I assure you CSC, EDS, IBM, Lockheed Martin etc are warming up their proposal teams because there will probably be billions spent on about a hundred contracts, or addendums to existing contracts, in a hundred agencies to do this. Its not like you can do it once and have every agency use the same setup, every agency will reinvent the wheel themselves, some will work, some wont, all will cost lots of tax dollars to implement and run, and its money pouring in to the pockets of big companies who live by feeding at this trough, and its billions more tacked on the national debt.
This administration excels whenever a calamity hits the news they can throw $X billion at it to "solve" it, most of which disappears in to corruption and the pockets of friends of the Republican party.
So instead they chose to hinder application developers, especially game developers, with two choices:
A. Design for DirectX 9 and not use any DirectX 10 specific feature B. Adopt DirectX 10 and abandon any potential customer not running Vista which will be more than half of their target market for a LOOOONGGGG time
If they opt for B, and I wager a future version of HALO will opt for B, then we can switch to hindering consumers. When the game they want to buy runs best on or requires DirectX 10, but unfortunately the consumer has 2000 or XP what do they do. There is a 50/50 chance the hardware they have wont run Vista or run it well. So at this point, to run a 50 dollar game the family has to buy at a minimum the Vista retail upgrade package, or worse a whole new computer.
I'm glad the DirectX engineers aren't hindered, because everyone else will be, you know like just all their customers.
It is a basic reality today, most consumers DON'T NEED Vista or new hardware to run a web browser, email and office apps. PC's have reached a level of power that is overkill for what most people use them for. 3D games are one of the few applications that are pushing new hardware and software sells for Microsoft and Dell. Therefor it follows that DirectX is the best avenue to compell Vista sales for Microsoft, and new hardware sales for manufacturers, especially for high end machines that have better profit margins. Since Microsoft controls a fair number of game titles they can try to use them to drive Vista upgrades, at the risk of alienating some customers from their game divisions. But then too a lot of gamers are fanatics for spending huge amounts of money on their computers and graphics cards
Kind of going off on a tangent but to illustrate your point, yesterday's Christian Science Monitor has an article on New Zealand's attitude towards Americans. In 2001 they had a 54% positive attitude towards America, today its 29%. They reference a case of an ex pat American teaching there whose filed a civil rights complaint because his students are openly hostile, and verbally abusive to him, because he is American. Similar double digit declines in America's popularity are found in Russia, Turkey and India. Pakistan approval rose slightly thanks to U.S. earthquake assistance. China also rose slightly presumably out of appreciation for giving them all of America's money.
Now most Americans probably don't think they are bad people or doing evil, but most of the world is thinking that U.S. is more the problem in today's world than the solution, especially thanks to Iraq and the incessant saber rattling by the Bush white house. A long source of friction with New Zealand was their ban of U.S. ships which are nuclear powered or carrying nuclear weapons. Most of the world no longer appreciates the value of nuclear weapons, the U.S. continues to develop new ones and threatens to use them to resolve every dispute. The U.S. has installed or propped up so many ruthless dictators in so many places that much of the world does in fact hate the U.S. but Americans are completely oblivious to the fact they are hated and why. They think they are champions of "freedom and democracy" in the world and do no wrong.
Spending a hundred billion to play with cats is why the public has no appreciation for the space program beyond launch, landing and disaster. You see that hundred plus billion in tax dollars is our money they are spending. It is our right to expect them to do something worthwhile with it, esoteric research with no practical application is not that. Zero G research which is only of value if they push on the next step is not that and many people will doubt they can manage the next step.
When Apollo started America was a rich nation flush with post World War II economic success because the U.S. was one of the few not destroyed in World War II. The U.S. could afford a grand stunt like Apollo and the spinoffs did make it worthwhile. There aren't many spin offs any more and the U.S. is the world's biggest debtor nation now. We can't afford Iraq, and we sure can't afford a couple billion to play with cats. Either NASA comes up with a mission that matters or they should probably pack it in. The return to the Moon is borderline because the Moon is a barren, boring place which is why we got bored with it last time.
Its not like you are paying for the coupons by buying the newspaper. The companies who make them should be delighted at the prospect of putting them online and making you use your expensive color printer ink to print them. They can easily rig and restrict them so you can't abuse them. They just overcharge the people without the coupons and make a slightly smaller profit on the people that do use them.
There must be some marketing rationale for coupons, but me personally I hate the whole idea, especially standing in line behind people who have a giant deck of them to waste time processing. People like you:) who are just using them to get discounts I'm not getting, because they were willing to dick with them and I'm not. Its not like the person in front of me is trying a product just because of the coupon, its just an enormously resource wasting way to make people think they are getting a bargain, well they are but it would be more efficient to just have reduced the price a few cents for everyone.
Um...two words....Jobs program.....two more words.....Texas and Florida......which happen to be the political power base of George and Jeb and winning votes in Florida was pretty important in 2000 and 2004. You could tack on Utah(SRB's and Orrin Hatch) and Mississippi (External Tank and Trent Lott) etc.
In case you hadn't noticed NASA's manned spaced program stopped being about space a long time ago. Whenever Congress debates NASA funding the #1 issue is what the impact will be on jobs in the districts and states of various politicians. When CRV and the return to the Moon ramp up the only priority for Congress is to insure all the current ISS and Shuttle jobs are preserved. The new NASA administrator would actually like a much cheaper, leaner and meaner manned space program than Shuttle and ISS. But if he cuts any of the pork Congress will slap him silly so he wont. Therefor return to the Moon will be staggeringly expensive, take forever, and fall way short of its goals just like 2 projects we know and love.
There is one overwhelming plus to internet news replacing newspapers. Manufacturing newsprint for newspapers is a single handed ecological disaster. Bowater, one of the biggest U.S. producers produced 2.7 million metric tons of newsprint in 2005. Trees the world over will breath a sigh of relief if the Internet replaces newspapers.
Now we just need to get rid of coal fired power plants to generate the electricity we need for our computers, and come up with readers that actually work as well as newspapers when you are on a subway commuting.
"We need a place to train the astronauts and test equipment and procedures."
Granted there are some useful things being done on ISS in this regard, none justify the price tag. ISS just isn't that great a place to practice for the trip to Mars or once you get there, neither is the Moon.
If you build a real prototype of the Mars vehicle and put it in an orbit where it has the same radiation issues, and has no resupply from Earth, etc I could see the value.
One thing about ISS that totally doesn't work for Mars is the dependence on ground control from Earth and on nearly instantaneous communication.
ISS is all practice, no do.
"To put one example, has anyone ever attempted surgery in microgravity?"
I seriously doubt you are going to be afforded the luxury of a functional hospital on a ship where space is at a premium, and I really doubt the odds would justify it. You would instead be thoroughly screening the astronauts before they go, and taking basic precautions like making them all get their appendix out. I could see maybe taking a doctor and having emergency facilities to deal with burns, cuts and broken bones. I can't see you doing heart surgery or cancer treatment in space. Yes you would need to get a hospital established on Mars as soon as you could manage it but that isn't zero G and I doubt medicine would be very different except for the extreme constraints on medical supplies.
As I said elsewhere most stupid wastage of money pales in comparison to Iraq, but when you have a finite amount of money to spend on research and development, whether it be in space or elsewhere, squandering over a hundred billion on a space station that doesn't do anything isn't really good either. Its not good to have to weigh which place your tax dollars is less stupid.
About the only thing Shuttle and ISS have done is keep on life support a manned aerospace industry and kept a small cadre of aerospace engineers employed, but its been such a waste of a life its not really drawing many new and promising people to aerospace. It was vividly illustrated that was the goal of the program when the U.S. hired Russia's aerospace engineers to keep them employed and out of trouble, though in fact they had real space station experience and their Mir derived designs are the core of the ISS.
I've often pondered what NASA would be like if the people there were given a subsistence base salary and really big incentives when they launch on or ahead of schedule, and accomplish their missions. When their are catastrophic failures there is a serious price to pay. I think NASA needs something like stock options in a startup so they have a motivation to succeed. The problem with the civil service is the pay is the same whether you succeed or not. During Apollo NASA was young and the people were driven to succeed because they were doing something amazing and that had never been done, so they didn't need motivators. Today they are doing nothing that hasn't been done before, and they have no real motivation to succeed which is why they fail.
"The ISS project is dying on it's backside without the shuttle"
What exactly is it the ISS is doing that makes it worth keeping alive, especially when its diverting billions of dollars from all those new things you list, so they mostly aren't happening?
Whenever people start lobbying in favor of the ISS I generally ask what has the ISS done that justifies the price tag, the zero G physiology research simply doesn't. The Russians did far more for far less on Mir, and still today the gist of it seems to be intensive exercise helps fight the effects of zero G. Not sure that really justifies a $100 billion price tag. I'm sure you can dig up some esoteric research done on the ISS but I assure you, you could could have gotten far better research spending the $100 billion elsewhere.
Someone also always says its crucial practice for taking the next step. With this I guess I can agree, it has been an invaluable lesson in how not to run a large space project.
"It may be harsh, but I would say that if they are trying to make space travel 100% safe"
This particular team is an institutionalized bureaucracy. Their pay is the same whether they fly or not. Not flying is substantially easier and safer. They are mostly just trying to preserve their jobs until CRV or some other program comes along to which they can all be transfered and which point CRV will become extraordinarily expensive jobs program with a poor track record.
There is actually somewhat greater job security in flying infrequently, and stretching out how long it takes to finish the ISS, because when they finish the 16 flights or whatever their careers are over unless their is a big new project to transfer to, i.e. CRV and the return to the Moon. They just have to be careful that they don't frustrate the politicians that pay them to the point they pull the plug on them prematurely. Not flying in the name of safety is the safest methodology.
The Shuttle payroll stays the same, yet their flight rate has reached a truly glacial pace since Columbia. I sure would be curious to see what the actual cost per flight has been for the last flight and this one. I'm guessing probably in the $5-10 billion range per flight, and these two missions have accomplished nothing beyond hauling supplies to the ISS which should have been done with a cheap, expendable booster. Though when we spend $8 billion a month on Iraq to no obvious good end, I guess $5 billion isn't so bad. But still, we spend so little money on space and technology(outside weapons) you are left wishing the dollars we do spend were spent more wisely than to just keep jobs going in Texas and Florida for political reasons. I assure you whenever NASA's budget comes up the jobs program it drives is way more important to the politicians that fund them than are what they actually accomplish which is why the manned program has a huge payroll and accomplished very little. NASA kind of needs to be like a corporation, where either you succeed or you go under. The way it is now they can fail and just keep failing.
The basic problem with our space program is their is no objective, there is no goal, there is nothing to reach where there will be celebration and a sense of accomplishment. At this point the objective is just to kind of keep the shuttle from another catastrophic failure and kind of half finish the ISS. At that point there is a 50/50 chance success will be declared and then they will have to figure out how to abandon the ISS safely since it sucks money out of more worthwhile endeavors, and does next to nothing useful.
At this point getting getting a life boat colony on Mars, mining asteroids, or finding a new energy source are the only objectives that really excite enough to justify manned presence.
Getting a permanent colony on Mars would be priceless. It would teach us a lot about ourselves and our society, compell innovation and give people who hunger for a frontier a place to go, and there are always people hungry for a frontier.
At the rate our exploding population is exhausting both mineral and energy resources on our home planet, starting to explore space alternatives would be worth doing though it will be a long time before they will be viable. When we start running out of minerals having asteroid mining proved will be priceless.
We are all sitting here dreaming of the day this guy is made CEO of Microsoft, can you imagine a Walmart cost cutter in charge of a tech company completely dependent on the quality and happiness of its workers. And here you are ridiculing the guy in public. Someone at Microsoft or some Wall Street analyst might read this, come to their senses and get someone good to be CEO or keep Ballmer. STFU!!!!!...:)
I'm guessing it didn't register with you I was being sarcastic and making a kind of joke.
If you recall history, as posted on slashdot, one or more computer companies have attempted to upgrade the FBI's computer systems under the code name Trilogy and Virtual Case Files. I believe SAIC and or CSC. Tens of millions were spent and the software developed was so bad last I remember it was never deployed, which is kind of standard for government contracted software development.
I wager the people at Google would do a wonderful job at instituting this system probably using off the shelf open source solutions. It kind of sounds like they need a good internal search engine, some blogs so agents can share information with one another, but unfortunately there are a lot of security issues that frustrate the free flow of information.
Now Google has no actual incentive to do this. Government contracting is for no talent companies like CSC, SAIC and EDS who make a living winning and screwing up government contracts, and in the process screw up our government. But on the other hand the FBI actually does need the brilliant people at Google to fix their screwed up information systems. If the FBI had computers and networks that worked they would have "connected the dots" before 9/11 and correlated the fact that there were multiple reports of Arab men in U.S. flight schools training to fly but not land airliners, one of whom, Mossaui was arrested a month before 9/11.
I was just dreaming of a fantasy world where Google fixed the government so it worked for a change, and they caught bad guys before they did bad things, but without turning the U.S. in to a police state. I've returned to reality now, where we are getting a police state and they probably still wont catch the bad guys before they do bad things.
"Actually, they are. Perhaps you don't read enough news. Or, maybe you think those organizations are small monoliths, restricting their members and activities to that area?"
The U.S. and Pakistan has made no viable effort in the tribal areas of Waziristan. Afghanistan and has turned it in to a narco-state thanks to the corruption of the U.S. supported government, and on the other hand a home for a resurgent Taliban. You see the U.S. backed government is so bad, the Taliban looks good by comparison. Rumsfeld's failed strategy of using the North Alliance on the ground and the U.S. in the air, scattered the Taliban and Al Qaeda. It did very little to actually catch or punish them.
" In it you list things the FBI should have done (which would have "stopped" 9/11), which is pretty much exactly what they're trying to do now."
You fail to grasp the concept. You see the FBI could have stopped 9/11 just using some basic police work and good communication, with the powers they had pre 9/11 and and pre patriot act. They don't need to spy on all Americans to catch Al Qaeda. The FISA courts worked fine the way they were, sure it was some paperwork but that is a small price to pay to prevent spying on innocent people.
What they are doing now is massive overkill and of dubious merit. It is in like making you take your shoes off to get on an airplane. It makes it seem like they are doing something when in fact they are just punishing innocent people to give those same people a false sense that they are doing something effective.
"They are buying data from the commercial sector and using it. This is spying how?"
Because they can and probably are correlating it with all the other data they have, much of which is illegally obtained like our phone call records, and evesdropping on our every form of communication without FISA warrants, probably illegally accessing our IRS records, sneak and peak searches which is basically the Patriot act authorizing the government to break and enter in to our homes and businesses withour our knowledge.
The cumulative effect is our government is accumulating vastly more information about us than they should. Knowledge is power and when our government can use computers and networks to accumulate all this information about us they are becoming enormously dangerous. If I could trust them that would be one thing, but Hoover and Nixon and all the bad things the CIA and FBI have done in the past when they started spying on America suggests they can't be trusted. It is inevitable all this spying will turn in to spying on dissidents, to suppress dissent, and smearing political opponents to suppress democracy, and to just suppress our right to free speech and right to privacy in general.
" (You don't think they would have discovered the Saudis learning to take off and not land without the "mining", do you?)"
Dude, the flight schools they were at reported them to the FBI because they were being suspicious. As I recall TWO different schools reported them in Arizona and I think Minnesota. THERE WASN'T ANY MINING INVOLVED. They ARRESTED Moussaoui a month before 9/11 because of it, and were holding him on a visa violation. The FBI could have foiled 9/11 with some basic police work but they didn't because they are an inept bureaucracy.
" How then do you suggest they determine those individuals that are doing suspicions things which might lead to another 9/11? "
Arab men in this country on visa's deserve more some scrutiny by default, since all the 9/11 attackers were Arab men and citizens of Middle Eastern countries and likely will be in the future. Unfortunately there is a degree of racial profiling there but, but its against people who aren't U.S. citizens and I am OK with that, that is a smaller price than trashing the civil liberties of citizens who have done nothing wrong nor will they.
You see you are presuming all this bullshit is actually going to foil th
If this has already been done, I'm wonder if maybe instead Google could straighten out all the fucked up computers at the FBI so they could communicate with each other and maybe stop the next 9/11 like they should have the first one when agents started getting reports of Arab men training to fly but not land airliners but they weren't talking to each other so....
Then maybe the U.S. wouldn't need to resorting to massively spying on everyone, torturing people, invading random countries, etc. to deal with this little terrorism problem.
If Google could do that instead of just "do no evil" they could make their motto "do good". Since/. seems to think Google is like God and can do anything, I think straightening out our messed up government, and nipping this police state in the bud, is a simple thing. If Google is concerned about being in the Chinese police state, what are they going to do if they let their home country turn in to one.
I'm not saying it WILL happen, I'm saying it is possible, and it is on the worst end of the scale of what is possible, especially if the CO2 levels reach the point a runaway greenhouse effect kicks in because we refuse to recognize the problem and spend the next couple centuries burning coal and oil shale like mad. Like I said anyone who says they know for sure what will and wont happen is full of shit, YOU INCLUDED. There are a range of possibilities here and all we can do now is lay odds.
In case you didn't realize it the vast majority of the world lives on coastlines and a 20 foot rise in sea level which is quite possible will destroy life as we know it. Category 5 and maybe even category 6 hurricanes will pulverize some of those same coastal regions. Massive changes in weather patterns may completely disrupt agriculture which means lots of people could starve. Maybe we will end up with more arable land, maybe less, YOU DON'T KNOW. Species that can migrate, like ocean fish and birds can cope within reason, species that have limited ranges probably wont and may go extinct. Polar bears are already in deep trouble due to the disappearance of the polar ice cap.
Severe global warming, if it happens, will change life as we know it and could well destroy life as we know it.
Brazil is making massive and intelligent use of sugar cane can to produce ethanol and are really using it in their cars on a large scale. I'm not commenting on anything else their society is doing but their ethanol program is a shining light to the rest of the world on how to ditch your dependence on fossil fuels. Iceland is likewise using the resource they have to solve the problem and eliminate dependence on the fossil fuel crack dealers.
I was contrasting Brazil with the U.S. which is subsidizing a massive and largely inviable campaign to turn corn in to Ethanol. The problem being it takes almost as much energy, or maybe even slightly more, to cook corn in to Ethanol than the energy you get out of it. Most places in the U.S. producing it are burning fossil fuels one way or another to produce it and its not really gaining us anything other than a massive subsidy to Midwestern corn farmers who have a powerful political lobby. Turning sugar cane in to ethanol is by contrast something like 7 times more efficient. You actually do get a renewable energy source out of sugar cane and Brazil is rapidly shedding its dependence on imported oil, and reducing the trade deficit hit that comes with that, as a result.
It would be possible to use this kind of mining to catch someone buying a ton of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, some plastic barrels, and diesel fuel. You might catch an Al Qaeda terrorist or a Tim McVeigh preparing a very large bomb, or you might net about a million farmers. Presumably your data mining would use other information sources to narrow the focus to Arab Muslims who are either terrorists or farmers. Of course when you do that you would let all the Tim McVeigh's out of your net. Maybe you can factor in Ryder truck rentals to get them back in the net, so the query is:
I don't know about anyone else, but I would really prefer the government stop spying on all Americans in a mostly futile effort to catch a relatively small number of Muslim extremists. I would prefer the government had focused on dismantling Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, since they were actually responsible for 9/11 and are still mostly not held to account. I would have preferred they hadn't gone off on a tangent and off the deep end in Iraq and in spying in the U.S. For example it is insane to make everyone take off their shoes in airports, from now on, because one guy put some explosives in his shoes once and it didn't even work. People on airplanes will freak if they see someone try to light their shows now so I'm not very worried about this vector of attack. It was insane to create a concentration camp in Gitmo, and it is really insane to snatch up innocent people with Rendition, endorse the use of torture, and dismantle due process all of which have permanently tarnished the U.S. in the eyes of the world and made many Americans ashamed.
I can probably live with the FBI focusing some attention on Arab Muslim men who are in this country on visa's of one and if they are doing things that are suspicious, get a FISA warrant and spy the hell out of them. FISA warrants are almost never denied and at least there would be some restraint on the spying. All the spying that is going on has NO restraints on it, and is ripe for and probably is being abused.
Sure its possible another 9/11 plot slips through the cracks, but its a smaller price to pay than the one we are paying by turning the U.S. in to a police state, reviled by the rest of the world, and that is what we are getting. Even worse we are getting a police state that can make extensive use of computers and networks to create a police state that is more all knowing and all seeing than any in history. And it is a police state with nukes, lots and lots of nukes, and the most powerful military in world history(though it still can't control the streets of Baghdad).
A new 9/11 plot might kill some people but the war in Iraq has killed far more people than 9/11 did and in a year or so it will have killed more Americans than 9/11 did, having passed the 2500 mark this week. A new 9/11 plot might cause a lot of economic damage like the first, but the war in Iraq is heading towards the half trillion dollar mark, we are spending more there every month than we spent during the height of Vietnam(adjusted for inflation) and Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. American should have whacked Al Qaeda after 9/11, and then laughed in their face and said we aren't going to play your game, we are going to be an even better and freer country than before and do some things that would make a real difference in the world, and in the eyes of Muslims, like resolve the mess in Israel.
All I'm saying is:
Dear Government, Please stop being insane, Please stop spying on me, Please stop wasting all my tax dollars and borrowing my country in to a hole it will never get out of. Please stop making the rest of the world completely hate America and Americans. I like the rest of the world and I would like them to like me. The fewer people who hate America, the fewer people there are who will want to blow it up. Please FBI keep an eye on Ara
It is impossible to tell just how bad the labs under the control of the University of California are or aren't. Its murky since its hard for anyone to peer inside high security facilities because thats what security clearance are for. Also much of the information coming out of them in recent years may be the Bush administration intentionally trying to make them look bad because they want to transfer their control to Republican friendly contractors or the University of Texas to pump billions of dollars in to his home state.
"administration-pleasing junk science and "imaginary weapons""
Unfortunately this is what you get out of governments whose top priority is delivering pork to contractors who happen to be big political supporters of the people in power (like Bechtel and Lockheed Martin). This is a disease that predates the Bush administration by a long ways, but the current administration has just taken it to new and breathtaking levels. Not sure the Bush administration really cares if it gets anything for the money, they are just delivering large quantities of our tax dollars or borrowed dollars(our deficit) in to the pockets of their friends. It has an important added political benefit of creating artificial stimulus in the economy and jobs by pumping large amounts of money and profit in to the private sector, and it makes the U.S. economy look a lot better than it is. The U.S. economy is becoming massively dependent on government spending since its one of the few parts of the U.S. economy that isn't being crated up and shipped to China and India. This massive government intervention in the economy used to be referred to as either Socialism (under FDR) or more like Fascism today. Its sad to see how the Republican's have tarnished the name Conservative. There is nothing conservative about them any more unless you qualify it with Social Conservative. Political and fiscal conservatives are for limiting government power, size and spending and that is the antithesis of today's Republican party so they are aghast at today's Republican party. Someone should make them, Limbaugh and Colter stop claiming the title, Fascist is a lot more accurate term its just a taboo term since World War II. Conservative != Fascist so stop claiming to be conservatives, you aren't.
The national labs, DOD weapons programs and satellite manufacturing are GREAT places to pump money in to the pockets of your friends because you can use the high security clearance, and "state secret privilege" to crush any oversight that might catch some of the fraud, waste, abuse and incompetence. A subset of Congress is the only body that can provide oversight but.....
There is an intereting article on the Christian Science Monitor today about Congress's feeble efforts to restore legal and financial oversight on the Bush administration and the DOD. I didn't realize it till this article but when the Republican's gained power in 1995 one of the first things they did in the House Armed Services Committee was disband the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. This subcommittee's role was to reign in the fraud, waste and abuse in the Pentagon. It was like they fired the last cop in town, and created open season for thieves. It is now quite clear why there is such rampant corruption in the DOD now. There is NO real Congressional oversight to stop it.
Harry Truman rose to prominence with the "Truman Committee" which basically performed this role during World War II and saved the country billions in fraud, waste and abuse.
Its a basic problem in the current government that the Bush administration and DOD is running amuck using 9/11 as an excuse and since they have control of all branches of the government there is NO oversight of anything going on. Congress has abdicated so much power to the Executive branch we really are teetering on the edge of a term limited dictatorship.
As a result we get Duke Cunningham, satellite programs billions
First off I'm of the opinion that anyone claims they know beyond a doubt global warming is really here to stay, and that is caused man vaa CO2 is full of shit. Likewise anyone that denies it is equally full of shit. At this point it is all speculation and probably will be until its too late to stop it it turned out it is happening, it will destroy life as we know it and it was our fault. One thing for sure though is most of the people denying the possibility are people making money off fossil fuels or are friends of the same, this guy included.
"then we're going to spend some incomprehensible number of dollars reducing our CO2 output over the next 100 years for no gain"
In the process of reducing CO2 output you would get some HUGE gains that we really need anyway.
First off we need to either stop burning coal or seriously clean it up. It is abundant but it spews lots of crap in to the air that we don't want there, especially nitrous oxides, sulfur dioxide, and the worst, traces of mercury, arsenic and uranium. There is Clean Coal power plant called FutureGen being touted by the Coal industry and the Bush administration to cure all this but its 10 years down the road and may or may not work. In some respects it is a propaganda tool, constantly being advertised on TV these days to make coal sound clean while the U.S. builds a bunch of new Unclean coal power plants. The huge dependence on coal fired power plants in the U.S. and China are an undisputed ecological disaster already, CO2 or not. If CO2 is a global warming factor then coal fired power plants are the worst culprit. Not to mention that in many places the process of mining coal means taking the tops off whole mountains, and maybe planting some nice grass when you are done.
Second, we need to stop being completely dependent on oil and natural gas. They are in finite supply, unless maybe you resort to oil shale which is not an ideal solution. Persistent short supply is why prices are so high now, and its likely to just get more expensive as India and China increase their use of them. Someday they are going to run out anyway. Most of the supplies are in countries with regimes that you really don't want to be sending all your money to, and by sending all your money there you are contributing to huge and unsupportable trade deficits in the U.S. China is working really hard to lock up the dwindling oil supplies in long term contracts so they don't run out while the U.S. does.
Places like Brazil and Iceland are already far along on eliminating their dependence on fossil fuels and it has proved nothing but beneficial to them and their economies. Really the only people who are trying to con you about the staggering costs of abandoning our dependence on fossil fuels are people who are SELLING fossil fuels, Exxon/Mobile being the propaganda leader. At current oil and natural gas prices just about every alternative is cheaper. It should be noted that oil doesn't cost anything close to $70 a barrel to produce. More than 50% of the current price is going in to pockets of oil producing countries, oil companies and oil market speculators.
We really should put some big taxes on oil to make it so expensive that every alternative would be cheaper and to make oil cost what it really costs the U.S. In particular in the last century the U.S. has spent vast sums on military adventures that were, whether you like it or not, to protect and control oil supplies. The U.S. toppled the government of Iran with T.K. Ultra and installed the Shah to gain control of Iranian oil. This was all well and good except the Iranian people hated the shah and by the time they overthrew him they hated the U.S. too so they took a bunch of Americans hostage for 444 days because of what T.K. Ultra wrought. There is an extremist regime in Iran today, and there is a perpetual crisis between the U.S. and Iran, as a direct result of U.S. meddling there to control oil. Of course Gulf War I and II were both
I guess it depends on your definition. My take is package managers are mostly for installing binary packages coming from prebuilt repositories.
Gentoo in its purest form, and from its original inception, is just an automation tool to download source from wherever it comes, configure, compile and install it. All its doing is is the same thing you would do if you were to build a Linux system by hand. It does, out of necessity, do dependencies but that is the only thing very close to a package manager in portage.
If Gentoo craters you can simply create new ebuilds to grab new source for the things you want to continue to update. You would have to flush out Gentoo's patches but I'm pretty sure I could live without them. I really like the idea of just building Linux from all the original source providers without the distro middleman, since unfortunately the distro middlemen have proved to be consistently unreliable, untrustworthy(Red Hat) or badly paced(Debian), and there are simply to many of them. Its certainly not an approach for someone who just wants to slap in a CD and hit install, but if you are admin'ing any number of machines its a wonderful approach since you have serious control over your own destiny.
"But for a pay-per-download type service, this would mean each provider would need a local server"
Not really, you would just have to have a payment mechanism from whomever is running the caches to the original content provider, with the cache provider getting a small percentage of the take. Its not a model very different from iTunes, except that its very distributed.
Me being a Gentoo user, what's a package manager? I ditched Red Hat when they stuck a knife in Red Hat 7, 8 and 9 which was right after I'd subscribed to their subscription update service for same, rendering it worthless, and never had a conflict since nor have I had to go searching for something in 5 different repositories.
Gentoo certainly isn't for everyone but I REALLY like being able to just update stuff when I want to update stuff, and not get locked in to some distro's arbitrary release cycle. It really just doesn't even register with me why people would put up with having to obsess over things like FC3, FC4 or FC5.
I just compile and build new versions of stuff when emerge says they are there and I want them, It really is such a liberating experience. If Gentoo were to go tits up I could keep selectively updating my computer without them. If Red Hat sticks a knife in Fedora someday, or Ubuntu craters, not sure you could say the same about all your Fedora or Ubuntu machines.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot:
- contracts and contractors
I assure you CSC, EDS, IBM, Lockheed Martin etc are warming up their proposal teams because there will probably be billions spent on about a hundred contracts, or addendums to existing contracts, in a hundred agencies to do this. Its not like you can do it once and have every agency use the same setup, every agency will reinvent the wheel themselves, some will work, some wont, all will cost lots of tax dollars to implement and run, and its money pouring in to the pockets of big companies who live by feeding at this trough, and its billions more tacked on the national debt.
This administration excels whenever a calamity hits the news they can throw $X billion at it to "solve" it, most of which disappears in to corruption and the pockets of friends of the Republican party.
" The designers chose to not be hindered"
So instead they chose to hinder application developers, especially game developers, with two choices:
A. Design for DirectX 9 and not use any DirectX 10 specific feature
B. Adopt DirectX 10 and abandon any potential customer not running Vista which will be more than half of their target market for a LOOOONGGGG time
If they opt for B, and I wager a future version of HALO will opt for B, then we can switch to hindering consumers. When the game they want to buy runs best on or requires DirectX 10, but unfortunately the consumer has 2000 or XP what do they do. There is a 50/50 chance the hardware they have wont run Vista or run it well. So at this point, to run a 50 dollar game the family has to buy at a minimum the Vista retail upgrade package, or worse a whole new computer.
I'm glad the DirectX engineers aren't hindered, because everyone else will be, you know like just all their customers.
It is a basic reality today, most consumers DON'T NEED Vista or new hardware to run a web browser, email and office apps. PC's have reached a level of power that is overkill for what most people use them for. 3D games are one of the few applications that are pushing new hardware and software sells for Microsoft and Dell. Therefor it follows that DirectX is the best avenue to compell Vista sales for Microsoft, and new hardware sales for manufacturers, especially for high end machines that have better profit margins. Since Microsoft controls a fair number of game titles they can try to use them to drive Vista upgrades, at the risk of alienating some customers from their game divisions. But then too a lot of gamers are fanatics for spending huge amounts of money on their computers and graphics cards
Ron is also the better choice because he reads and posts on Slashdot even if it is an AC. Thanks for sharing your take on this with us Ron :)
Kind of going off on a tangent but to illustrate your point, yesterday's Christian Science Monitor has an article on New Zealand's attitude towards Americans. In 2001 they had a 54% positive attitude towards America, today its 29%. They reference a case of an ex pat American teaching there whose filed a civil rights complaint because his students are openly hostile, and verbally abusive to him, because he is American. Similar double digit declines in America's popularity are found in Russia, Turkey and India. Pakistan approval rose slightly thanks to U.S. earthquake assistance. China also rose slightly presumably out of appreciation for giving them all of America's money.
Now most Americans probably don't think they are bad people or doing evil, but most of the world is thinking that U.S. is more the problem in today's world than the solution, especially thanks to Iraq and the incessant saber rattling by the Bush white house. A long source of friction with New Zealand was their ban of U.S. ships which are nuclear powered or carrying nuclear weapons. Most of the world no longer appreciates the value of nuclear weapons, the U.S. continues to develop new ones and threatens to use them to resolve every dispute. The U.S. has installed or propped up so many ruthless dictators in so many places that much of the world does in fact hate the U.S. but Americans are completely oblivious to the fact they are hated and why. They think they are champions of "freedom and democracy" in the world and do no wrong.
Spending a hundred billion to play with cats is why the public has no appreciation for the space program beyond launch, landing and disaster. You see that hundred plus billion in tax dollars is our money they are spending. It is our right to expect them to do something worthwhile with it, esoteric research with no practical application is not that. Zero G research which is only of value if they push on the next step is not that and many people will doubt they can manage the next step.
When Apollo started America was a rich nation flush with post World War II economic success because the U.S. was one of the few not destroyed in World War II. The U.S. could afford a grand stunt like Apollo and the spinoffs did make it worthwhile. There aren't many spin offs any more and the U.S. is the world's biggest debtor nation now. We can't afford Iraq, and we sure can't afford a couple billion to play with cats. Either NASA comes up with a mission that matters or they should probably pack it in. The return to the Moon is borderline because the Moon is a barren, boring place which is why we got bored with it last time.
-- Ed
Its not like you are paying for the coupons by buying the newspaper. The companies who make them should be delighted at the prospect of putting them online and making you use your expensive color printer ink to print them. They can easily rig and restrict them so you can't abuse them. They just overcharge the people without the coupons and make a slightly smaller profit on the people that do use them.
:) who are just using them to get discounts I'm not getting, because they were willing to dick with them and I'm not. Its not like the person in front of me is trying a product just because of the coupon, its just an enormously resource wasting way to make people think they are getting a bargain, well they are but it would be more efficient to just have reduced the price a few cents for everyone.
There must be some marketing rationale for coupons, but me personally I hate the whole idea, especially standing in line behind people who have a giant deck of them to waste time processing. People like you
Um...two words....Jobs program.....two more words.....Texas and Florida... ...which happen to be the political power base of George and Jeb and winning votes in Florida was pretty important in 2000 and 2004. You could tack on Utah(SRB's and Orrin Hatch) and Mississippi (External Tank and Trent Lott) etc.
In case you hadn't noticed NASA's manned spaced program stopped being about space a long time ago. Whenever Congress debates NASA funding the #1 issue is what the impact will be on jobs in the districts and states of various politicians. When CRV and the return to the Moon ramp up the only priority for Congress is to insure all the current ISS and Shuttle jobs are preserved. The new NASA administrator would actually like a much cheaper, leaner and meaner manned space program than Shuttle and ISS. But if he cuts any of the pork Congress will slap him silly so he wont. Therefor return to the Moon will be staggeringly expensive, take forever, and fall way short of its goals just like 2 projects we know and love.
There is one overwhelming plus to internet news replacing newspapers. Manufacturing newsprint for newspapers is a single handed ecological disaster. Bowater, one of the biggest U.S. producers produced 2.7 million metric tons of newsprint in 2005. Trees the world over will breath a sigh of relief if the Internet replaces newspapers.
Now we just need to get rid of coal fired power plants to generate the electricity we need for our computers, and come up with readers that actually work as well as newspapers when you are on a subway commuting.
"We need a place to train the astronauts and test equipment and procedures."
Granted there are some useful things being done on ISS in this regard, none justify the price tag. ISS just isn't that great a place to practice for the trip to Mars or once you get there, neither is the Moon.
If you build a real prototype of the Mars vehicle and put it in an orbit where it has the same radiation issues, and has no resupply from Earth, etc I could see the value.
One thing about ISS that totally doesn't work for Mars is the dependence on ground control from Earth and on nearly instantaneous communication.
ISS is all practice, no do.
"To put one example, has anyone ever attempted surgery in microgravity?"
I seriously doubt you are going to be afforded the luxury of a functional hospital on a ship where space is at a premium, and I really doubt the odds would justify it. You would instead be thoroughly screening the astronauts before they go, and taking basic precautions like making them all get their appendix out. I could see maybe taking a doctor and having emergency facilities to deal with burns, cuts and broken bones. I can't see you doing heart surgery or cancer treatment in space. Yes you would need to get a hospital established on Mars as soon as you could manage it but that isn't zero G and I doubt medicine would be very different except for the extreme constraints on medical supplies.
"... is near to impossible"
Declaring stuff impossible isn't the kind of attitude you need to do hard things.
Two words.... Space elevator.
As I said elsewhere most stupid wastage of money pales in comparison to Iraq, but when you have a finite amount of money to spend on research and development, whether it be in space or elsewhere, squandering over a hundred billion on a space station that doesn't do anything isn't really good either. Its not good to have to weigh which place your tax dollars is less stupid.
About the only thing Shuttle and ISS have done is keep on life support a manned aerospace industry and kept a small cadre of aerospace engineers employed, but its been such a waste of a life its not really drawing many new and promising people to aerospace. It was vividly illustrated that was the goal of the program when the U.S. hired Russia's aerospace engineers to keep them employed and out of trouble, though in fact they had real space station experience and their Mir derived designs are the core of the ISS.
I've often pondered what NASA would be like if the people there were given a subsistence base salary and really big incentives when they launch on or ahead of schedule, and accomplish their missions. When their are catastrophic failures there is a serious price to pay. I think NASA needs something like stock options in a startup so they have a motivation to succeed. The problem with the civil service is the pay is the same whether you succeed or not. During Apollo NASA was young and the people were driven to succeed because they were doing something amazing and that had never been done, so they didn't need motivators. Today they are doing nothing that hasn't been done before, and they have no real motivation to succeed which is why they fail.
"The ISS project is dying on it's backside without the shuttle"
What exactly is it the ISS is doing that makes it worth keeping alive, especially when its diverting billions of dollars from all those new things you list, so they mostly aren't happening?
Whenever people start lobbying in favor of the ISS I generally ask what has the ISS done that justifies the price tag, the zero G physiology research simply doesn't. The Russians did far more for far less on Mir, and still today the gist of it seems to be intensive exercise helps fight the effects of zero G. Not sure that really justifies a $100 billion price tag. I'm sure you can dig up some esoteric research done on the ISS but I assure you, you could could have gotten far better research spending the $100 billion elsewhere.
Someone also always says its crucial practice for taking the next step. With this I guess I can agree, it has been an invaluable lesson in how not to run a large space project.
"It may be harsh, but I would say that if they are trying to make space travel 100% safe"
This particular team is an institutionalized bureaucracy. Their pay is the same whether they fly or not. Not flying is substantially easier and safer. They are mostly just trying to preserve their jobs until CRV or some other program comes along to which they can all be transfered and which point CRV will become extraordinarily expensive jobs program with a poor track record.
There is actually somewhat greater job security in flying infrequently, and stretching out how long it takes to finish the ISS, because when they finish the 16 flights or whatever their careers are over unless their is a big new project to transfer to, i.e. CRV and the return to the Moon. They just have to be careful that they don't frustrate the politicians that pay them to the point they pull the plug on them prematurely. Not flying in the name of safety is the safest methodology.
The Shuttle payroll stays the same, yet their flight rate has reached a truly glacial pace since Columbia. I sure would be curious to see what the actual cost per flight has been for the last flight and this one. I'm guessing probably in the $5-10 billion range per flight, and these two missions have accomplished nothing beyond hauling supplies to the ISS which should have been done with a cheap, expendable booster. Though when we spend $8 billion a month on Iraq to no obvious good end, I guess $5 billion isn't so bad. But still, we spend so little money on space and technology(outside weapons) you are left wishing the dollars we do spend were spent more wisely than to just keep jobs going in Texas and Florida for political reasons. I assure you whenever NASA's budget comes up the jobs program it drives is way more important to the politicians that fund them than are what they actually accomplish which is why the manned program has a huge payroll and accomplished very little. NASA kind of needs to be like a corporation, where either you succeed or you go under. The way it is now they can fail and just keep failing.
The basic problem with our space program is their is no objective, there is no goal, there is nothing to reach where there will be celebration and a sense of accomplishment. At this point the objective is just to kind of keep the shuttle from another catastrophic failure and kind of half finish the ISS. At that point there is a 50/50 chance success will be declared and then they will have to figure out how to abandon the ISS safely since it sucks money out of more worthwhile endeavors, and does next to nothing useful.
At this point getting getting a life boat colony on Mars, mining asteroids, or finding a new energy source are the only objectives that really excite enough to justify manned presence.
Getting a permanent colony on Mars would be priceless. It would teach us a lot about ourselves and our society, compell innovation and give people who hunger for a frontier a place to go, and there are always people hungry for a frontier.
At the rate our exploding population is exhausting both mineral and energy resources on our home planet, starting to explore space alternatives would be worth doing though it will be a long time before they will be viable. When we start running out of minerals having asteroid mining proved will be priceless.
Shhhhhhhhhh.
... :)
We are all sitting here dreaming of the day this guy is made CEO of Microsoft, can you imagine a Walmart cost cutter in charge of a tech company completely dependent on the quality and happiness of its workers. And here you are ridiculing the guy in public. Someone at Microsoft or some Wall Street analyst might read this, come to their senses and get someone good to be CEO or keep Ballmer. STFU!!!!!
"who the hell modded you insightful?"
I'm guessing it didn't register with you I was being sarcastic and making a kind of joke.
If you recall history, as posted on slashdot, one or more computer companies have attempted to upgrade the FBI's computer systems under the code name Trilogy and Virtual Case Files. I believe SAIC and or CSC. Tens of millions were spent and the software developed was so bad last I remember it was never deployed, which is kind of standard for government contracted software development.
I wager the people at Google would do a wonderful job at instituting this system probably using off the shelf open source solutions. It kind of sounds like they need a good internal search engine, some blogs so agents can share information with one another, but unfortunately there are a lot of security issues that frustrate the free flow of information.
Now Google has no actual incentive to do this. Government contracting is for no talent companies like CSC, SAIC and EDS who make a living winning and screwing up government contracts, and in the process screw up our government. But on the other hand the FBI actually does need the brilliant people at Google to fix their screwed up information systems. If the FBI had computers and networks that worked they would have "connected the dots" before 9/11 and correlated the fact that there were multiple reports of Arab men in U.S. flight schools training to fly but not land airliners, one of whom, Mossaui was arrested a month before 9/11.
I was just dreaming of a fantasy world where Google fixed the government so it worked for a change, and they caught bad guys before they did bad things, but without turning the U.S. in to a police state. I've returned to reality now, where we are getting a police state and they probably still wont catch the bad guys before they do bad things.
"Actually, they are. Perhaps you don't read enough news. Or, maybe you think those organizations are small monoliths, restricting their members and activities to that area?"
The U.S. and Pakistan has made no viable effort in the tribal areas of Waziristan. Afghanistan and has turned it in to a narco-state thanks to the corruption of the U.S. supported government, and on the other hand a home for a resurgent Taliban. You see the U.S. backed government is so bad, the Taliban looks good by comparison. Rumsfeld's failed strategy of using the North Alliance on the ground and the U.S. in the air, scattered the Taliban and Al Qaeda. It did very little to actually catch or punish them.
" In it you list things the FBI should have done (which would have "stopped" 9/11), which is pretty much exactly what they're trying to do now."
You fail to grasp the concept. You see the FBI could have stopped 9/11 just using some basic police work and good communication, with the powers they had pre 9/11 and and pre patriot act. They don't need to spy on all Americans to catch Al Qaeda. The FISA courts worked fine the way they were, sure it was some paperwork but that is a small price to pay to prevent spying on innocent people.
What they are doing now is massive overkill and of dubious merit. It is in like making you take your shoes off to get on an airplane. It makes it seem like they are doing something when in fact they are just punishing innocent people to give those same people a false sense that they are doing something effective.
"They are buying data from the commercial sector and using it. This is spying how?"
Because they can and probably are correlating it with all the other data they have, much of which is illegally obtained like our phone call records, and evesdropping on our every form of communication without FISA warrants, probably illegally accessing our IRS records, sneak and peak searches which is basically the Patriot act authorizing the government to break and enter in to our homes and businesses withour our knowledge.
The cumulative effect is our government is accumulating vastly more information about us than they should. Knowledge is power and when our government can use computers and networks to accumulate all this information about us they are becoming enormously dangerous. If I could trust them that would be one thing, but Hoover and Nixon and all the bad things the CIA and FBI have done in the past when they started spying on America suggests they can't be trusted. It is inevitable all this spying will turn in to spying on dissidents, to suppress dissent, and smearing political opponents to suppress democracy, and to just suppress our right to free speech and right to privacy in general.
" (You don't think they would have discovered the Saudis learning to take off and not land without the "mining", do you?)"
Dude, the flight schools they were at reported them to the FBI because they were being suspicious. As I recall TWO different schools reported them in Arizona and I think Minnesota. THERE WASN'T ANY MINING INVOLVED. They ARRESTED Moussaoui a month before 9/11 because of it, and were holding him on a visa violation. The FBI could have foiled 9/11 with some basic police work but they didn't because they are an inept bureaucracy.
" How then do you suggest they determine those individuals that are doing suspicions things which might lead to another 9/11? "
Arab men in this country on visa's deserve more some scrutiny by default, since all the 9/11 attackers were Arab men and citizens of Middle Eastern countries and likely will be in the future. Unfortunately there is a degree of racial profiling there but, but its against people who aren't U.S. citizens and I am OK with that, that is a smaller price than trashing the civil liberties of citizens who have done nothing wrong nor will they.
You see you are presuming all this bullshit is actually going to foil th
If this has already been done, I'm wonder if maybe instead Google could straighten out all the fucked up computers at the FBI so they could communicate with each other and maybe stop the next 9/11 like they should have the first one when agents started getting reports of Arab men training to fly but not land airliners but they weren't talking to each other so....
/. seems to think Google is like God and can do anything, I think straightening out our messed up government, and nipping this police state in the bud, is a simple thing. If Google is concerned about being in the Chinese police state, what are they going to do if they let their home country turn in to one.
Then maybe the U.S. wouldn't need to resorting to massively spying on everyone, torturing people, invading random countries, etc. to deal with this little terrorism problem.
If Google could do that instead of just "do no evil" they could make their motto "do good". Since
Go Google!!!
I'm not saying it WILL happen, I'm saying it is possible, and it is on the worst end of the scale of what is possible, especially if the CO2 levels reach the point a runaway greenhouse effect kicks in because we refuse to recognize the problem and spend the next couple centuries burning coal and oil shale like mad. Like I said anyone who says they know for sure what will and wont happen is full of shit, YOU INCLUDED. There are a range of possibilities here and all we can do now is lay odds.
In case you didn't realize it the vast majority of the world lives on coastlines and a 20 foot rise in sea level which is quite possible will destroy life as we know it. Category 5 and maybe even category 6 hurricanes will pulverize some of those same coastal regions. Massive changes in weather patterns may completely disrupt agriculture which means lots of people could starve. Maybe we will end up with more arable land, maybe less, YOU DON'T KNOW. Species that can migrate, like ocean fish and birds can cope within reason, species that have limited ranges probably wont and may go extinct. Polar bears are already in deep trouble due to the disappearance of the polar ice cap.
Severe global warming, if it happens, will change life as we know it and could well destroy life as we know it.
Brazil is making massive and intelligent use of sugar cane can to produce ethanol and are really using it in their cars on a large scale. I'm not commenting on anything else their society is doing but their ethanol program is a shining light to the rest of the world on how to ditch your dependence on fossil fuels. Iceland is likewise using the resource they have to solve the problem and eliminate dependence on the fossil fuel crack dealers.
I was contrasting Brazil with the U.S. which is subsidizing a massive and largely inviable campaign to turn corn in to Ethanol. The problem being it takes almost as much energy, or maybe even slightly more, to cook corn in to Ethanol than the energy you get out of it. Most places in the U.S. producing it are burning fossil fuels one way or another to produce it and its not really gaining us anything other than a massive subsidy to Midwestern corn farmers who have a powerful political lobby. Turning sugar cane in to ethanol is by contrast something like 7 times more efficient. You actually do get a renewable energy source out of sugar cane and Brazil is rapidly shedding its dependence on imported oil, and reducing the trade deficit hit that comes with that, as a result.
It would be possible to use this kind of mining to catch someone buying a ton of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, some plastic barrels, and diesel fuel. You might catch an Al Qaeda terrorist or a Tim McVeigh preparing a very large bomb, or you might net about a million farmers. Presumably your data mining would use other information sources to narrow the focus to Arab Muslims who are either terrorists or farmers. Of course when you do that you would let all the Tim McVeigh's out of your net. Maybe you can factor in Ryder truck rentals to get them back in the net, so the query is:
Ammonium Nitrate && barrels && diesel && (Arab Muslim || Ryder truck rental)
I don't know about anyone else, but I would really prefer the government stop spying on all Americans in a mostly futile effort to catch a relatively small number of Muslim extremists. I would prefer the government had focused on dismantling Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, since they were actually responsible for 9/11 and are still mostly not held to account. I would have preferred they hadn't gone off on a tangent and off the deep end in Iraq and in spying in the U.S. For example it is insane to make everyone take off their shoes in airports, from now on, because one guy put some explosives in his shoes once and it didn't even work. People on airplanes will freak if they see someone try to light their shows now so I'm not very worried about this vector of attack. It was insane to create a concentration camp in Gitmo, and it is really insane to snatch up innocent people with Rendition, endorse the use of torture, and dismantle due process all of which have permanently tarnished the U.S. in the eyes of the world and made many Americans ashamed.
I can probably live with the FBI focusing some attention on Arab Muslim men who are in this country on visa's of one and if they are doing things that are suspicious, get a FISA warrant and spy the hell out of them. FISA warrants are almost never denied and at least there would be some restraint on the spying. All the spying that is going on has NO restraints on it, and is ripe for and probably is being abused.
Sure its possible another 9/11 plot slips through the cracks, but its a smaller price to pay than the one we are paying by turning the U.S. in to a police state, reviled by the rest of the world, and that is what we are getting. Even worse we are getting a police state that can make extensive use of computers and networks to create a police state that is more all knowing and all seeing than any in history. And it is a police state with nukes, lots and lots of nukes, and the most powerful military in world history(though it still can't control the streets of Baghdad).
A new 9/11 plot might kill some people but the war in Iraq has killed far more people than 9/11 did and in a year or so it will have killed more Americans than 9/11 did, having passed the 2500 mark this week. A new 9/11 plot might cause a lot of economic damage like the first, but the war in Iraq is heading towards the half trillion dollar mark, we are spending more there every month than we spent during the height of Vietnam(adjusted for inflation) and Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. American should have whacked Al Qaeda after 9/11, and then laughed in their face and said we aren't going to play your game, we are going to be an even better and freer country than before and do some things that would make a real difference in the world, and in the eyes of Muslims, like resolve the mess in Israel.
All I'm saying is:
Dear Government, Please stop being insane, Please stop spying on me, Please stop wasting all my tax dollars and borrowing my country in to a hole it will never get out of. Please stop making the rest of the world completely hate America and Americans. I like the rest of the world and I would like them to like me. The fewer people who hate America, the fewer people there are who will want to blow it up. Please FBI keep an eye on Ara
It is impossible to tell just how bad the labs under the control of the University of California are or aren't. Its murky since its hard for anyone to peer inside high security facilities because thats what security clearance are for. Also much of the information coming out of them in recent years may be the Bush administration intentionally trying to make them look bad because they want to transfer their control to Republican friendly contractors or the University of Texas to pump billions of dollars in to his home state.
"administration-pleasing junk science and "imaginary weapons""
Unfortunately this is what you get out of governments whose top priority is delivering pork to contractors who happen to be big political supporters of the people in power (like Bechtel and Lockheed Martin). This is a disease that predates the Bush administration by a long ways, but the current administration has just taken it to new and breathtaking levels. Not sure the Bush administration really cares if it gets anything for the money, they are just delivering large quantities of our tax dollars or borrowed dollars(our deficit) in to the pockets of their friends. It has an important added political benefit of creating artificial stimulus in the economy and jobs by pumping large amounts of money and profit in to the private sector, and it makes the U.S. economy look a lot better than it is. The U.S. economy is becoming massively dependent on government spending since its one of the few parts of the U.S. economy that isn't being crated up and shipped to China and India. This massive government intervention in the economy used to be referred to as either Socialism (under FDR) or more like Fascism today. Its sad to see how the Republican's have tarnished the name Conservative. There is nothing conservative about them any more unless you qualify it with Social Conservative. Political and fiscal conservatives are for limiting government power, size and spending and that is the antithesis of today's Republican party so they are aghast at today's Republican party. Someone should make them, Limbaugh and Colter stop claiming the title, Fascist is a lot more accurate term its just a taboo term since World War II. Conservative != Fascist so stop claiming to be conservatives, you aren't.
The national labs, DOD weapons programs and satellite manufacturing are GREAT places to pump money in to the pockets of your friends because you can use the high security clearance, and "state secret privilege" to crush any oversight that might catch some of the fraud, waste, abuse and incompetence. A subset of Congress is the only body that can provide oversight but.....
There is an intereting article on the Christian Science Monitor today about Congress's feeble efforts to restore legal and financial oversight on the Bush administration and the DOD. I didn't realize it till this article but when the Republican's gained power in 1995 one of the first things they did in the House Armed Services Committee was disband the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. This subcommittee's role was to reign in the fraud, waste and abuse in the Pentagon. It was like they fired the last cop in town, and created open season for thieves. It is now quite clear why there is such rampant corruption in the DOD now. There is NO real Congressional oversight to stop it.
Harry Truman rose to prominence with the "Truman Committee" which basically performed this role during World War II and saved the country billions in fraud, waste and abuse.
Its a basic problem in the current government that the Bush administration and DOD is running amuck using 9/11 as an excuse and since they have control of all branches of the government there is NO oversight of anything going on. Congress has abdicated so much power to the Executive branch we really are teetering on the edge of a term limited dictatorship.
As a result we get Duke Cunningham, satellite programs billions
First off I'm of the opinion that anyone claims they know beyond a doubt global warming is really here to stay, and that is caused man vaa CO2 is full of shit. Likewise anyone that denies it is equally full of shit. At this point it is all speculation and probably will be until its too late to stop it it turned out it is happening, it will destroy life as we know it and it was our fault. One thing for sure though is most of the people denying the possibility are people making money off fossil fuels or are friends of the same, this guy included.
"then we're going to spend some incomprehensible number of dollars reducing our CO2 output over the next 100 years for no gain"
In the process of reducing CO2 output you would get some HUGE gains that we really need anyway.
First off we need to either stop burning coal or seriously clean it up. It is abundant but it spews lots of crap in to the air that we don't want there, especially nitrous oxides, sulfur dioxide, and the worst, traces of mercury, arsenic and uranium. There is Clean Coal power plant called FutureGen being touted by the Coal industry and the Bush administration to cure all this but its 10 years down the road and may or may not work. In some respects it is a propaganda tool, constantly being advertised on TV these days to make coal sound clean while the U.S. builds a bunch of new Unclean coal power plants. The huge dependence on coal fired power plants in the U.S. and China are an undisputed ecological disaster already, CO2 or not. If CO2 is a global warming factor then coal fired power plants are the worst culprit. Not to mention that in many places the process of mining coal means taking the tops off whole mountains, and maybe planting some nice grass when you are done.
Second, we need to stop being completely dependent on oil and natural gas. They are in finite supply, unless maybe you resort to oil shale which is not an ideal solution. Persistent short supply is why prices are so high now, and its likely to just get more expensive as India and China increase their use of them. Someday they are going to run out anyway. Most of the supplies are in countries with regimes that you really don't want to be sending all your money to, and by sending all your money there you are contributing to huge and unsupportable trade deficits in the U.S. China is working really hard to lock up the dwindling oil supplies in long term contracts so they don't run out while the U.S. does.
Places like Brazil and Iceland are already far along on eliminating their dependence on fossil fuels and it has proved nothing but beneficial to them and their economies. Really the only people who are trying to con you about the staggering costs of abandoning our dependence on fossil fuels are people who are SELLING fossil fuels, Exxon/Mobile being the propaganda leader. At current oil and natural gas prices just about every alternative is cheaper. It should be noted that oil doesn't cost anything close to $70 a barrel to produce. More than 50% of the current price is going in to pockets of oil producing countries, oil companies and oil market speculators.
We really should put some big taxes on oil to make it so expensive that every alternative would be cheaper and to make oil cost what it really costs the U.S. In particular in the last century the U.S. has spent vast sums on military adventures that were, whether you like it or not, to protect and control oil supplies. The U.S. toppled the government of Iran with T.K. Ultra and installed the Shah to gain control of Iranian oil. This was all well and good except the Iranian people hated the shah and by the time they overthrew him they hated the U.S. too so they took a bunch of Americans hostage for 444 days because of what T.K. Ultra wrought. There is an extremist regime in Iran today, and there is a perpetual crisis between the U.S. and Iran, as a direct result of U.S. meddling there to control oil. Of course Gulf War I and II were both
"emerge/portage is a package manager"
I guess it depends on your definition. My take is package managers are mostly for installing binary packages coming from prebuilt repositories.
Gentoo in its purest form, and from its original inception, is just an automation tool to download source from wherever it comes, configure, compile and install it. All its doing is is the same thing you would do if you were to build a Linux system by hand. It does, out of necessity, do dependencies but that is the only thing very close to a package manager in portage.
If Gentoo craters you can simply create new ebuilds to grab new source for the things you want to continue to update. You would have to flush out Gentoo's patches but I'm pretty sure I could live without them. I really like the idea of just building Linux from all the original source providers without the distro middleman, since unfortunately the distro middlemen have proved to be consistently unreliable, untrustworthy(Red Hat) or badly paced(Debian), and there are simply to many of them. Its certainly not an approach for someone who just wants to slap in a CD and hit install, but if you are admin'ing any number of machines its a wonderful approach since you have serious control over your own destiny.
"But for a pay-per-download type service, this would mean each provider would need a local server"
Not really, you would just have to have a payment mechanism from whomever is running the caches to the original content provider, with the cache provider getting a small percentage of the take. Its not a model very different from iTunes, except that its very distributed.
Me being a Gentoo user, what's a package manager? I ditched Red Hat when they stuck a knife in Red Hat 7, 8 and 9 which was right after I'd subscribed to their subscription update service for same, rendering it worthless, and never had a conflict since nor have I had to go searching for something in 5 different repositories.
Gentoo certainly isn't for everyone but I REALLY like being able to just update stuff when I want to update stuff, and not get locked in to some distro's arbitrary release cycle. It really just doesn't even register with me why people would put up with having to obsess over things like FC3, FC4 or FC5.
I just compile and build new versions of stuff when emerge says they are there and I want them, It really is such a liberating experience. If Gentoo were to go tits up I could keep selectively updating my computer without them. If Red Hat sticks a knife in Fedora someday, or Ubuntu craters, not sure you could say the same about all your Fedora or Ubuntu machines.