Yea but most of the prescient sci fi works were intelligent, well written fiction. Terminator 3 was just bad on every level. I seriously doubt it is an indicator of much beyond the high probability that when Hollywood tries to milk a franchise it will often completely trash the franchise. They should have stopped when James Cameron stopped which was at the end of Terminator 2.
I think Paul Bucheit probably meant it when he coined the phrase, and I doubt it was marketing BS back then. But Paul is long gone from Google and its not the same company it was back then.
I think you seriously overestimate the U.S. military. DID they turn off GPS during this launch, I doubt it. I pretty much doubt they would be able to shut off every GPS constellation in existence and planned in the near future for any event less than World War III.
Your interpretation is incorrect, not sure how it got modded up. This is a case of two behemoths colluding to build huge patent portfolio's to:
A. Protect themselves from patent law suits by competitors, though it doesn't really help against patent trolls since trolls don't make anything and can't use portfolios to defend against them
B. Potentially lock out competitors and disruptive small companies.
Startups and small companies tend to be the biggest casualties in this behavior since they usually don't have patent portfolios they can horse trade with to defend against patent suits and to cross license with the huge companies with the huge patent portfolios.
It remains to be seen if Apple and Google use their portfolio offensively or defensively. If its defensively its not a problem. If they use it to crush potential competitors it is horrible.
Apple is obviously the more aggressive of the two in using patents to crush competition, but then Android, Samsung and HTC did pretty aggressively copy the iPhone in the early days.
The issue here is probably that it is a misnomer to say corporations are holding "cash". The big banks (a.k.a. primary dealers) are moving their cash hordes around constantly but I think most of it has been in the stock market and commodities. I imagine most corporations are doing the same. You would have been a complete chump to actually hold cash for the last three years because the value of dollars have been hammered.
The key distinction is between holding your assets in liquid investments or investing it in your business. Companies are NOT investing it in growing their businesses which is what TFA is referring too. Why should they. Over the last 3-4 years it was incredibly easy to get huge returns just buying in to the stock market as it rallied from 6600 to 13000. It was shooting fish in a barrel for them to just ride the wave as the Fed reinflated the stock market by printing money and handing it to the primary dealers. Contrast the ease with making money gambling in stocks and commodities over the last three years versus doing the hard way, investing in your business, doing R&D, making products. Its why unemployment stays high. Its a lot easier to gamble for money these days than it is to work for it.
As for when the inflation happens, as I said, no one knows. Maybe it won't. The problem is always that everyone has confidence in your currency until they don't. And when they lose it, it is usually sudden and ugly.
Another problem is that, since nearly all central banks are debasing their currency, its a complete crap shoot to figure out which currency is safer than all the others. The Swiss Franc has been the hands down choice for most of the last three years but so much money has fled in to such a small country that its severely imbalanced too.
Let's hope we get lucky and can muddle through. One plus to the Fed's money printing is they are replacing wealth wiped out when the housing bubble collapsed. Unfortunately they are replacing money lost by home owners and pension funds who bought mortgage backed securities, with money pouring in to Wall Street, and Wall Street is just using it to fund their gambling addiction, not to build companies or create jobs.
The origin of most of the cash glut recently isn't direct governent bail outs, most of it is due to the massive liquidity injections (a.k.a money printing) being done by the Fed, ECB and various other central banks. They are in a massive race to the bottom to see who can debase their currency faster, juice their exports, and print money to finance massive sovereign debts.
This money printing is mostly propping up the stock market and corporate profitability. It makes it look like all is well, though in reality the value of the dollars those things are measured in is plunging more than the stock market or corporate balance sheets are actually improving. It is a creating an economy based largely on fantasy, and is creating a global Wiemar Republic.
What the Fed is doing is also referred to as Financial repression. It is artificially suppressing interest rates, punishing savers, especially seniors who shun the stock market, and giving debtors, including the U.S. government a giant finance your debt for free card. China has been using massive financial repression for over a decade to juice their economy too.
When central banks start printing money to finance sovereign debt, it is nearly impossible for it to end well. The only question is when will the house of cards they are building collapse.
I'm pretty sure America's completely out of control health insurance costs are a bigger problem than the unions. Most of the perks people miss were probably aced to pay the health insurance premiums.
Unions are a no win situation to argue either way. Not having them lets employers massively exploit workers. Having them allows lazy and incompetent people to massively exploit their employers and customers.
The U.S. has pretty much reached a magic zone where most of its corporations completely suck. so does most of its unions and work force, and so does nearly every politician. Chances are this is a mix that wont end well.
The odd thing is uranium based fission for power generation never did become particularly stable and certainly isn't cheap.
The only reason we did it was because we wanted to make bombs and dual use of Uranium and Plutonium mitigated some of the costs and provided some civilian cover for what was basically a weapons program to produce Plutonium and enriched Uranium. Probably exactly the same thing Iran is doing today.
Japan, Germany and Canada are among the few countries that pursued fission purely as a power source using them to make bombs. Last time I checked Japan and Germany are both abandoning the concept because they've realized its not safe(stable) nor it is it very economical.
If we were actually pursuing fission as a power source Thorium would have been a vastly better approach, but it has no value for making Plutonium or justifying Uranium enrichment infrastructure, so it got no R&D or funding until very recently.
You apparently missed the parady in my post dude. It was partially to draw out the self righteous people like yourself who are willing to declare with absolute certainty that they KNOW what is going to happen.
You have absolutely no more knowledge of what's going to happen to the world's climate in the next hundred years than I do or do the global warming deniers.
When you chicken littles start claiming that mantle of certainty, and prognosticating the planets imminent demise you just make yourselves look comical. Its why so many people are getting weary of the global warming chicken littles, they are so consistently self righteous and smug.
Yes there might be a run away green house and calamity at every turn but I kind of doubt it. The world could turn in to a tropical paradise with abundance for all, I kind of doubt that too.
Chances are it will probably be somewhere in the middle.
Thanks to fracking the U.S. is dramatically reducing its green house gas emissions, and is apparently running ahead of the Kyoto accords it rejected. its also doing it without punitive taxes or other economic damage. It now appears the U.S. may never build another coal fired power plant, and will probably start shuttering some. Coal fired power plants can't compete economically with gas any more, and gas produces less CO2 than coal, though there is a risk the U.S. will just export all its coal to China to burn.
At the current rate solar will pass coal in economics in the next 10 years and gas in 20 years. It is very possible that we will solve much of our dependence on fossil fuels in the next few decades and without crippling economic engineering by the chicken littles.
As global temperatures rise, ocean temperatures rise and they are almost certainly going to push more water in to the atmosphere in the form of clouds and rain on land. Earth does have natural mechanisms to adapt to climate changes. More rain could mean floods, could mean places that aren't getting enough precipitation like the Sahara will get more and be more habitable. The Sahara hasn't always been a desert. The people who live there might LIKE climate change.
Some researchers are contending that half the sea level rise we've seen to date is due to cities and farms pumping water out of ancient aquifers on an industrial scale. If you had more rain civilization wouldn't be so dependent on depleting aquifers. When aquifers are gone it will take a really long time before they come back.
Yes there is a danger of a runaway greenhouse effect but its also true that the Earth doesn't have "one true" climate and we shouldn't pretend that we are going to lock it in to one. Its always changed over time, sometimes dramatically and unless man is going to start teraforming we aren't going to lock it down now.
Me personally I'm OK with global warming, of course I'm heavily invested in harbor and beach front property on the northern coast of Canada, or at least it will be beach front when sea level rises 9-10 meters.
I always like to "look on the bright side of life".
The whole problem with the Space Shuttle is it proved to be at least an order of magnitude more expensive than every other launch option. In part because of the huge amount of dead weight being lifted to orbit, and mostly because of the huge work force and logisticial train required to refurbish and refit it between each launch.
Unless you have unlimited amounts of money at your disposal, successful access to space is almost entirely about how many dollars it costs to lift a kilogram/pound in to low earth orbit. The more it costs the less you launch which translates in to less you do there. The less it costs the more you launch and the more you accomplish.
The Shuttle failed miserably by this metric which is why its a museum peice now. Everyone shedding tears over this fact need to get over it and realize its entirely for the best. The only way this country could afford the Shuttle would be to gut defense spending or Medicare/Medicaid and transfer all the money to NASA. Gutting defense spending, especially the trillion+ we are blowing on the F-35, would be smart but this country isn't smart and it would never fly in Congress, since Lockheed owns too many congressmen.
If you think you are going to get in to space on the shuttle then you must be a billionaire because it is prohibitively expensive to fly anyone in to space that way without huge taxpayer subsidies.
If you actually want to get in to space, common sense dictates you should be advocating SpaceX Falcon and not space shuttle. Then you only need $10-20 million instead of the several $100 million a shuttle ride would cost you without taxpayer subsidies.
I'm not generally one to defend NASA but they've had a pretty huge role in earth observation satellites, Landsat for example. They've had a huge impact on environmental issues, deforestation, climate change, resource usage, monitoring the destruction of our our ozone layer by CFC's and helping to stop it, this list goes on for a while.
Their manned space program has moslty been a huge wast of time and money but their earth observation programs have been DOING EXACTLY THE THINGS YOU SEEM TO BE WHINING FOR.
It pretty delusional to think you should basically stop doing anything ground breaking until you've solved every problem on Earth. YOU WILL NEVER SOLVE EVERY PROBLEM ON EARTH. If you manage to insure everyone is well fed and, and no one dies of diseases, chances are you will just cause a population spike that will push a bunch of people in to starvation or further deplete the earth's resources trying to feed them all.
Its still a little over the horizon but it wont be that much longer until we start deplete the Earth's easily accessible mineral resources at which point pretty much the first thing you are going to be wishing for is a robust space program so you can start mining near earth asteroids for them.
The space shuttle didn't "inspire us to transcend our own planetary existence". It mostly bogged us down in low earth orbit for 30 years, squandering money that could have better gone elsewhere, and doing very little that was inspiring or transcendent. In fact it mostly helped shackle us to our earth bound planetary existence.
The one possible exception would the Hubble launch and repair missions. The Hubble was pretty inspiring and the Shuttle's capabilities made it possible both in salvaging it from being a compelte write off and in keeping it going for so long.
The SpaceX Falcon Heavy is the most likely craft to "transcend our own planetary existence". Elon Musk is saying its one of his goal in life to die on Mars and he is actually means it.
NASA has been mostly empty talk since Apollo and a stellar animated film production house, making animations of stuff they will never build and of places they will never go. JPL being the one exception.
The topic here, you apparently missed, is what will it take to make Linux succeed on the desktop. As long as the Linux desktop stays on its current course of massive fragmentation, duplicative effort, in fighting, and massive inconsistency it simply won't succeed on the desktop, outside of its existing niche which everyone agrees is not very successful at least in terms of numbers of users or users outside of the geeks that have always used Linux.
So why don't you stop preaching about your religion and try to follow the actual topic being discussed here.
That is why SpaceX succeeds and NASA fails. SpaceX is setting their own strategic direction and its engineering and vision driven. They have to fight to piece together funding but when develop great launchers with a killer price point the money flows to them and they aren't totally dependent on polticially motivated funding, though their NASA contracts are huge to them.
"I don't think they've lost the engineering capabilities"
How do you think they would still have the engineering capabilities to do something hard when all the people that did Apollo have retired or died, and even most of the people that built the Shuttle are probably gone. You can't develop or maintain engineering excellence to build new things if you never build anything new. They might have some great young engineers but if they never build things they aren't going to develop and hold the expertise to build things.
It was fantastically hard on NASA's in house engineering capability during the Reagan years when they compelled everything to be contracted out and the engineers at NASA were turned in to paper pushing contract monitors while the contractors did all the work. No good engineer wanted the civil service jobs NASA was offering during that era.
Any aerospace engineer with talent, drive and any sense is going to try to get a job at SpaceX these days, not NASA.
Don't even get my started on Boeing and Lockheed. The culture difference between them and SpaceX is vast. SpaceX wants to build rockets and do great things in space exploration. Boeing and Lockheed want to land big, sole source, cost plus contracts, milk as much out of them as they can to pad their profit margins and stock price. Doing incredible things in space just doesn't seem to enter in to their equation. I doubt they much care if their projects get killed before they bend any metal as long as they get a new one they can milk to replace it.
There is inherehently a vast gulf betweem SpaceX gambling everything on every launch, where failures could put them out of business versus Boeing and Lockheed who are never gambling anything. For them the pay is always the same, whether they succeed or fail.
So you are worried about "effective ownership and control of the computer" issues with Windows and OSX but you some how are OK being completely dependent on Adobe and Creative Suite and they can completely screw you at any moment just like Microsoft and Apple. Interesting. . . .
The chance of Adobe doing native Linux ports of any major part of CS are vanishingly small so why do people even keep suggesting it.
Ask all the people that bet the farm on Flash how they fell about letting Adobe control their destiny since Adobe pretty much botched their Flash strategy and have now pretty much thrown in the towel.
Miguel has been actively trying to shove Mono based crap in to Gnome for most of that 5 years. Banshee, Tomboy and Mono were preinstalled in Ubuntu for a number of releases until they finally removed them in Ubuntu 12. I don't have any particular hate or bigotry toward him, his track record in picking tech has just been horrible for so long I don't know why anyone even listens to the stuff he says any more.
Like it or not his name is permenently associated with GNOME and he isn't doing that name any good any more on top of GNOME's own misguided decision making in recent releases.
I didn't say PC's were disappearing. I said they were fading in importance to a lot of people Most ordinary people are going to do email, browsing, twitter, facebook, IM, casual gaming on a tablet or smartphone these days. I imagine the trend among kids is even worse away from PC's.
PC's will be around for a long time for people who are developing code, editing video, writing books, doing 3D modelling, basically anything where a good keyboard, pointing device and big screen without fingerprints is important.
My main point was I doubt it is worth even trying to make Linux win on the desktop these days. The PC desktop is starting to shrink for everyone and Linux already lost. On the other hand Android is wildly successful already, a growing market, why not focus on that instead.
You simply aren't being realistic you think large numbers of power users are going to migrate to Linux at this point. In fact a lot of them are migrating from Linux to OSX because they are fed up with the user experience on Linux. Most people just want their apps, audio and video to work on their desktop. The religion of having an open source desktop is nice but not when stuff doesn't work right.
There was never a strong case for using the shuttle to launch DOD satellites and everyone knows it. If it had been cheap and launched frequently as originally promised maybe. But by the time it first flew it was obvious it was going to be extravegently over priced to fly and difficult to refurbish between flights so it would never have a good launch rate. As much trouble as it had out of the box with water droplet damage it would have been horrible to launch it out of fog bound Vandenburgh.
If they only did one launch a year out of SLC-6 that would have made it assinenly expensive unless they had some incredibly important task they needed to do that only the shuttle could do.
If anyone actually thought it was going to be economical to use the Shuttle to launch satellties from SLC-6 they they were just delusional. The $6 billion they blew on SLC-6 alone would have funded a bunch of Atlas, Titan and Delta launches.
All things considered my theory is more plausible than you echoing the bullshit that the DOD was going to do one polar launch a year from there.
My personal theory is that launching the Shuttle from SLC-6 was a wacko Reagan-esque first strike weapon aimed at the Soviet Union, which only someone as wacko as Reagan and his friends would dream up.
Basically you permanently park a Shuttle in the SLC-6 hanger with a payload bay full of nuclear bombs attached to small solid rocket motors. The day you decide to launch a first strike, you launch the Shuttle from Vandenburg in to a polar orbit in the vacinity of Moscow and Russia's command and control centers. You count on the Russians not being alarmed by a shuttle launch.
Over the Soviet union you open the payload bay, and lob a couple dozen nukes in to the Soviet Union with almost no warning time. You decapitate their political and military elites, cripple their command and control of their nuclear forces, and follow up with conventional missiles to wipe out their ICBM's and bombers. The only flaw is you will probably still get clocked by their submarines unless they capitulate first.
NASA, Boeing and Lockheed are unlikely to ever build a new launcher especially one with a price tag running to $40 billion dollars. They have completely lost the engineering capacity, the fire in the belly and the desire. Their funding source, the U.S. Congress and President, is so politicized, gridlocked and partisan they will never sustain the funding over the extended period it takes to complete anything of substance and difficulty.
They will do exactly what they've done on every new launcher for the last 20 years. Pour money in to, make some impressive and expensive animations of what it would look like if they ever built it, and a new Congress or President will cancel it and start over right before they actually start building it.
NASA's manned space program these days is mostly about buying votes in Florida since its the ultimate swing state in Presidential elections.
Most of these Shuttle derived launchers are also schemes by Senators Hatch and Shelby to salvage jobs in their home states at a staggering price per job.
The money would be better spent pouring it in to Falcon Heavy. They would get a much larger number of launches, much sooner, in a probably much more reliable launcher, for a fraction of the price, which more than makes up for the lower payload per launch, unless you have a huge payload that can't be split up.
The $350 a month discussion in this thread was more about ordinary Foxconn workers than these students. Yea the students are getting a raw deal. Welcome to a totalitarian state. If you don't like it you either need to change your government, through a messy, probably violent revolution. or move some place else if you can swing it. When the Chinese government/Communist party tells you to do something you do it or you end up in a prison camp.
Me personally I would rather western multinationals hadn't rushed to transfer manufacturing of everything to China, but they did, the capitalist incentives China dangled in front of them overruled ethics and common sense.
Like a lot of places you don't have any rights your government doesn't want you to have. The U.S. and U.K. aren't exactly a lot better lately, they are stripping your civil liberties at a pretty furious rate too and no one is stopping them. Once you have the courts stacked in favor of totalitarianism your recourse against abuse as a citizen is pretty much gone.
Slashdot Mirror
Yea but most of the prescient sci fi works were intelligent, well written fiction. Terminator 3 was just bad on every level. I seriously doubt it is an indicator of much beyond the high probability that when Hollywood tries to milk a franchise it will often completely trash the franchise. They should have stopped when James Cameron stopped which was at the end of Terminator 2.
I think Paul Bucheit probably meant it when he coined the phrase, and I doubt it was marketing BS back then. But Paul is long gone from Google and its not the same company it was back then.
I think you seriously overestimate the U.S. military. DID they turn off GPS during this launch, I doubt it. I pretty much doubt they would be able to shut off every GPS constellation in existence and planned in the near future for any event less than World War III.
Guidance is a lot easier now that there is this thing called GPS
Your interpretation is incorrect, not sure how it got modded up. This is a case of two behemoths colluding to build huge patent portfolio's to:
A. Protect themselves from patent law suits by competitors, though it doesn't really help against patent trolls since trolls don't make anything and can't use portfolios to defend against them
B. Potentially lock out competitors and disruptive small companies.
Startups and small companies tend to be the biggest casualties in this behavior since they usually don't have patent portfolios they can horse trade with to defend against patent suits and to cross license with the huge companies with the huge patent portfolios.
It remains to be seen if Apple and Google use their portfolio offensively or defensively. If its defensively its not a problem. If they use it to crush potential competitors it is horrible.
Apple is obviously the more aggressive of the two in using patents to crush competition, but then Android, Samsung and HTC did pretty aggressively copy the iPhone in the early days.
The issue here is probably that it is a misnomer to say corporations are holding "cash". The big banks (a.k.a. primary dealers) are moving their cash hordes around constantly but I think most of it has been in the stock market and commodities. I imagine most corporations are doing the same. You would have been a complete chump to actually hold cash for the last three years because the value of dollars have been hammered.
The key distinction is between holding your assets in liquid investments or investing it in your business. Companies are NOT investing it in growing their businesses which is what TFA is referring too. Why should they. Over the last 3-4 years it was incredibly easy to get huge returns just buying in to the stock market as it rallied from 6600 to 13000. It was shooting fish in a barrel for them to just ride the wave as the Fed reinflated the stock market by printing money and handing it to the primary dealers. Contrast the ease with making money gambling in stocks and commodities over the last three years versus doing the hard way, investing in your business, doing R&D, making products. Its why unemployment stays high. Its a lot easier to gamble for money these days than it is to work for it.
As for when the inflation happens, as I said, no one knows. Maybe it won't. The problem is always that everyone has confidence in your currency until they don't. And when they lose it, it is usually sudden and ugly.
Another problem is that, since nearly all central banks are debasing their currency, its a complete crap shoot to figure out which currency is safer than all the others. The Swiss Franc has been the hands down choice for most of the last three years but so much money has fled in to such a small country that its severely imbalanced too.
Let's hope we get lucky and can muddle through. One plus to the Fed's money printing is they are replacing wealth wiped out when the housing bubble collapsed. Unfortunately they are replacing money lost by home owners and pension funds who bought mortgage backed securities, with money pouring in to Wall Street, and Wall Street is just using it to fund their gambling addiction, not to build companies or create jobs.
The origin of most of the cash glut recently isn't direct governent bail outs, most of it is due to the massive liquidity injections (a.k.a money printing) being done by the Fed, ECB and various other central banks. They are in a massive race to the bottom to see who can debase their currency faster, juice their exports, and print money to finance massive sovereign debts.
This money printing is mostly propping up the stock market and corporate profitability. It makes it look like all is well, though in reality the value of the dollars those things are measured in is plunging more than the stock market or corporate balance sheets are actually improving. It is a creating an economy based largely on fantasy, and is creating a global Wiemar Republic.
What the Fed is doing is also referred to as Financial repression. It is artificially suppressing interest rates, punishing savers, especially seniors who shun the stock market, and giving debtors, including the U.S. government a giant finance your debt for free card. China has been using massive financial repression for over a decade to juice their economy too.
When central banks start printing money to finance sovereign debt, it is nearly impossible for it to end well. The only question is when will the house of cards they are building collapse.
I'm pretty sure America's completely out of control health insurance costs are a bigger problem than the unions. Most of the perks people miss were probably aced to pay the health insurance premiums.
Unions are a no win situation to argue either way. Not having them lets employers massively exploit workers. Having them allows lazy and incompetent people to massively exploit their employers and customers.
The U.S. has pretty much reached a magic zone where most of its corporations completely suck. so does most of its unions and work force, and so does nearly every politician. Chances are this is a mix that wont end well.
"Xenon headlights are a hazard, especially to older drivers."
⦠because drivers can see seniors on sidewalks sooner and have a better chance of hitting them for points?
The odd thing is uranium based fission for power generation never did become particularly stable and certainly isn't cheap.
The only reason we did it was because we wanted to make bombs and dual use of Uranium and Plutonium mitigated some of the costs and provided some civilian cover for what was basically a weapons program to produce Plutonium and enriched Uranium. Probably exactly the same thing Iran is doing today.
Japan, Germany and Canada are among the few countries that pursued fission purely as a power source using them to make bombs. Last time I checked Japan and Germany are both abandoning the concept because they've realized its not safe(stable) nor it is it very economical.
If we were actually pursuing fission as a power source Thorium would have been a vastly better approach, but it has no value for making Plutonium or justifying Uranium enrichment infrastructure, so it got no R&D or funding until very recently.
You apparently missed the parady in my post dude. It was partially to draw out the self righteous people like yourself who are willing to declare with absolute certainty that they KNOW what is going to happen.
You have absolutely no more knowledge of what's going to happen to the world's climate in the next hundred years than I do or do the global warming deniers.
When you chicken littles start claiming that mantle of certainty, and prognosticating the planets imminent demise you just make yourselves look comical. Its why so many people are getting weary of the global warming chicken littles, they are so consistently self righteous and smug.
Yes there might be a run away green house and calamity at every turn but I kind of doubt it. The world could turn in to a tropical paradise with abundance for all, I kind of doubt that too.
Chances are it will probably be somewhere in the middle.
Thanks to fracking the U.S. is dramatically reducing its green house gas emissions, and is apparently running ahead of the Kyoto accords it rejected. its also doing it without punitive taxes or other economic damage. It now appears the U.S. may never build another coal fired power plant, and will probably start shuttering some. Coal fired power plants can't compete economically with gas any more, and gas produces less CO2 than coal, though there is a risk the U.S. will just export all its coal to China to burn.
At the current rate solar will pass coal in economics in the next 10 years and gas in 20 years. It is very possible that we will solve much of our dependence on fossil fuels in the next few decades and without crippling economic engineering by the chicken littles.
As global temperatures rise, ocean temperatures rise and they are almost certainly going to push more water in to the atmosphere in the form of clouds and rain on land. Earth does have natural mechanisms to adapt to climate changes. More rain could mean floods, could mean places that aren't getting enough precipitation like the Sahara will get more and be more habitable. The Sahara hasn't always been a desert. The people who live there might LIKE climate change.
Some researchers are contending that half the sea level rise we've seen to date is due to cities and farms pumping water out of ancient aquifers on an industrial scale. If you had more rain civilization wouldn't be so dependent on depleting aquifers. When aquifers are gone it will take a really long time before they come back.
Yes there is a danger of a runaway greenhouse effect but its also true that the Earth doesn't have "one true" climate and we shouldn't pretend that we are going to lock it in to one. Its always changed over time, sometimes dramatically and unless man is going to start teraforming we aren't going to lock it down now.
Me personally I'm OK with global warming, of course I'm heavily invested in harbor and beach front property on the northern coast of Canada, or at least it will be beach front when sea level rises 9-10 meters.
I always like to "look on the bright side of life".
The whole problem with the Space Shuttle is it proved to be at least an order of magnitude more expensive than every other launch option. In part because of the huge amount of dead weight being lifted to orbit, and mostly because of the huge work force and logisticial train required to refurbish and refit it between each launch.
Unless you have unlimited amounts of money at your disposal, successful access to space is almost entirely about how many dollars it costs to lift a kilogram/pound in to low earth orbit. The more it costs the less you launch which translates in to less you do there. The less it costs the more you launch and the more you accomplish.
The Shuttle failed miserably by this metric which is why its a museum peice now. Everyone shedding tears over this fact need to get over it and realize its entirely for the best. The only way this country could afford the Shuttle would be to gut defense spending or Medicare/Medicaid and transfer all the money to NASA. Gutting defense spending, especially the trillion+ we are blowing on the F-35, would be smart but this country isn't smart and it would never fly in Congress, since Lockheed owns too many congressmen.
If you think you are going to get in to space on the shuttle then you must be a billionaire because it is prohibitively expensive to fly anyone in to space that way without huge taxpayer subsidies.
If you actually want to get in to space, common sense dictates you should be advocating SpaceX Falcon and not space shuttle. Then you only need $10-20 million instead of the several $100 million a shuttle ride would cost you without taxpayer subsidies.
I'm not generally one to defend NASA but they've had a pretty huge role in earth observation satellites, Landsat for example. They've had a huge impact on environmental issues, deforestation, climate change, resource usage, monitoring the destruction of our our ozone layer by CFC's and helping to stop it, this list goes on for a while.
Their manned space program has moslty been a huge wast of time and money but their earth observation programs have been DOING EXACTLY THE THINGS YOU SEEM TO BE WHINING FOR.
It pretty delusional to think you should basically stop doing anything ground breaking until you've solved every problem on Earth. YOU WILL NEVER SOLVE EVERY PROBLEM ON EARTH. If you manage to insure everyone is well fed and, and no one dies of diseases, chances are you will just cause a population spike that will push a bunch of people in to starvation or further deplete the earth's resources trying to feed them all.
Its still a little over the horizon but it wont be that much longer until we start deplete the Earth's easily accessible mineral resources at which point pretty much the first thing you are going to be wishing for is a robust space program so you can start mining near earth asteroids for them.
The space shuttle didn't "inspire us to transcend our own planetary existence". It mostly bogged us down in low earth orbit for 30 years, squandering money that could have better gone elsewhere, and doing very little that was inspiring or transcendent. In fact it mostly helped shackle us to our earth bound planetary existence.
The one possible exception would the Hubble launch and repair missions. The Hubble was pretty inspiring and the Shuttle's capabilities made it possible both in salvaging it from being a compelte write off and in keeping it going for so long.
The SpaceX Falcon Heavy is the most likely craft to "transcend our own planetary existence". Elon Musk is saying its one of his goal in life to die on Mars and he is actually means it.
NASA has been mostly empty talk since Apollo and a stellar animated film production house, making animations of stuff they will never build and of places they will never go. JPL being the one exception.
The topic here, you apparently missed, is what will it take to make Linux succeed on the desktop. As long as the Linux desktop stays on its current course of massive fragmentation, duplicative effort, in fighting, and massive inconsistency it simply won't succeed on the desktop, outside of its existing niche which everyone agrees is not very successful at least in terms of numbers of users or users outside of the geeks that have always used Linux.
So why don't you stop preaching about your religion and try to follow the actual topic being discussed here.
"NASA only does what they're told"
That is why SpaceX succeeds and NASA fails. SpaceX is setting their own strategic direction and its engineering and vision driven. They have to fight to piece together funding but when develop great launchers with a killer price point the money flows to them and they aren't totally dependent on polticially motivated funding, though their NASA contracts are huge to them.
"I don't think they've lost the engineering capabilities"
How do you think they would still have the engineering capabilities to do something hard when all the people that did Apollo have retired or died, and even most of the people that built the Shuttle are probably gone. You can't develop or maintain engineering excellence to build new things if you never build anything new. They might have some great young engineers but if they never build things they aren't going to develop and hold the expertise to build things.
It was fantastically hard on NASA's in house engineering capability during the Reagan years when they compelled everything to be contracted out and the engineers at NASA were turned in to paper pushing contract monitors while the contractors did all the work. No good engineer wanted the civil service jobs NASA was offering during that era.
Any aerospace engineer with talent, drive and any sense is going to try to get a job at SpaceX these days, not NASA.
Don't even get my started on Boeing and Lockheed. The culture difference between them and SpaceX is vast. SpaceX wants to build rockets and do great things in space exploration. Boeing and Lockheed want to land big, sole source, cost plus contracts, milk as much out of them as they can to pad their profit margins and stock price. Doing incredible things in space just doesn't seem to enter in to their equation. I doubt they much care if their projects get killed before they bend any metal as long as they get a new one they can milk to replace it.
There is inherehently a vast gulf betweem SpaceX gambling everything on every launch, where failures could put them out of business versus Boeing and Lockheed who are never gambling anything. For them the pay is always the same, whether they succeed or fail.
So you are worried about "effective ownership and control of the computer" issues with Windows and OSX but you some how are OK being completely dependent on Adobe and Creative Suite and they can completely screw you at any moment just like Microsoft and Apple. Interesting. . . .
The chance of Adobe doing native Linux ports of any major part of CS are vanishingly small so why do people even keep suggesting it.
Ask all the people that bet the farm on Flash how they fell about letting Adobe control their destiny since Adobe pretty much botched their Flash strategy and have now pretty much thrown in the towel.
Miguel has been actively trying to shove Mono based crap in to Gnome for most of that 5 years. Banshee, Tomboy and Mono were preinstalled in Ubuntu for a number of releases until they finally removed them in Ubuntu 12. I don't have any particular hate or bigotry toward him, his track record in picking tech has just been horrible for so long I don't know why anyone even listens to the stuff he says any more.
Like it or not his name is permenently associated with GNOME and he isn't doing that name any good any more on top of GNOME's own misguided decision making in recent releases.
I didn't say PC's were disappearing. I said they were fading in importance to a lot of people Most ordinary people are going to do email, browsing, twitter, facebook, IM, casual gaming on a tablet or smartphone these days. I imagine the trend among kids is even worse away from PC's.
PC's will be around for a long time for people who are developing code, editing video, writing books, doing 3D modelling, basically anything where a good keyboard, pointing device and big screen without fingerprints is important.
My main point was I doubt it is worth even trying to make Linux win on the desktop these days. The PC desktop is starting to shrink for everyone and Linux already lost. On the other hand Android is wildly successful already, a growing market, why not focus on that instead.
You simply aren't being realistic you think large numbers of power users are going to migrate to Linux at this point. In fact a lot of them are migrating from Linux to OSX because they are fed up with the user experience on Linux. Most people just want their apps, audio and video to work on their desktop. The religion of having an open source desktop is nice but not when stuff doesn't work right.
There was never a strong case for using the shuttle to launch DOD satellites and everyone knows it. If it had been cheap and launched frequently as originally promised maybe. But by the time it first flew it was obvious it was going to be extravegently over priced to fly and difficult to refurbish between flights so it would never have a good launch rate. As much trouble as it had out of the box with water droplet damage it would have been horrible to launch it out of fog bound Vandenburgh.
If they only did one launch a year out of SLC-6 that would have made it assinenly expensive unless they had some incredibly important task they needed to do that only the shuttle could do.
If anyone actually thought it was going to be economical to use the Shuttle to launch satellties from SLC-6 they they were just delusional. The $6 billion they blew on SLC-6 alone would have funded a bunch of Atlas, Titan and Delta launches.
All things considered my theory is more plausible than you echoing the bullshit that the DOD was going to do one polar launch a year from there.
My personal theory is that launching the Shuttle from SLC-6 was a wacko Reagan-esque first strike weapon aimed at the Soviet Union, which only someone as wacko as Reagan and his friends would dream up.
Basically you permanently park a Shuttle in the SLC-6 hanger with a payload bay full of nuclear bombs attached to small solid rocket motors. The day you decide to launch a first strike, you launch the Shuttle from Vandenburg in to a polar orbit in the vacinity of Moscow and Russia's command and control centers. You count on the Russians not being alarmed by a shuttle launch.
Over the Soviet union you open the payload bay, and lob a couple dozen nukes in to the Soviet Union with almost no warning time. You decapitate their political and military elites, cripple their command and control of their nuclear forces, and follow up with conventional missiles to wipe out their ICBM's and bombers. The only flaw is you will probably still get clocked by their submarines unless they capitulate first.
NASA, Boeing and Lockheed are unlikely to ever build a new launcher especially one with a price tag running to $40 billion dollars. They have completely lost the engineering capacity, the fire in the belly and the desire. Their funding source, the U.S. Congress and President, is so politicized, gridlocked and partisan they will never sustain the funding over the extended period it takes to complete anything of substance and difficulty.
They will do exactly what they've done on every new launcher for the last 20 years. Pour money in to, make some impressive and expensive animations of what it would look like if they ever built it, and a new Congress or President will cancel it and start over right before they actually start building it.
NASA's manned space program these days is mostly about buying votes in Florida since its the ultimate swing state in Presidential elections.
Most of these Shuttle derived launchers are also schemes by Senators Hatch and Shelby to salvage jobs in their home states at a staggering price per job.
The money would be better spent pouring it in to Falcon Heavy. They would get a much larger number of launches, much sooner, in a probably much more reliable launcher, for a fraction of the price, which more than makes up for the lower payload per launch, unless you have a huge payload that can't be split up.
The $350 a month discussion in this thread was more about ordinary Foxconn workers than these students. Yea the students are getting a raw deal. Welcome to a totalitarian state. If you don't like it you either need to change your government, through a messy, probably violent revolution. or move some place else if you can swing it. When the Chinese government/Communist party tells you to do something you do it or you end up in a prison camp.
Me personally I would rather western multinationals hadn't rushed to transfer manufacturing of everything to China, but they did, the capitalist incentives China dangled in front of them overruled ethics and common sense.
Like a lot of places you don't have any rights your government doesn't want you to have. The U.S. and U.K. aren't exactly a lot better lately, they are stripping your civil liberties at a pretty furious rate too and no one is stopping them. Once you have the courts stacked in favor of totalitarianism your recourse against abuse as a citizen is pretty much gone.