flights to Lagrange points just to prove we could do long duration space flights. They seem to miss the fact that flying to points in space in a tin can and sitting there would leave the world aghast with the stupidity of it all.
Planting a permanent colony on Mars is the mission most likely to be worth and that would fire the imagination of the whole planet like Apollo 11 did. It is the one place where humans have a fighting chance of making another biosphere and fulfilling the human desire to break new frontiers.
Tapping solar power in space to solve our energy problem might be worth exploring.
Working towards asteroid mining to eliminate future shortages of resources on earth, and to use in construction of structures in space might be worth doing.
Its just an opinion but:
- returning to the moon isn't very useful and smacks of the ISS all over again, except on the Moon - putting men in tin cans in space going no place in particular isn't worth it either - Justifying every mission in space with "searching for life" is weak, really weak. Searching for signs of life is a worthwhile secondary goal to primary missions that matter. The odds of finding life elsewhere in our solar system are not great so when that is the be all, end all goal for your space program you ar
"This is essentially the same assumption that AI researchers have had from the start."
Maybe... but the pivotal difference is medical imaging of the brain is dramatically more advanced than it has even been. Until recently AI researchers were grasping at straws in the dark and failing. They will relatively soon be able to image every neural path way in the brain and watch them over time.
Its certainly not a given that it will be easy to develop a silicon emulation, but its almost a certainty that the combination of medical imaging and the current state of the art in semiconductors make it more likely to succeed than when AI researchers were doing tiny neural nets in software or on unsophistacted IC's.
One area they could encounter difficulty is if it turns out our intelligence and "soul" have a quantum electodynamic or multiverse component since that will probably push the goal much farther out.
"If Opera doesn't come up with some sort of educational advertising campaign"
Why exactly would anyone PAY for an advertising campaign for a FREE product which they make no money on because they give it away for FREE. I think Opera pretty much survives on licensing their embedded browsers. Its not really clear why they are still even in the desktop browser business other than for brand awareness which isn't really working for them. I wager Opera is pretty much just burning money still doing a desktop browser at all, I think there business is all embedded browsers.
Microsoft got in the browser business only because Netscape terrified them and when Netscape cratered Microsoft stopped caring about it until Google revived the threat of web apps and cloud computing. They are afraid the browser is going to displace their OS and they want to lock people in to a proprietary web, and they are mostly failing at it.
Google did a browser because they are fixated on web apps and want to drive the technology for their apps and the have a river of money from search to fund it.
Firefox/Mozilla is where Netscape went to survive and amazingly did survive and thrive as open source mostly thanks to the Firefox team.
Just about everyone else is doing Webkit lately.
To be honest it sounds to me like this Opera guy is still fighting a war that was over years ago. The fact is browsers on the desktop are an undifferentiated commodity and there is no financial incentive to even be in that business any more. Only reason to be there is if you want to control the direction of the web which is Microsoft, Google, Firefox and Apple's reason for being there, not Opera's, Opera is an embedded browser company now.
The worst proprietary lockin everyone should be unhappy about is Flash.... and SVG isn't the solution. The main solution is to get the HTML5 video tag to work and get every browser to support the same codec(s). Once Flash loses its lock on web video Flash and Adobe matters a LOT less to everyone than it does now. Without a lock on video Flash can go back to where it was in Flash 5, an annoying purveyor of obnoxious ads, and a platform for mostly bad games, that people can block if they hate it enough.
As others have said the EU fixating on the browser is completely retarded at this point. The two real problems with the Microsoft monopoly are:
A) they force all PC manufactures in to shipping their OS exclusively on most new PC's so everyone buying a PC is practically forced to buy it even if you don't want it
B. Office proprietary file formats and the network effect tends to lock all business in to running Office for all docs and spreadsheets. Open Office is a nice product but the docs it produces never work quite right in Office.
I'm not going to be defending Markoff but there is reason for concern.
Yes it is unlikely that people writing "code" are going to develop real artificial intelligence any time soon, they've pretty much tried and failed. But as medical imaging continues to advance it may reach a point that it will be possible to completely image a human brain and create a road map to natural intelligence. If you can then develop a highly parallel machine that can then implement that road map you may be able to create a machine with an intelligence matching and then surpassing a human. The brains complexity is simply too high for humans to recreate it from scratch using code but you may well be able to copy it.
There certainly are obstacles to this happening that have to be overcome. Even if we map the mechanics of the brain there is a fair chance we may miss some of the subtlety of the chemistry so the AI might not work. It may also be non trivial to develop hardware that accurately mimics the road map and especially that has the ability to rewire itself on the fly like a human brain. It would seem these problem should ultimately be solvable, its just a matter of how long and how much money it will take.
If and when the obstacles are overcome and assuming the brain really is just a biochemical machine, that there is no soul or divine component to animal intelligence, it would seem inevitable that a mechanical simulator will eventually be developed, and once developed it could then be extended to exceed natural intelligence, all of which will create a host of ethical dilemmas.
Probably as much a risk is that as we decode the human genome and the mechanics of the brain we might devise genetic changes that could dramatically accelerate evolution and create humans with much higher intelligence, which will also create a host of ethical dilemmas.
There is a different line of reasoning that as we become more and more dependent on computers to control everything in our lives like our cars, airliners, weapons and utilities, and as they are all networked together there is a rapidly increasing potential for machines to do harm on a wide scale either due to design flaws, unintended consequences or manipulation by humans with malevolent attempt. These issues probably shouldn't be mixed in with the AI debate, they are more just the issues we are already seeing in adapting to dramatically accelerating penetration of computers and networks in our existence.
That isn't a very likely scenario. The U.S. would never completely "capitulate" in a war as long as it has nuclear weapons. Economics and currencies also don't really matter in a total war as much as control of shipping lanes and resources.
The U.S. would have fuel as long as the strategic petroleum reserve held out which would be long enough to fight a pretty nasty war if civilian use was rationed. China is as dependent on imports as anyone and the U.S. has more carriers and submarines to interdict shipping than China does. I imagine the biggest problem would be integrated circuits to make the precision weapons the U.S. has become so dependent on. Don't think the Pentagon has been very effective in maintaining domestic production of those but if Taiwan and Japan were still producing those might not be a problem.
The economic damage to China in dumping their U.S. dollars and T-Bills would be about as bad for them as it would be for the U.S. There is an economic axiom that once a debt becomes large enough the debtor actually has more power in the bilateral relation than the lender does.
I think the Chinese have been trying to quietly unwind their dollar assets in a commodity buying binge for the last six monthes which is one of the few ways they can unwind their dollar position without causing a calamity that will hurt them as and the global economy just as bad as it would the U.S. if not more.
No argument, it is totally a bad thing for the U.S. to be borrowing so much and to be running such a huge trade deficit, but I doubt it would ever be the basis for open economic warfare. It was still shear stupidity on the part of American and European politicians and CxO's to decimate their manufacturing base in the search of cheap labor in a hostile Fascist dictatorship like China, and for Congress to squander money like they have. But hey most of the moron CxO's we have now are never thinking past their next quarterly results, and their stock price when their options vest, they have no concept of the macroeconomic devastation they are producing through off shoring. Our politicians are also never thinking past their next election and are only concerned about the size of their campaign coffers not rational spending policies. If you've watched our Congress in action in any recent finance hearings you should have noticed they are almost all complete morons in general and about finance and economics in particular.
"I'm waiting for an air to air combat drone that can kill Predators, etc."
The fundamental problem with drones are they either have to have:
- an up and down link so a human potentially very far away can control them. These signals are somewhat vulnerable either to jamming or to shooting down the satellite relay or control aircraft. Its unlikely a rag tag insurgency will be able to jam them so you are probably OK with drones unless you are fighting a technically advanced adversary like China or Russia.
- an autonomous AI capable of completing the entire mission. Its open to debate if you can have an AI with all the necessary capabilities and that you can also trust to do the right thing in all circumstances at least with todays technology.
I've been of the opinion the F-22 was a massive boondoggle primarily to line the pockets of Lockheed Martin since it was first in flight test. It probably should have remained a research aircraft and never made it to the production stage with the staggering price tag but Lockheed knows how to seed jobs in nearly every state and congressional district to insure their programs will get funded whether they should be or not. The F-22 was in reality a lot like NASA these days, a big high tech jobs program mostly to benefit Lockheed.
Hopefully the F-35 will be more reasonable though it isn't exactly a certainty the F-35 is going to deliver on time, on budget and with advertised capability yet.
I can't really subscribe to the idea you want an air force based enitrely on drones drones if you need to fight a technologically advanced foe, they are too vulnerable to single points of failure that would render them useless, and that will probably be true for some time to come. They work fine in Iraq and Afghanistan but there were no air forces there worth mentioning where a fighter drone would have been any value either.
The biggest failing of Slashdot Karma is the resolution is so low its effectively useless. Most people's Karma immediately shoots to Excellent and stays there for eternity or to "shitty troll" or whatever is the lowest rung of./ Karma.
Cmdr Taco made an enormous strategic blunder not making Karma a numeric value with no upper or lower limit cuz then it would be a ginormous horse race among karma whores to be #1 and trolls to be dead last. Comments from the #1 karma whore would be godlike in their powers.
The game I'd most like to see is something along the lines of:
- BF2 on a PC, the one game I play consistently is BF2 just because PvP is a blast if there are no cheats and the teams are even. COD4 graphics are pretty and all but I always have more PvP fun in BF2. To me graphics realism is way down on the list of priorities for a game. For me the PvP balance and intensity is the compelling feature of online games. - BF2 rounds are too short and repetitive, I'd prefer it if games more persistent up to but not quite like a MMORPG - Greater scope and long running strategy and tactics like a real war - Get rid of clan run servers, they are often poorly or abusively administered. I'd really rather pay a subscription to play on servers run by the company with unbiased admins who aren't 12 years old, aren't playing on one of the teams and using admin to cheat and who aggressively stamp out cheats. - Some mechanism to prevent team stacking. Team stacking ruins BF2 much of the time. - More realism. In particular get rid of medics with instant miracle cures and spawning out of thin air. If you are wounded you should be incapacitated and evacuated, if you are dead you should have to respawn in a rear area and start over as a reinforcement. There needs to be a higher price to be paid for getting shot even if it does slow down the game. - Mixing in air craft and to a lesser extent armor in BF2 is really flawed. I pretty much play infantry only so everyone is evenly matched. Armor only games are OK too, but mixing infantry in with armor and air pretty much sucks in BF2.
My problem with Steam is that obnoxious client of theirs starting every time I boot to Windows, putting itself in my toolbar, putting up a Window with spam and minimizing any other game I might have started running before it finished its minute of startup BS. I like the Steam concept but their execution of their client is AWFUL. Anyone know how to make it not run until and unless I actually want to run one of their games?
To be honest their client feels so much like spyware and spam I've put a moratorium on buying any more games there until they either fix their client or I figure out how to shut it off except when I want it to run.
If Wikipedia is correct Apple had 88% of the U.S. download market in 2006 and it passed Walmart as the #1 all around music sales leader in 2008. iTunes is a defacto monopoly now and Apple better start treading more carefully. Using tie ins to build new monopolies, which seems to be what they are doing here, is especially dangerous. An antitrust regulator might be inclined to say Apple's defacto monopoly on online music sales is giving them an unfair advantage in other markets, in this case the smartphone market. If a competitor can't bring a new smartphone to market because they can't access online music because of a monopoly Apple is begging for an antitrust complaint.
You can argue competitors just have to start their own competing MP3 service but that is a very tall order, especially since it requires inking deals with a relatively small number of recording companies that are something of cartel themselves. They are already distributing their product through iTunes and may or may not give a competing MP3 services the same terms, or may not deal with them at all which would make the iTunes monopoly very pronounced and entrenched.
One thing that might have crossed Palm's mind is this is a pretty vivid way to illustrate to consumers and government antitrust regulators that Apple is building some pretty powerful mutually supporting monopolies between iTunes, iPod and iPhone and Apple is using one monopoly to build new monopolies. As best I recall antitrust regulators frown on using tie ins with existing monopolies to create new ones.
Palm was faced with three options:
- try to compete against iPhone without iTunes support which put them at a competitive disadvantage - hack their way in to iTunes, and hope that either Apple plays it cool and does nothing in which case they get the iTunes support they needed, or Apple hammers them and Apple suddenly become a substantially bigger antitrust target and they make Apple's customers feel a little more apprehensive about being locked in to the Apple ecosystem. - it would be interesting to know if Palm tried to negotiate a license for iTunes access and Apple rebuffed them because of the competitive threat either denying it outright or making it prohibitively expensive. If Palm tried and Apple rebuffed that could come back on Apple in the eyes of antitrust regulators.
What ever happens with Palm infringing on Apple's multitouch patents anyway? I haven't been following and I thought this was a pretty serious problem for Pre with Apple too. Everyone demands multitouch now and if Apple has it locked up in patents that will further cement a pretty potent monopoly on multitouch smart phones.
One thing about the iPhone is it would be quite as big an antitrust target if it wasn't locked in to ATT in the U.S. ATT doesn't even provide service in big swaths of rural America so people in those areas, can't buy iPhones at all and it appears can't get iTunes on their phones either. People in cities wont care but iPhone exclusivity was already starting to cause antitrust attention to be brought to bear on Apple.
The whole idea of Paranoid Linux since you apparently haven't read Little Brother is it was passed around on CD and you popped it in to an XBox and it was prebuilt and prepackaged to be ultra secure so the people running it didn't have to knowledgable geeks and security experts to be use it to communicate. The name XNet came from the fact the distribution ws slapped on generic XBox's.
Someone has staked out paranoidlinux.org though not sure they've actually built anything yet.
The whole point of Paranoid Linux is everything is prebuilt and preconfigured by someone trustworthy and security aware and then signed so its could be verified the man hadn't slipped a Trojan in its place. They user mostly just pops it in an Xbox and then gets walked through the security measures, presumably Tor, PGP, adhoc WiFI, etc. They then ran forums on XNet where they discussed their resistance movement to DHS and created circles of trust for their PGP keys.
They also used an open source pirate MMORPG game called Clockwork Plunder as one of the primary communication mediums. Not sure game chat would be any better than Twitter to communicate rebellion though it is certainly less visible to the authorities as long as they aren't gamers and I doubt the Basij are gamers:) If you encrypt game chat and figure out a way to keep spies out it certainly would be better than Twitter. If CNN can figure out Twitter.... anyone can.
OLPC certainly would be a good candidate for its price, portability and WiFI capabilities. Would hate to see it blacklisted by authoritarian regimes and not reach kids because they decided might be a threat to their iron grip. Its also not widely distributed that people could get it when the need arose.
You would kind of need a distribution that would run on the hardware people have, like a bootable CD that would run on any x86, though it would need access to WiFi one way or another. A jailbroken iPod touch might be a good choice though its a little pricey for the third world, and certainly game consoles and hand held games machines would be good candidates due to ubiquity and they are less likely to be singled out by authorities for scrutiny.
Another possibility might be a distribution running in something like VirtualBox. You could encrypt, hide or nuke that fairly easily and the rest of the computer wouldn't be incriminating. The host OS for the VM would probably cause security and anonymity problems though.
"The original Orbiter design is possibly the most reliable construction engineers have ever accomplished."
Excepting of course it can't fly in rain without damaging the tiles, and it rains in Florida pretty much every freaking day.
Excepting of course they bolted a spacecraft on the side of a cryo tank so its fragile heat shield could be showered with ice on every launch and that has been a disaster waiting to happen since STS-1.
Excepting of course it has hydrogen leaks ALL the time.
I seriously don't know what you are smoking to say "most reliable construction engineers have ever accomplished" unless your reliability data is for a design that was never built which tend to be extremely reliable... because they were never built. The only reliability that matters is for the ship they built, and it isn't reliable.
"The Russian Space Agency hasn't produced anything on spec or on schedule despite a ton of funding being passed in their direction. Giving them more would be a huge mistake."
Exactly how often have NASA projects been on time and on budget since Apollo and Skylab?
A) when the ISS partnership originally started the Soviet Union had just imploded in every respect, its entire economy had collapsed, people weren't getting paid, they had a couple feeble coups, it was a challenge to find basic staples let alone parts for a high tech enterprise like building a space station. I'd like to see how NASA or your company did under such circumstances. B) There is a distinct possibility they just didn't like doing NASA's outsource work and abandoning a program they controlled for one where NASA tried to make them in to a junior partner. There are a lot of areas where Russia's engineers are unmatched especially in doing a LOT with a LITTLE, while NASA struggles to do a LITTLE with a LOT by comparison.
And NO I'm not Russian and I've never worked for the RSA. I know NASA first hand though.
You seem to be forgetting that for the next 5-10 years Russian Soyuz capsules are going to be the only way NASA astronauts have to get in to space unless they can hitch a ride with the Chinese, Elon Rusk or Burt Ratan. You probably shouldn't cast aspersions on your ride....
The first problem in your theory is the Russians ARE salvaging their modules out of it and they are they essential core of the ISS. Once they take their modules and go home I don't think what's left is viable. It is unfortunate all those solar panels and modules are going to end up as toast. Not sure if some enteriprising space pirate could lay claim to them and do something worthwhile with them or not.
I assume part of NASA's ploy is to sucker the European's and Japanese in to work with Russia and pony up to keep it alive. In NASA's ideal world I imagine they want the ISS to continue but someone else to pay for it since the U.S. is essentially bankrupt at this point. The Europeans and Japanese aren't entirely plussed their modules were delivered a decade late and will be trashed after only a few years in space.
Unfortunately the ISS is such a money pit and the science being done is so marginal I'm not sure anyone wants to pony up the billions to keep it going. Some parts of it will also start passing their designed life span and no telling how problematic it will be to keep it going as a whole. Mir wasn't in the best of shape when it was deorbited.
Didn't realize it was my job to point out to them that using the Internet, to send messages with their IP address in them, advocating overthrowing their authoritarian government was.... dumb. If the Iranians had just followed what happened in Guatemala with Twitter they should have known better.
About the only useful thing I could do at this point is point out that someone need to actually develop a real Paranoid Linuix distribution that will help people communicate who want to topple a repressive government, so it doesn't keep happening. It would be a good idea to have a prebuilt OS to help people who don't know how computers and the Internet work communicate over networks and organize without turning themselves in to sitting ducks.
As best I recall the Chinese government is well aware of the threat of ad hoc WiFi networks which is why they have their own special version with their own special back doors. I think its pretty much a given at this point that if you communicate through an ISP everything you say is being watched in just about every country on the planet.
Of course they are screwed either way. How can you botch a program as bad as that one has been botched and salvage anything out of it.
"When the ISS was first proposed before any money was spent, the plan was to decommission it in 2015"
How many years behind schedule is the ISS? That is the crux of the problem. If they finished it on time and on budget and had a full crew on it for the last ten years it might have worked. Instead they went through a decade of politically ensnarled redesigns and then years of further delays because the Shuttle proved to be inherently unreliable. At this point they are going to finish it and then pretty much trash it. Once they killed the Centrifuge Accomodations module and all of the other specialized equipment for interesting experiments it turned in to nothing but a white elephant and a vampire sucking resources away from anything useful.
You have to hand it to the Russians that they are astute and practical enough to rip their modules out of it and go back to their Mir heritage with affordable space stations doing interesting things on a reasonable budget.
Giving NASA's manned space budget to the Russian Space Agency would also probably lead to an exciting space program. NASA's manned space program is so dysfunctional at this point I'm not sure it can ever be turned around. I'm pretty sure the only reason Russia joined ISS in the first place was because back when they agreed to it the Soviet Union had just collapsed, they were broke and desperate for money. Putin has, if nothing else, pulled them out from being a basket case, and they may have enough money to go it alone again in space again depending on where the price of oil and natural gas are at a given point in time. I wager the Russian Space Agency can't wait to escape the bureaucratic BS that is NASA's manned space division.
Have you HEARD of any useful discoveries coming out of it that would justify the $150 billion dollar price tag? There is no doubt they are doing science on it, the burning question is what science have they done that justified the price tag or couldn't done through other means for a LOT less like on Mir before it was deorbited under pressure. ISS and NASA have been so obsessed with zero G biology on ISS its nearly excluded everything else.
The main problem is they are just now reaching the point that they can put a full crew of six on ISS. A three main crew was largely consumed just maintaining the station. They are also just now getting many of the main science modules attached. Most of them are like a decade late in being delivered to the ISS and its amazing countries like Japan are even sticking with their models after the staggering delays. About the time they actually finish the ISS and manage to keep a full crew on it, if they ever do, they will A) have a poor ability to deliver and retrieve people and cargo from the station since the Shuttle will be done and B) since they are already talking about deorbiting it, this insures no one will risk investing anything more in it.
There was one really interesting experiment I remember reading about a while ago but I think it was killed and will never make it to the ISS. Can't remember what it was called or what it did though.
Its also the viewpoint of a 15 year old male gamer, so its a pretty narrow snapshot of a narrow demographic though its not an insignificant demographic now that gaming is a multibillion dollar market and game companies do in fact make money unlike Twitter. His report probably says very little about a 15 year old female demographic and a demographic for those who aren't gamers.
A fifteen year old boy is likely to sitting at home playing games these days anway and the chat is built in and free so it does make vastly more sense for them to chat with his friends there than to use a metered cell phone or stare at a twitter client full of drivel. American cell phone companies in general are doing everything in their power to destroy their business by charging outrageous fees for bad service. For a fifteen year old girl the conversation is the game, so they are much more likely to focus their attention on their phones and twitter. For the gross generalization of the day, men tend to be somewhat escapist from the sordid details of every day life and crave adventure. Women generally seem to revel in tracking every sordid detail of everyone around them in real life, and that is the game for them, so Twitter is a more natural fit for a female demographic. Though seem to be loads of clueless men who do twitter and plenty of women gamers who break the generalization.
The kid does state the obvious that PC games are in deep trouble since big game companies are fed up with the piracy and gamers are fed up with all the cheats in PC games. This is kind of old news since many of the game companies are already dropping their PC ports, like Madden NFL, in favor of console ports only, unless they are doing subscriptions like WoW.
A more fascinating thread I'd like to see on Slashdot is the mechanics and economics of "Free" on the Internet. We seem to rapidly approaching a head where:
A. Newspapers are all going under since they can't compete with Craigslist and on the Internet for free. The NY Times is moving to some kind of pay scheme next month which is likely to kill them on the web.
B. Google is making rivers of money off searc ads and it allows them to attack many other web markets with free products which is going to destroy any incentive for anyone else to enter those markets. YouTube is thought to be losing somewhere between $200-500 million a year and is only sustainable because Google's search business is subsidizing it.
C. Everyone under thirty expects everything to be free music, software, books, movies, games, newspapers. If something they want isn't free they will steal it or opt for a path where it is free. It is an economic model draining a lot of incentive out of sinking time and money in to creative works if you have doubts about getting compensated for the effort and to pay the bills, put food on the table or a roof over your head. Creative endeavors it seems will have to be done by people already wealthy, support by someone else or by people doing it in their spare time while they also dig ditches for money to support themselves.
You left out Twitter and Facebook suckered large numbers of Iranian and Guatemalan young people in to posting anti government rants on them, thinking they were going to overthrow their government with Twitter. Now that's a laugh. It was a stellar part of the Twitter hype to make everyone think Twitter would lead to an instantaneous outbreak of Democracy across the globe. CNN was a leading purveyor of this myth. Since CNN has pretty much ceased to function as a news network all they have left to do is grasp at straws in the form of Twitter, Facebook and iReport. They kind of missed the fact its nearly impossible to verify anything you get from the anonymous public, or to have any confidence in the source. Howard Stern pranks proved this.
Note to wanna be young Iranian rebels, Iran monitors all Internet traffic so using Twitter in the clear provides the Basij with an instantaneous mechanism to identify, arrest and track you and your rabble-rouser friends. Note to all future young wanna be rebels, all your internet activities are probably being watched. Your Twitter and Facebook pages aren't a good place to organize a revolution unless you really know what you are doing. Don't use them unless you are using anonymous WiFi stolen from your neighbor so they get busted instead, or a very good anonymizer like Tor. Try reading Cory Doctorow's Little Brother so you will at least be in the correct mind set for interacting with authoritarian governments who use computers to oppress their people, like Iran, Russia... and the U.S.
"Little Brother" is a somewhat flawed work but at least it teaches paranoia. Note to Linux community, someone really needs to put together Paranoid Linux and XNet with Tor, gnupg, WiFi sniffers, security tools, etc. and make sure computer noobs who want to overthrow their out of control governments have it, and can use it out of the box even if they are noobs.
There is a reason the NSA is building two giant new data centers in Utah and San Antonio and expanding the one in Maryland. They appear to be preparing to spy on a whole lot more communications traffic than they already are. Anyone who think America's bout with Big Brother ended when Obama replaced Bush are sadly mistaken. The Democrats are just as eager to spy on everyone and destroy all our civil liberties as the Cheneyists were.
A burning question of the 21st century is if computers will liberate us or enslave us. The paradoxical answer is they will probably do both at the same time.
Let them play it. Until ISS starts doing useful science, which at this point it probably never will, its just a money pit. But, if NASA thinks they can deorbit a $150 billion in sunk costs and 40 wasted years and get away unscathed they are mistaken. It will make NASA's manned space office permenently damaged goods, more so than they already are.
NASA's manned space office has just been using ISS and Shuttle as a giant job's program since Apollo ended. They couldn't get funding for or think of anything useful to do so they've just been pouring money in to two failed programs, circling around in LEO doing nothing for nearly 40 years. It was just a scheme so they would get pay checks and underachieving overachievers could put "astronaut" on their resume. So far Orion and Ares aren't any better.
Either:
- Give the money in well structured grants to the private sector, like Burt Ruttan and Elon Musk, at least they are smaller, leaner and willing to think outside the box - Give the money to parts of NASA that work like JPL for robotics missions or the great observatories - Find someone with the ability and willingness to colonize Mars though you would have to throw a lot more money at it than NASA's current budget. Since we've thrown trillions in to the pockets of corrupt bankers, Iraq, brain dead stimulus, GM, etc. colonizing Mars seems vastly better by comparison.
You put the kind of money in to JPL the ISS and Shuttle have been sucking up for the last four decades you could do some amazing robotic missions. Robotics just wasn't there when Apollo ended. Now it is and it can do a whole lot more for a whole lot less than putting men in space, especially with the current safety obsession in the wake of the two shuttle disaster, which is pretty much paralyzing manned missions. Problem with putting men in space is it consumes vast resources and money just to keep them alive. Only value in it is if you are going to build a self sustaining colony on Mars, presuming such a thing is even possible.
According to Wikipedia U.S. passports were redesigned to build in shielding so I'm wondering if this person was reading U.S. passports before the design, passports from elsewhere or the redesign didn't work:
"In 2006, RFID tags were included in new US passports. The US produced 10 million passports in 2005, and it has been estimated that 13 million will be produced in 2006. The chips inlays produced by Smartrac will store the same information that is printed within the passport and will also include a digital picture of the owner.[11] The US State Department initially stated the chips could only be read from a distance of 10 cm (4 in), but after widespread criticism and a clear demonstration that special equipment can read the test passports from 10 meters (33 ft) away, the passports were designed to incorporate a thin metal lining to make it more difficult for unauthorized readers to "skim" information when the passport is closed. The department will also implement Basic Access Control (BAC), which functions as a Personal Identification Number (PIN) in the form of characters printed on the passport data page. Before a passport's tag can be read, this PIN must be entered into an RFID reader. The BAC also enables the encryption of any communication between the chip and interrogator"
Slashdot Mirror
"Having people permanently on it is good practice for living in a vacuum"
The ISS is good practice for living in a vacuum. We've already spent more than a hundred billion dollars and decades doing it to the exclusion of all else, and its mostly been a gigantic waste of time and money. It is one of the most expensive science projects in history and NASA has pretty much NOTHING to show for it and they want to deorbit it right after its finished because they know its a giant money sink.
This new report's apparent suggestion we should send missions to EMPTY POINTS in space is pretty DELUSIONAL too. You fly people to Lagrange points, so they stare at a vacuum, and come back is going to leave the entire planet laughing or slapping their foreheads for the stupidity of it. Lagrange points are interesting as places to put satellites, telescopes, etc, but there is NO reason to send people to them for a sightseeing trip.
If you are going to keep spending billions putting men in space you need to have an actual goal and stop with the "stepping stones" to no where BS. It smacks of just to keeping the jobs program going. Only actual goals justifying a manned space program I can think of, and which are reasonably feasible, at the moment are:
- colonizing Mars
- laying the groundwork to mine asteroids or deflect them if they are on a collision course with Earth
- large solar power station in orbit
Another Apollo like stunt flying to the Mars, planting a flag, collecting rocks and flying home doesn't work either. If that's all you are going to do send robots. Sending people to Mars to permanently colonize it is one of the few missions that actually justifies sending people. Most everything else would be better done with robots. Not sure you are going to be able to find the money or the guts to do it unfortunately.
"They have spent around a trillion dollars with no end in sight."
Actually I think the end is very much in sight in Iraq, 2011 all U.S. combat forces are supposed to be out of Iraq. There is talk they might accelerate the withdrawal by another brigade soon. Iraq mostly wants the U.S. out so they can finish their civil war, the U.S. doesn't want to be in the middle of their looming civil war.
The war with no end in sight is in Afghanistan. They just added 21,000 more troops added this year and rumors today McChrystal may request more next year. I think there we will be fighting a forever war because we are trying to prop up a completely corrupt government the Afghan people hate so much they often prefer the Taliban.
It should be remembered the war in Vietnam played a pretty key role in Nixon killing Apollo and sending NASA on a road to no where (the ISS and Shuttle) since Vietnam was bankrupting the U.S. in parallel with Apollo.
Considering we spent $100 billion on the ISS, its one of the most expensive science projects in history, and it doesn't do anything useful I'm not really sure building a 2001 class space station would have really been any better even if we hadn't blown the money on wars. Maybe there would be a tourism case but I think its dubious you will get real space tourism anywhere close to a break even point any time soon, other than flying the super rich.
Before anyone dreams of a 2001 space station we need to get LEO launch cost down, way down, to like $1 a pound instead of $1000-$10000 a pound. Virgin Galactic is talking $200K for a 200 lb person to suborbital for a few minutes. That's $1000 a lb for not much. At present a space elevator is probably the only thing that will make getting out of Earth's gravity well economical and that still faces some enormous hurdles that throwing money at it may or may not solve.
I think the problem with Apollo, 2001, Star Trek, Star Wars syndrome, especially in the U.S., is they created a lot of dreamers who dwell on how romantic space travel is, when most of the time it wouldn't be anything like that. Space is an empty vacuum, it has all the appeal of a vacuum. It is mostly a nasty place, and working and traveling in space will for a long time to come be tedious, boring, stressful and dangerous. Only things interesting in space are the other rocks in space and most of them are no picnic.
I predict manned space travel will continue to have a really rocky future until A) we take all the inflated romance out of the idea and B) figure out ways to utilize space that are actually useful and make sense. Some early leaks out of the upcoming Augustine report worry me. There was talk they were going to propose manned space flights to Lagrange points just to prove we could do long duration space flights. They seem to miss the fact that flying to points in space in a tin can and sitting there would leave the world aghast with the stupidity of it all.
Planting a permanent colony on Mars is the mission most likely to be worth and that would fire the imagination of the whole planet like Apollo 11 did. It is the one place where humans have a fighting chance of making another biosphere and fulfilling the human desire to break new frontiers.
Tapping solar power in space to solve our energy problem might be worth exploring.
Working towards asteroid mining to eliminate future shortages of resources on earth, and to use in construction of structures in space might be worth doing.
Its just an opinion but:
- returning to the moon isn't very useful and smacks of the ISS all over again, except on the Moon
- putting men in tin cans in space going no place in particular isn't worth it either
- Justifying every mission in space with "searching for life" is weak, really weak. Searching for signs of life is a worthwhile secondary goal to primary missions that matter. The odds of finding life elsewhere in our solar system are not great so when that is the be all, end all goal for your space program you ar
"and users become savvier in protecting their home machines"
And when pigs fly...
"This is essentially the same assumption that AI researchers have had from the start."
Maybe... but the pivotal difference is medical imaging of the brain is dramatically more advanced than it has even been. Until recently AI researchers were grasping at straws in the dark and failing. They will relatively soon be able to image every neural path way in the brain and watch them over time.
Its certainly not a given that it will be easy to develop a silicon emulation, but its almost a certainty that the combination of medical imaging and the current state of the art in semiconductors make it more likely to succeed than when AI researchers were doing tiny neural nets in software or on unsophistacted IC's.
One area they could encounter difficulty is if it turns out our intelligence and "soul" have a quantum electodynamic or multiverse component since that will probably push the goal much farther out.
"If Opera doesn't come up with some sort of educational advertising campaign"
Why exactly would anyone PAY for an advertising campaign for a FREE product which they make no money on because they give it away for FREE. I think Opera pretty much survives on licensing their embedded browsers. Its not really clear why they are still even in the desktop browser business other than for brand awareness which isn't really working for them. I wager Opera is pretty much just burning money still doing a desktop browser at all, I think there business is all embedded browsers.
Microsoft got in the browser business only because Netscape terrified them and when Netscape cratered Microsoft stopped caring about it until Google revived the threat of web apps and cloud computing. They are afraid the browser is going to displace their OS and they want to lock people in to a proprietary web, and they are mostly failing at it.
Google did a browser because they are fixated on web apps and want to drive the technology for their apps and the have a river of money from search to fund it.
Firefox/Mozilla is where Netscape went to survive and amazingly did survive and thrive as open source mostly thanks to the Firefox team.
Just about everyone else is doing Webkit lately.
To be honest it sounds to me like this Opera guy is still fighting a war that was over years ago. The fact is browsers on the desktop are an undifferentiated commodity and there is no financial incentive to even be in that business any more. Only reason to be there is if you want to control the direction of the web which is Microsoft, Google, Firefox and Apple's reason for being there, not Opera's, Opera is an embedded browser company now.
The worst proprietary lockin everyone should be unhappy about is Flash.... and SVG isn't the solution. The main solution is to get the HTML5 video tag to work and get every browser to support the same codec(s). Once Flash loses its lock on web video Flash and Adobe matters a LOT less to everyone than it does now. Without a lock on video Flash can go back to where it was in Flash 5, an annoying purveyor of obnoxious ads, and a platform for mostly bad games, that people can block if they hate it enough.
As others have said the EU fixating on the browser is completely retarded at this point. The two real problems with the Microsoft monopoly are:
A) they force all PC manufactures in to shipping their OS exclusively on most new PC's so everyone buying a PC is practically forced to buy it even if you don't want it
B. Office proprietary file formats and the network effect tends to lock all business in to running Office for all docs and spreadsheets. Open Office is a nice product but the docs it produces never work quite right in Office.
I'm not going to be defending Markoff but there is reason for concern.
Yes it is unlikely that people writing "code" are going to develop real artificial intelligence any time soon, they've pretty much tried and failed. But as medical imaging continues to advance it may reach a point that it will be possible to completely image a human brain and create a road map to natural intelligence. If you can then develop a highly parallel machine that can then implement that road map you may be able to create a machine with an intelligence matching and then surpassing a human. The brains complexity is simply too high for humans to recreate it from scratch using code but you may well be able to copy it.
There certainly are obstacles to this happening that have to be overcome. Even if we map the mechanics of the brain there is a fair chance we may miss some of the subtlety of the chemistry so the AI might not work. It may also be non trivial to develop hardware that accurately mimics the road map and especially that has the ability to rewire itself on the fly like a human brain. It would seem these problem should ultimately be solvable, its just a matter of how long and how much money it will take.
If and when the obstacles are overcome and assuming the brain really is just a biochemical machine, that there is no soul or divine component to animal intelligence, it would seem inevitable that a mechanical simulator will eventually be developed, and once developed it could then be extended to exceed natural intelligence, all of which will create a host of ethical dilemmas.
Probably as much a risk is that as we decode the human genome and the mechanics of the brain we might devise genetic changes that could dramatically accelerate evolution and create humans with much higher intelligence, which will also create a host of ethical dilemmas.
There is a different line of reasoning that as we become more and more dependent on computers to control everything in our lives like our cars, airliners, weapons and utilities, and as they are all networked together there is a rapidly increasing potential for machines to do harm on a wide scale either due to design flaws, unintended consequences or manipulation by humans with malevolent attempt. These issues probably shouldn't be mixed in with the AI debate, they are more just the issues we are already seeing in adapting to dramatically accelerating penetration of computers and networks in our existence.
That isn't a very likely scenario. The U.S. would never completely "capitulate" in a war as long as it has nuclear weapons. Economics and currencies also don't really matter in a total war as much as control of shipping lanes and resources.
The U.S. would have fuel as long as the strategic petroleum reserve held out which would be long enough to fight a pretty nasty war if civilian use was rationed. China is as dependent on imports as anyone and the U.S. has more carriers and submarines to interdict shipping than China does. I imagine the biggest problem would be integrated circuits to make the precision weapons the U.S. has become so dependent on. Don't think the Pentagon has been very effective in maintaining domestic production of those but if Taiwan and Japan were still producing those might not be a problem.
The economic damage to China in dumping their U.S. dollars and T-Bills would be about as bad for them as it would be for the U.S. There is an economic axiom that once a debt becomes large enough the debtor actually has more power in the bilateral relation than the lender does.
I think the Chinese have been trying to quietly unwind their dollar assets in a commodity buying binge for the last six monthes which is one of the few ways they can unwind their dollar position without causing a calamity that will hurt them as and the global economy just as bad as it would the U.S. if not more.
No argument, it is totally a bad thing for the U.S. to be borrowing so much and to be running such a huge trade deficit, but I doubt it would ever be the basis for open economic warfare. It was still shear stupidity on the part of American and European politicians and CxO's to decimate their manufacturing base in the search of cheap labor in a hostile Fascist dictatorship like China, and for Congress to squander money like they have. But hey most of the moron CxO's we have now are never thinking past their next quarterly results, and their stock price when their options vest, they have no concept of the macroeconomic devastation they are producing through off shoring. Our politicians are also never thinking past their next election and are only concerned about the size of their campaign coffers not rational spending policies. If you've watched our Congress in action in any recent finance hearings you should have noticed they are almost all complete morons in general and about finance and economics in particular.
"I'm waiting for an air to air combat drone that can kill Predators, etc."
The fundamental problem with drones are they either have to have:
- an up and down link so a human potentially very far away can control them. These signals are somewhat vulnerable either to jamming or to shooting down the satellite relay or control aircraft. Its unlikely a rag tag insurgency will be able to jam them so you are probably OK with drones unless you are fighting a technically advanced adversary like China or Russia.
- an autonomous AI capable of completing the entire mission. Its open to debate if you can have an AI with all the necessary capabilities and that you can also trust to do the right thing in all circumstances at least with todays technology.
I've been of the opinion the F-22 was a massive boondoggle primarily to line the pockets of Lockheed Martin since it was first in flight test. It probably should have remained a research aircraft and never made it to the production stage with the staggering price tag but Lockheed knows how to seed jobs in nearly every state and congressional district to insure their programs will get funded whether they should be or not. The F-22 was in reality a lot like NASA these days, a big high tech jobs program mostly to benefit Lockheed.
Hopefully the F-35 will be more reasonable though it isn't exactly a certainty the F-35 is going to deliver on time, on budget and with advertised capability yet.
I can't really subscribe to the idea you want an air force based enitrely on drones drones if you need to fight a technologically advanced foe, they are too vulnerable to single points of failure that would render them useless, and that will probably be true for some time to come. They work fine in Iraq and Afghanistan but there were no air forces there worth mentioning where a fighter drone would have been any value either.
The biggest failing of Slashdot Karma is the resolution is so low its effectively useless. Most people's Karma immediately shoots to Excellent and stays there for eternity or to "shitty troll" or whatever is the lowest rung of ./ Karma.
Cmdr Taco made an enormous strategic blunder not making Karma a numeric value with no upper or lower limit cuz then it would be a ginormous horse race among karma whores to be #1 and trolls to be dead last. Comments from the #1 karma whore would be godlike in their powers.
The game I'd most like to see is something along the lines of:
- BF2 on a PC, the one game I play consistently is BF2 just because PvP is a blast if there are no cheats and the teams are even. COD4 graphics are pretty and all but I always have more PvP fun in BF2. To me graphics realism is way down on the list of priorities for a game. For me the PvP balance and intensity is the compelling feature of online games.
- BF2 rounds are too short and repetitive, I'd prefer it if games more persistent up to but not quite like a MMORPG
- Greater scope and long running strategy and tactics like a real war
- Get rid of clan run servers, they are often poorly or abusively administered. I'd really rather pay a subscription to play on servers run by the company with unbiased admins who aren't 12 years old, aren't playing on one of the teams and using admin to cheat and who aggressively stamp out cheats.
- Some mechanism to prevent team stacking. Team stacking ruins BF2 much of the time.
- More realism. In particular get rid of medics with instant miracle cures and spawning out of thin air. If you are wounded you should be incapacitated and evacuated, if you are dead you should have to respawn in a rear area and start over as a reinforcement. There needs to be a higher price to be paid for getting shot even if it does slow down the game.
- Mixing in air craft and to a lesser extent armor in BF2 is really flawed. I pretty much play infantry only so everyone is evenly matched. Armor only games are OK too, but mixing infantry in with armor and air pretty much sucks in BF2.
My problem with Steam is that obnoxious client of theirs starting every time I boot to Windows, putting itself in my toolbar, putting up a Window with spam and minimizing any other game I might have started running before it finished its minute of startup BS. I like the Steam concept but their execution of their client is AWFUL. Anyone know how to make it not run until and unless I actually want to run one of their games?
To be honest their client feels so much like spyware and spam I've put a moratorium on buying any more games there until they either fix their client or I figure out how to shut it off except when I want it to run.
If Wikipedia is correct Apple had 88% of the U.S. download market in 2006 and it passed Walmart as the #1 all around music sales leader in 2008. iTunes is a defacto monopoly now and Apple better start treading more carefully. Using tie ins to build new monopolies, which seems to be what they are doing here, is especially dangerous. An antitrust regulator might be inclined to say Apple's defacto monopoly on online music sales is giving them an unfair advantage in other markets, in this case the smartphone market. If a competitor can't bring a new smartphone to market because they can't access online music because of a monopoly Apple is begging for an antitrust complaint.
You can argue competitors just have to start their own competing MP3 service but that is a very tall order, especially since it requires inking deals with a relatively small number of recording companies that are something of cartel themselves. They are already distributing their product through iTunes and may or may not give a competing MP3 services the same terms, or may not deal with them at all which would make the iTunes monopoly very pronounced and entrenched.
One thing that might have crossed Palm's mind is this is a pretty vivid way to illustrate to consumers and government antitrust regulators that Apple is building some pretty powerful mutually supporting monopolies between iTunes, iPod and iPhone and Apple is using one monopoly to build new monopolies. As best I recall antitrust regulators frown on using tie ins with existing monopolies to create new ones.
Palm was faced with three options:
- try to compete against iPhone without iTunes support which put them at a competitive disadvantage
- hack their way in to iTunes, and hope that either Apple plays it cool and does nothing in which case they get the iTunes support they needed, or Apple hammers them and Apple suddenly become a substantially bigger antitrust target and they make Apple's customers feel a little more apprehensive about being locked in to the Apple ecosystem.
- it would be interesting to know if Palm tried to negotiate a license for iTunes access and Apple rebuffed them because of the competitive threat either denying it outright or making it prohibitively expensive. If Palm tried and Apple rebuffed that could come back on Apple in the eyes of antitrust regulators.
What ever happens with Palm infringing on Apple's multitouch patents anyway? I haven't been following and I thought this was a pretty serious problem for Pre with Apple too. Everyone demands multitouch now and if Apple has it locked up in patents that will further cement a pretty potent monopoly on multitouch smart phones.
One thing about the iPhone is it would be quite as big an antitrust target if it wasn't locked in to ATT in the U.S. ATT doesn't even provide service in big swaths of rural America so people in those areas, can't buy iPhones at all and it appears can't get iTunes on their phones either. People in cities wont care but iPhone exclusivity was already starting to cause antitrust attention to be brought to bear on Apple.
The whole idea of Paranoid Linux since you apparently haven't read Little Brother is it was passed around on CD and you popped it in to an XBox and it was prebuilt and prepackaged to be ultra secure so the people running it didn't have to knowledgable geeks and security experts to be use it to communicate. The name XNet came from the fact the distribution ws slapped on generic XBox's.
Someone has staked out paranoidlinux.org though not sure they've actually built anything yet.
The whole point of Paranoid Linux is everything is prebuilt and preconfigured by someone trustworthy and security aware and then signed so its could be verified the man hadn't slipped a Trojan in its place. They user mostly just pops it in an Xbox and then gets walked through the security measures, presumably Tor, PGP, adhoc WiFI, etc. They then ran forums on XNet where they discussed their resistance movement to DHS and created circles of trust for their PGP keys.
They also used an open source pirate MMORPG game called Clockwork Plunder as one of the primary communication mediums. Not sure game chat would be any better than Twitter to communicate rebellion though it is certainly less visible to the authorities as long as they aren't gamers and I doubt the Basij are gamers :) If you encrypt game chat and figure out a way to keep spies out it certainly would be better than Twitter. If CNN can figure out Twitter.... anyone can.
OLPC certainly would be a good candidate for its price, portability and WiFI capabilities. Would hate to see it blacklisted by authoritarian regimes and not reach kids because they decided might be a threat to their iron grip. Its also not widely distributed that people could get it when the need arose.
You would kind of need a distribution that would run on the hardware people have, like a bootable CD that would run on any x86, though it would need access to WiFi one way or another. A jailbroken iPod touch might be a good choice though its a little pricey for the third world, and certainly game consoles and hand held games machines would be good candidates due to ubiquity and they are less likely to be singled out by authorities for scrutiny.
Another possibility might be a distribution running in something like VirtualBox. You could encrypt, hide or nuke that fairly easily and the rest of the computer wouldn't be incriminating. The host OS for the VM would probably cause security and anonymity problems though.
"The original Orbiter design is possibly the most reliable construction engineers have ever accomplished."
Excepting of course it can't fly in rain without damaging the tiles, and it rains in Florida pretty much every freaking day.
Excepting of course they bolted a spacecraft on the side of a cryo tank so its fragile heat shield could be showered with ice on every launch and that has been a disaster waiting to happen since STS-1.
Excepting of course it has hydrogen leaks ALL the time.
I seriously don't know what you are smoking to say "most reliable construction engineers have ever accomplished" unless your reliability data is for a design that was never built which tend to be extremely reliable... because they were never built. The only reliability that matters is for the ship they built, and it isn't reliable.
"The Russian Space Agency hasn't produced anything on spec or on schedule despite a ton of funding being passed in their direction. Giving them more would be a huge mistake."
Exactly how often have NASA projects been on time and on budget since Apollo and Skylab?
A) when the ISS partnership originally started the Soviet Union had just imploded in every respect, its entire economy had collapsed, people weren't getting paid, they had a couple feeble coups, it was a challenge to find basic staples let alone parts for a high tech enterprise like building a space station. I'd like to see how NASA or your company did under such circumstances. B) There is a distinct possibility they just didn't like doing NASA's outsource work and abandoning a program they controlled for one where NASA tried to make them in to a junior partner. There are a lot of areas where Russia's engineers are unmatched especially in doing a LOT with a LITTLE, while NASA struggles to do a LITTLE with a LOT by comparison.
And NO I'm not Russian and I've never worked for the RSA. I know NASA first hand though.
You seem to be forgetting that for the next 5-10 years Russian Soyuz capsules are going to be the only way NASA astronauts have to get in to space unless they can hitch a ride with the Chinese, Elon Rusk or Burt Ratan. You probably shouldn't cast aspersions on your ride....
The first problem in your theory is the Russians ARE salvaging their modules out of it and they are they essential core of the ISS. Once they take their modules and go home I don't think what's left is viable. It is unfortunate all those solar panels and modules are going to end up as toast. Not sure if some enteriprising space pirate could lay claim to them and do something worthwhile with them or not.
I assume part of NASA's ploy is to sucker the European's and Japanese in to work with Russia and pony up to keep it alive. In NASA's ideal world I imagine they want the ISS to continue but someone else to pay for it since the U.S. is essentially bankrupt at this point. The Europeans and Japanese aren't entirely plussed their modules were delivered a decade late and will be trashed after only a few years in space.
Unfortunately the ISS is such a money pit and the science being done is so marginal I'm not sure anyone wants to pony up the billions to keep it going. Some parts of it will also start passing their designed life span and no telling how problematic it will be to keep it going as a whole. Mir wasn't in the best of shape when it was deorbited.
Didn't realize it was my job to point out to them that using the Internet, to send messages with their IP address in them, advocating overthrowing their authoritarian government was .... dumb. If the Iranians had just followed what happened in Guatemala with Twitter they should have known better.
About the only useful thing I could do at this point is point out that someone need to actually develop a real Paranoid Linuix distribution that will help people communicate who want to topple a repressive government, so it doesn't keep happening. It would be a good idea to have a prebuilt OS to help people who don't know how computers and the Internet work communicate over networks and organize without turning themselves in to sitting ducks.
As best I recall the Chinese government is well aware of the threat of ad hoc WiFi networks which is why they have their own special version with their own special back doors. I think its pretty much a given at this point that if you communicate through an ISP everything you say is being watched in just about every country on the planet.
Of course they are screwed either way. How can you botch a program as bad as that one has been botched and salvage anything out of it.
"When the ISS was first proposed before any money was spent, the plan was to decommission it in 2015"
How many years behind schedule is the ISS? That is the crux of the problem. If they finished it on time and on budget and had a full crew on it for the last ten years it might have worked. Instead they went through a decade of politically ensnarled redesigns and then years of further delays because the Shuttle proved to be inherently unreliable. At this point they are going to finish it and then pretty much trash it. Once they killed the Centrifuge Accomodations module and all of the other specialized equipment for interesting experiments it turned in to nothing but a white elephant and a vampire sucking resources away from anything useful.
You have to hand it to the Russians that they are astute and practical enough to rip their modules out of it and go back to their Mir heritage with affordable space stations doing interesting things on a reasonable budget.
Giving NASA's manned space budget to the Russian Space Agency would also probably lead to an exciting space program. NASA's manned space program is so dysfunctional at this point I'm not sure it can ever be turned around. I'm pretty sure the only reason Russia joined ISS in the first place was because back when they agreed to it the Soviet Union had just collapsed, they were broke and desperate for money. Putin has, if nothing else, pulled them out from being a basket case, and they may have enough money to go it alone again in space again depending on where the price of oil and natural gas are at a given point in time. I wager the Russian Space Agency can't wait to escape the bureaucratic BS that is NASA's manned space division.
Have you HEARD of any useful discoveries coming out of it that would justify the $150 billion dollar price tag? There is no doubt they are doing science on it, the burning question is what science have they done that justified the price tag or couldn't done through other means for a LOT less like on Mir before it was deorbited under pressure. ISS and NASA have been so obsessed with zero G biology on ISS its nearly excluded everything else.
The main problem is they are just now reaching the point that they can put a full crew of six on ISS. A three main crew was largely consumed just maintaining the station. They are also just now getting many of the main science modules attached. Most of them are like a decade late in being delivered to the ISS and its amazing countries like Japan are even sticking with their models after the staggering delays. About the time they actually finish the ISS and manage to keep a full crew on it, if they ever do, they will A) have a poor ability to deliver and retrieve people and cargo from the station since the Shuttle will be done and B) since they are already talking about deorbiting it, this insures no one will risk investing anything more in it.
There was one really interesting experiment I remember reading about a while ago but I think it was killed and will never make it to the ISS. Can't remember what it was called or what it did though.
Its also the viewpoint of a 15 year old male gamer, so its a pretty narrow snapshot of a narrow demographic though its not an insignificant demographic now that gaming is a multibillion dollar market and game companies do in fact make money unlike Twitter. His report probably says very little about a 15 year old female demographic and a demographic for those who aren't gamers.
A fifteen year old boy is likely to sitting at home playing games these days anway and the chat is built in and free so it does make vastly more sense for them to chat with his friends there than to use a metered cell phone or stare at a twitter client full of drivel. American cell phone companies in general are doing everything in their power to destroy their business by charging outrageous fees for bad service. For a fifteen year old girl the conversation is the game, so they are much more likely to focus their attention on their phones and twitter. For the gross generalization of the day, men tend to be somewhat escapist from the sordid details of every day life and crave adventure. Women generally seem to revel in tracking every sordid detail of everyone around them in real life, and that is the game for them, so Twitter is a more natural fit for a female demographic. Though seem to be loads of clueless men who do twitter and plenty of women gamers who break the generalization.
The kid does state the obvious that PC games are in deep trouble since big game companies are fed up with the piracy and gamers are fed up with all the cheats in PC games. This is kind of old news since many of the game companies are already dropping their PC ports, like Madden NFL, in favor of console ports only, unless they are doing subscriptions like WoW.
A more fascinating thread I'd like to see on Slashdot is the mechanics and economics of "Free" on the Internet. We seem to rapidly approaching a head where:
A. Newspapers are all going under since they can't compete with Craigslist and on the Internet for free. The NY Times is moving to some kind of pay scheme next month which is likely to kill them on the web.
B. Google is making rivers of money off searc ads and it allows them to attack many other web markets with free products which is going to destroy any incentive for anyone else to enter those markets. YouTube is thought to be losing somewhere between $200-500 million a year and is only sustainable because Google's search business is subsidizing it.
C. Everyone under thirty expects everything to be free music, software, books, movies, games, newspapers. If something they want isn't free they will steal it or opt for a path where it is free. It is an economic model draining a lot of incentive out of sinking time and money in to creative works if you have doubts about getting compensated for the effort and to pay the bills, put food on the table or a roof over your head. Creative endeavors it seems will have to be done by people already wealthy, support by someone else or by people doing it in their spare time while they also dig ditches for money to support themselves.
You left out Twitter and Facebook suckered large numbers of Iranian and Guatemalan young people in to posting anti government rants on them, thinking they were going to overthrow their government with Twitter. Now that's a laugh. It was a stellar part of the Twitter hype to make everyone think Twitter would lead to an instantaneous outbreak of Democracy across the globe. CNN was a leading purveyor of this myth. Since CNN has pretty much ceased to function as a news network all they have left to do is grasp at straws in the form of Twitter, Facebook and iReport. They kind of missed the fact its nearly impossible to verify anything you get from the anonymous public, or to have any confidence in the source. Howard Stern pranks proved this.
Note to wanna be young Iranian rebels, Iran monitors all Internet traffic so using Twitter in the clear provides the Basij with an instantaneous mechanism to identify, arrest and track you and your rabble-rouser friends. Note to all future young wanna be rebels, all your internet activities are probably being watched. Your Twitter and Facebook pages aren't a good place to organize a revolution unless you really know what you are doing. Don't use them unless you are using anonymous WiFi stolen from your neighbor so they get busted instead, or a very good anonymizer like Tor. Try reading Cory Doctorow's Little Brother so you will at least be in the correct mind set for interacting with authoritarian governments who use computers to oppress their people, like Iran, Russia... and the U.S.
"Little Brother" is a somewhat flawed work but at least it teaches paranoia. Note to Linux community, someone really needs to put together Paranoid Linux and XNet with Tor, gnupg, WiFi sniffers, security tools, etc. and make sure computer noobs who want to overthrow their out of control governments have it, and can use it out of the box even if they are noobs.
There is a reason the NSA is building two giant new data centers in Utah and San Antonio and expanding the one in Maryland. They appear to be preparing to spy on a whole lot more communications traffic than they already are. Anyone who think America's bout with Big Brother ended when Obama replaced Bush are sadly mistaken. The Democrats are just as eager to spy on everyone and destroy all our civil liberties as the Cheneyists were.
A burning question of the 21st century is if computers will liberate us or enslave us. The paradoxical answer is they will probably do both at the same time.
Let them play it. Until ISS starts doing useful science, which at this point it probably never will, its just a money pit. But, if NASA thinks they can deorbit a $150 billion in sunk costs and 40 wasted years and get away unscathed they are mistaken. It will make NASA's manned space office permenently damaged goods, more so than they already are.
NASA's manned space office has just been using ISS and Shuttle as a giant job's program since Apollo ended. They couldn't get funding for or think of anything useful to do so they've just been pouring money in to two failed programs, circling around in LEO doing nothing for nearly 40 years. It was just a scheme so they would get pay checks and underachieving overachievers could put "astronaut" on their resume. So far Orion and Ares aren't any better.
Either:
- Give the money in well structured grants to the private sector, like Burt Ruttan and Elon Musk, at least they are smaller, leaner and willing to think outside the box
- Give the money to parts of NASA that work like JPL for robotics missions or the great observatories
- Find someone with the ability and willingness to colonize Mars though you would have to throw a lot more money at it than NASA's current budget. Since we've thrown trillions in to the pockets of corrupt bankers, Iraq, brain dead stimulus, GM, etc. colonizing Mars seems vastly better by comparison.
You put the kind of money in to JPL the ISS and Shuttle have been sucking up for the last four decades you could do some amazing robotic missions. Robotics just wasn't there when Apollo ended. Now it is and it can do a whole lot more for a whole lot less than putting men in space, especially with the current safety obsession in the wake of the two shuttle disaster, which is pretty much paralyzing manned missions. Problem with putting men in space is it consumes vast resources and money just to keep them alive. Only value in it is if you are going to build a self sustaining colony on Mars, presuming such a thing is even possible.
According to Wikipedia U.S. passports were redesigned to build in shielding so I'm wondering if this person was reading U.S. passports before the design, passports from elsewhere or the redesign didn't work:
"In 2006, RFID tags were included in new US passports. The US produced 10 million passports in 2005, and it has been estimated that 13 million will be produced in 2006. The chips inlays produced by Smartrac will store the same information that is printed within the passport and will also include a digital picture of the owner.[11] The US State Department initially stated the chips could only be read from a distance of 10 cm (4 in), but after widespread criticism and a clear demonstration that special equipment can read the test passports from 10 meters (33 ft) away, the passports were designed to incorporate a thin metal lining to make it more difficult for unauthorized readers to "skim" information when the passport is closed. The department will also implement Basic Access Control (BAC), which functions as a Personal Identification Number (PIN) in the form of characters printed on the passport data page. Before a passport's tag can be read, this PIN must be entered into an RFID reader. The BAC also enables the encryption of any communication between the chip and interrogator"
Throw a copy of Paranoid Linux on an XBox, crank up XNet and Clockwork Plunder and you can teach your kids to fight the man starting at an early age.
Since its XBox the obligatory Cory Doctorow, Little Brother references are mandatory :) Don't trust anyone over 25 and down with the man.