The obvious question, why just because you've opted to buy stocks, and are lucky enough to have the money to put in them, should you be special and not have to pay taxes on your income.
Why if I put money in to a savings account which in turn is loaned out to small businesses or to buy houses, why is the money I make in interest still taxed and your dividends are not.
You are stating something obvious, you are getting income, not paying any taxes on it an you are glad, duh.
The thing you are missing is the massive inequity.
It is less objectional if small investors reap the windfall, but it doesn't change the fact that the very wealthy, like Bill Gates are reaping enormous windfalls and not paying their fair of the tax burden. If they don't we have to either:
A. Run huge deficits which we are B. Someone else has to pick up the slack, for example the government steals the Social Security surplus coming out of the wages of working people who are often barely getting by.
Low or no taxes on dividends would be less objectionable if corporations were paying a fair share of the tax burden. There share is down to 8% of the total tax burden last I heard and they are engaged in wholesale tax dodges and loophole exploitation. If they don't pay any taxes and they started doleing out huge dividends as Microsoft is doing there is potential for a giant untaxed economy and it is disproportionally going to the wealthy.
Try not paying taxes on wages, you will be in jail in no time.
The fundamental thing Republicans never get is that if you allow all the wealth to concentrate in the hands of an ever smaller economic elite, you are eventually going to have 95% of your people in poverty and 5% enormously wealthy. Many third world countries are like that and its enormously unhealthy. The U.S. was like this during the robber baron era at the end of the 19th century. The wealth concentration in the hands of a few led to massive unrest among everyone else, it started the Progressive Movement. Our progressive tax system arose during this era to reign in the wealth concentration and it restored some balance. The U.S. entered an era in the 20th century where America developed a big and healthy middle class. That healthy middle class is rapidly disappearing thanks to a tax code that is allowing the rich to get richer at a blinding pace, and working people's jobs and incomes are under assault thanks to outsourcing and illegal immigration and an increasingly regressive tax code.
As an aside I see today the U.S. trade deficit grew by a whopping 24% from 2003 to 2004. It passed $600 billion dollars. The U.S. simply can't continue to export its jobs and wealth at this rate and not end up with a smoldering economic ruin for working people and the middle class. Not to worry the wealthy elite will be OK, they will still be racking in untaxed dividends and investing their money in China, and the rich continue to get richer.
...or Sony comes out with EQ3 and all of your ancestors are trapped in EQ2 purgatory, not dead, but not alive, like all the characters and guilds in EQ1 that can't be transfered to EQ2.
Why don't you stop trying to pretend like you have psychic abilities, because you don't, and it just makes you look stupid. Do you actually think you are psychic? I was out of school and working for a living when Reagan siezed power.
"I accused you of being a liberal "
Well you were wrong again, your psychic powers are really slipping. I'm socially liberal which means I believe in live and let live. When it comes to big government I'm an arch conservative or maybe libertarian. I pretty much want the whole thing to go away. The only place I don't fit the mold and which makes me not a libertarian is I'm a huge believer in regulating the hell out of corporations because if someone doesn't keep them in check they are going to make life not worth living on this planet. Greed is a great motivator but its also a great destroyer when left unchecked.
"What, by prosecuting a war against our enemies."
No, by shreding our constitution, due process and rule of law. If we don't preserve those then you'll win some battles and lose the war. You really don't deserve American citizenship because apparently have no clue what its actually all about. Just a hint its our constitution, due process and the rule of law, not letting anyone be below the protection of the law and not letting anyone be above the law, most of all the President. Me thinks you would be happier in a nice right wing dictatorship though the U.S. practicly there so I guess you are in the right place. Me I think the New Republican party would be reviled by out founding fathers if they were alive to see it.
Hate to break it to you, but you aren't going to beat Al Qaida by invading one country after another. All your going to do is bankrupt the U.S. and turn the whole world against you. I know my history well enough to recognize paranoid delusionals like you and Joe McCarthy who start seeing enemies behind every rock, and you will become more dangerous to this country than external enemies. You should study Joe McCarthy sometime and learn from his mistakes before you repeat them. He died in disgrace you know because eventually everyone figured out he was wrong, out of control and dangerous.
"Democrats always claim to be fiscally responsible"
The problem here is you are still ranting about Democrats like they matter. They are irrelevant now. I know its an obsession for right wing nut cases and you can't stop ranting about them but to me they are irelavant. Why don't you rant about Bill Clinton while your here, he's only been gone 4 years. Just because the Democrats are pathetic, doesn't make the Republicans right and good by default.
"Wrong again. Reagan, through tax cuts DOUBLED treasury revenues beginining in 1982"
Simple answer here. Look at a chart of budget deficits. You will notice there are two staggering periods of deficits since 1972. The '80's during Reaganomics and since Little George siezed power. I'm all for tax cuts to stimulate the economy, the key point is you need to cut spending to so the deficits don't erase the benefits and the Republican's, despite their rhetoric, don't.
"If you want to get rid of the deficit, cut taxes and spending."
The problem here is you keep lecturing on something I already know and agree with. The problem is you keep kidding your self that the Republican's actually do that. At least for Reagan and Little George, they cut taxes, cut domestic spending and explode spending on defense, they generate huge deficits and the economy never generates enough revenue to correct the shortfalls. Meanwhile we accumulate staggering debts and an ever bigger percentage of our economu, the budget and our tax dollars go to maintaing debts that are being consistently produced at overwhelming levels under right wing presidents. The liberal conspiracy theory is they are trying to bankrupt the U.S. government so they wipe out the Fed
"A capsule is an extraordinarily efficient way to design anything..."
No argument its a good design approach excepting for the fact that its probably TINY inside. Conic capsules have severe size limitations which is probably why Kliper is using a different geometry, they seem to be tapping the benefits of the lifting body but without most of the weight penalties like landing gear.
Correct me if I'm wrong but the CEV plan appears to be to spend billions of dollars and 10 years to build a capsule not very different from the one we had 40 years ago and which the Russians already have, Soyuz.
The other point being you can't jam astronauts in one and send them on a multiyear mission to Mars which is what Boeing's plan seems to be doing. A Mars mission needs to be more like a small space station with room to exercise, room to get away from each other, lots of cargo space, tacked in front of a big propulsion system. Most sci fi designs for Mars put water tanks around at least part of the habitat for some shielding since you need lots of water anyway and you will need some serious shielding if there is a big solar storm.
"First we gotta go there, then we get out and walk around and come back"
Uh, we've already been there, walked around and came back. If you will recall after Apollo 12 everyone stopped caring and wondered what we were wasting all the money for. Apollo 13 regained excitement briefly and then everyone stopped caring again and when everyone stopped caring the money stopped flowing.
NASA runs a high danger of having huge excitement for the first return mission to the Moon and then everyone will say, uh we did that already, whats the point. Even putting a permanent presence on the moon isn't going to be any better unless you have a reason for people to be there, you have to have them doing something you can only do if you have people there, and that has real value. Harvesting fuel for a fusion reactor is the only reason I've seen and we dont have the fusion reactor. Maybe you could harvest moon dust for shielding and building big structures but that is kind of out there.
The only mission you can build a case for is putting a permanent colony on Mars as in people go there, have babies and don't come back. Mars has a enough resources to have a reasonable chance of becoming self sustaining, and then you have a whole new biosphere and that is something that matters. The Moon is dead and always will be, you will be stuck resupplying a colony there forever or more likely just stop going.
Problem is going to Mars is so far out in this grand plan its going to run out of money and die before it even starts.
Of course we've squandered 200 billion on Iraq so far and anything you do in space would be better than that insanity. I'd take a colony on the Moon over that any day, even if there is no point in putting a colony on the Moon.
"... in the new Moon/Mars plans, it's because those things worked."
It worked to the Moon, Mars is a completely different and MUCH harder challenge. What worked for a week long trip to the Moon ISN'T going to have much relevance going to Mars.
"But right now, all Kliper's got are some engineering plans and a mock-up, and the mock-up isn't done yet. They're not planning for it to fly until 2010, which is two years after the completion of CEV's first spiral."
Outside the boosters which the U.S., Russia and ESA all Boeing has is computer generated fantasy unless they are actually dusting off the blueprints for Apollo. Reusing those would be something since that is a tested design.
Russia is bending metal on a full scale mockup, hopefully one they can use for atmospheric tests though its not clear from the information out at the moment. From the Astronautix article they've apparently been doing substantial work on the concept throughout the 90's.
All in all comparing Russia's track record in recent years versus NASA, Lockheed and Boeing I'll bet on Russia ev
Thats nice and all but I wager they don't build anything past step 4 by 2014 which is what I'm comparing to Kliper for 1/36th the price.
The Boeing booster is going to end up being the current Titan IV heavy which isn't going to be good enough unless you do multiple launches.
You'll note the capsule is a pathetic little thing nearly identical to the one Apollo had 40 years ago. In fact the whole lunar plan is just a regurgitation of Apollo, excepting they are missing one key component the Saturn V. I think it would be cheaper and more likely to work if they just dust off the the Apollo plans if they are just going to DO Apollo again. That lander is amazingly similar to the LEM except its inflatible.
The shuttle derived cargo lifter would rock but chances are currently slim to none it will actually happen. Its amazing that Boeing wouldn't have settled on one or the other by now if they are going to launch one by 2008. Going with Titan Heavy versus a Shuttle derived heavy lifter are two COMPLETELY different programs, with the second one taking a LOT longer to develop though it would be a lot more capable in both mass and volume.
Note that getting out of LEO isn't scheduled before 2015-2020 and I'm guessing its going to be closer to the later than the former. My 36X times the cost of Kliper for CEV is going to get you a pathetic little capsule in LEO in 2014, less capability than Kliper most probably not more, certainly not 36X more.
There isn't ANYTHING substantive in that plan to go to Mars, other than the delusion that they are going to use that same dinky little Apollo module which isn't going to cut it. They have this inflatable habitat in there but I think they only inflate that on surface. Its pretty apparent that they aren't thinking about Mars at all in that Constellation plan. The business plan smacks of:
- Build Apollo ripoff, without Saturn V - Go to Moon - ??? - Send tiny Apollo capsule to Mars, propulsion system TBD, sometime around 2050.
If you want to actually put people on the surface of the Moon or Mars for an extended period you need to drop a real habitat, fairly large, and bury it to shield it. You're also going to need some serious power, either solar or nuclear. Note there are no solar panels on their lander and I know they are to chicken to go nuclear so that means they must be using fuel on board and that means they aren't staying any length of time.
Believe it or not you want to get the habitat to the surface and leave it there so making it inflatible and like a LEM is not a great idea. I thought the plan was to actually put a colony on the Moon and Mars with long duration stays, not send an inflatible LEM to the surface and come back a few days later, JUST LIKE APOLLO.
I assure you I can draw those same pretty pictures, and they will have about the same value, if not more, than those in the end, and I'm willing to do it for a mere $100 million dollars.
You, like the Republicans always do when they talk about taxes for workers, left out the payroll taxes dumbass. Social Security is 12.5% by itself, when you count the 6.25% employer contribution they conceal from workers. Add in Medicare and unemployment and what you and your employer pay every two weeks out of your pay check is actuall well over 30% even if you are in a low income bracket.
You can pretend that those aren't taxes, rather entitlements, but that is only true if you live long enough to reach retirement age, and then live long enough after that to get all the money you put in back, and Social Security and Medicare aren't gutted by the time you get there, and the U.S. government hasn't cratered under massive deficits by then.
It wouldn't be quite so bad if the surplus from my payroll taxes was actually being put in to high yield long term T bills or something but in fact the government is just spending it in the general fund and intentionally giving everyone the worst possible return on it. If you take the Social Security surplus out of the budgets for the last few years the deficits would be truly enormous.
Private accounts don't change the situation because the Republican's are STILL going to make you pay the taxes, and the money will still be locked up until you retire. Only difference is if you die before you use it you can pass it on to your heirs but me being single that doesn't count for anything. Only improvement is the money is going to be put in the hands of Wall Street, instead of politicians so they can steal the money instead, the return will probably be some better unless Wall Street manipulates it. If private accounts do happen its going put some serious extra pressure on financing the deficits, the Chinese and Japanese will have to pick up more slack.
If you read the article, and I should have mentioned it in my post, the Russians have plans to use Kliper to go to the moon too. I doubt there is really ANY difference in the mission requirements between Kliper and the first iteration of CEV.
I hate to break it to you, the only reason CEV is so vastly more expensive is because NASA, Boeing and Lockheed are in the loop and of course the wage rates are higher in the U.S. than the U.S.S.R., especially after Boeing and Lockheed slap on their overhead. I assure you NASA, Lockheed and Boeing are experts at wasting money, you need look no further than the Shuttle and the ISS to see that.
As best I understand it the CEV prototype launches in 2008 wont address ANYTHING involving manned flight, going to the moon or mars. Its going to be a tin can that isn't man rated launched on a more less existing booster, heavy lift versions of Atlas, Delta or Titan and will barely make it to LEO. Not sure the first launches in 2014 with men will do anything but LEO either. Somebody is going to have to build a major new heavy launcher to go back to the moon or do multiple launches (i.e. fuel and a space tug on one, and then the CEV on another).
Its very much open to doubt if the CEV in its first iterations will address going to the Moon or Mars at all in 2014 either though it remains to be seen what they propose. I think there is at least a chance they will have to develop landers on top of the CEV to go to the moon(and a better booster). I'm skeptical that they are going to land the whole CEV on the moon and blast if off from there. The Apollo strategy was the right one for a lot of reasons. To do the Moon right chances are a several vehicles will be required.
Its completely delusional to think CEV will be usable at all for going to Mars. The requirements for going to LEO and the Moon are VASTLY different from those for going to Mars. If you use the same vehicle for all three its going to be either complete overkill for LEO and the Moon or woefully inadequate for Mars. The Mars vehicle is going to have to a completely different vehicle and boosters, its going to have to be way bigger or the crew will both run out of supplies and go bonkers trapped for that long in a tiny capsule.
I wouldn't be surprised if they try to do a shuttle with CEV, and do one size fits all for all three missions, but it will be the same disaster the Shuttle was, heavy and expensive, jack of all trades, master of none.
Hmmmm. Someone from Lockheed must have some mod points this morning:)
Sorry man, I know the truth about your company hurts, but that doesn't exactly make it flamebait. Its not exactly a secret that has the U.S. Government in general and the Republican party in particular wrapped around their little finger, much to the detriment of U.S. taxpayers. All those big campaign contributions and that revolving door hiring generals and politicians does buy influence, a lot of it.
Here is the proposed Russian replacement for Soyuz called Kliper. Astronautix has a little more detail on it. They are planning to show a full size model at the Paris air show in June.
Its an interesting hybrid of lifting body and capsule, it will reenter like a lifting body but pop a parachute and land with a thud like Soyuz. I think its fairly similar to canceled X vehicle Burt Rutan was developing as the ISS lifeboat.
It will carry 6 people or 700 Kilo's of cargo. If you hang one of these on the ISS as the emergency vehicle you could raise the manning level to six people and actually do some research on it for a change. The cargo capacity also appears well suited to resupply the ISS, it can carry a lot more than Progress and Soyuz.
They hope to have it flying by 2010 which just happens to be about when the Shuttle stops flying. They need $10 billion roubles to finish it which sounds like a lot but the exchange rate is 28 roubles to the dollar so that is only $350 million dollars. By contrast NASA is wasting $500 billion on CEV this year alone and they wont get ANYTHING for it other than pretty computer generated images. Building CEV is going to cost at least 36 times as much as Kliper and is scheduled to be 4 years later for its first manned launch, 2010 versus 2014.
Sure looks to me like Russia is hoping to fill the void the Shuttle is going to leave in 2010 with Kliper and essentially take over the ISS if they get the funding to develop it. Whatever happens the Russians are going to be the ONLY people putting people in to LEO on a regular basis from 2010 to 2014, maybe the Chinese will launch a few people too. NASA ought to be ashamed, very ashamed, again.
Seems to me like the Europeans or Japanese should jump at helping with the funding for Kliper. Their investment in ISS has been largely destroyed by NASA's failures, most of their modules are sitting on the ground and they may never get the astronauts onboard the ISS needed to do their planned research. For $350 million they could save their ISS investment and in partnership with Russia develop their own manned space program free of the boat anchor that is NASA, Boeing, Lockheed.
Seems to me like the Chinese could partner with Kliper as well with their new found wealth and jump start their rather slow manned space effort, especially if they get technology sharing in return for cash.
P.S.
I submitted the Kliper article when it came out a few days ago and it was rejected. It is real news versus this fluff piece. Hate to break it to you the shuttle has been scheduled to launch in May for a while now, its not news. The breaking news will be if they manage to stay on schedule for a change.
I was unaware that Lockheed was making a power play for control of the labs but it is 100% believable.
Lockheed has turned in to an all powerful cancer on America, they are THE case study in Eisenhower's prescient warning about the undue influence of the military-industrial complex after World War II.
Here is a pretty good article on how they run the government, instead of the government running them. Some of its a stretch as is St. Clair's way but he has lots of fascinating little tid bits you never see in main stream press.
A few choice lines:
- each household in the U.S. is estimated to pay $228 just to Lockheed in their taxes each year.
- Through heavy exploitation of tax loopholes their tax rate is around 7%, try getting that tax rate if you work for a living.
- The C-130J debacle described in the article is classic. The planes have so many design flaws they are useless to the Air Force. Some of them were to be Hurricane chaser replacements but the composite propellers are so flawed you can't fly them in bad weather. I heard a DOD budget briefing last week and it appears they are finally shutting down this disaster of a program. Instead of punishing Lockheed for incompetence they are going to pay them another billion dollars or so in shut down costs to reward Lockheed for delivering planes that are worthless.
I assure you Lockheed has plenty of incompetence of its own and there is NO way it should take over more national labs, but it probably will because it has acquired such massive influence over the government, and especially over the Republicans.
Actually I'm a old enough to remember both Democrats and Reagan quite well. I dont think I said anything pro Democrat in the whole piece you just LEPT to the conclusion I'm both liberal and Democrat without a basis because you are a dumbass. I dislike both parties equally excepting the Republican's have complete control of government now and are massively dangerous and are massively abusing their power. The Democrats are so impotent now they are nearly irrelevent so who whats the point in ranting about them.
I think the key point you miss is Democrats don't campaign on fiscal responsibility and conservatism. Both Reagan and Bush the second did. Both Reagan and Bush presided over the staggering deficits that dwarf anything the Democrats manages, because they both slash taxes for the rich AND don't control spending. You might give Reagan a pass and blame it on the Dems in congress though most of the red ink came from his policies. But Little George has ZERO excuse because his party controls everything.
"Now you and your ilk will squeal like stuck pigs when Bush suggests that we cut spending... Oh wait... your already sqealing."
Wrong again. First off chances by the time Congress and the Republican's in congress get done all the spending cuts will have disappeared and the red ink will still be there. You also gloss over much of the voluminous red ink is do to a massive explosion in defense, intelligence and homeland security spending which is going up not being cut. I do have a problem slashing domestic spending, and running deficits, while the Bush administration is squandering hundreds of billions of dollars on a completely optional war in Iraq.
Bottomline is what I hate most about Republicans is the HYPOCRISY. If they did what their rhetoric has been for decades and were real conservatives I'd LOVE them. I want them to gut the Federal government and slash both spending and taxes, but they DON'T do anything about all the pork going to their rich friends, and the ROUTINELY cut taxes for their same rich friends and working people get chump change. That I disapprove of.
Kind of high and mighty about your grasp of the series versus mine. You forgot you've seen the whole first season while its mid season in the U.S. Its not to bright to stagger broadcast of a series in different countries in the Internet age because one country can spoiler it to death for the rest of the world at a minimum or put it on a bit torrent worst case.
The series did redeem itself some in the episode on tonight in the U.S. when Adama shut down the McCarthyist independent tribunal and called it a witch hunt so I'm willing to give it a second chance if it will play up the show the bad side of the post 9/11 world.
This episode did make it a little more obvious Caprica-boomer is Cylon though its not something I would bet in a series with a lot of plot twists.
I suspect you are reading more in to the options thing that is really there. You see taxation and regulation is running against options and in favor of dividends at the moment. Options used to be practicly free money to hand out in previous years, but there is huge pressure now for companies to account for options since they dilute the value of shares owned by shareholders who bought them and previously were largely unaccounted for. Executives in particularly were massively abusing them to give themselves windfall profits, even if they weren't performing.
If you are a Microsoft employee I imagine you are maxing out your stock purchases lately and wanting cash bonuses to buy more stock.
You see, Microsoft paid out a $3 dollar dividend in December. It single handedly raised average income in the U.S. by 3.7% in December, without the dividend it would have been 0.8%. Though it should be noted that is an average, chances are the lion's share of it went in to the pockets of a few people, Gate's, Balmer, Allen, etc.
You see the Republican's passed a dividend tax cut in 2003 I think it was. I'm a little hazy on it but I think the tax on dividends is 0% at the moment. Just remember that if you work for a living when you see all those massive deductions out of your paycheck you can't escape. If you make $30K a year you are still probably paying 30% in withholding and payroll deductions. If you're Bill Gates at the moment you can pay billions of dollars to yourself in dividends and pay almost no taxes. Here is what Warren Buffet had to say about it when the Republicans were shoving it through.
The Republican argument was dividend taxes were double taxation, because the company paid taxes on it when the money was made and it was unfair to tax it again when it was paid out as a dividend. The little catch they didn't mention was big corporations exploit so many loopholes in the tax code, and take advantage of so many shelters they often don't pay any taxes in the first iteration.
If you were to go the options route you would pay a big chunk of the windfall of cashing them in capital gains taxes, not as much as you used to but a lot, compared to the 0% you pay on dividends at the money. Its pretty rare in the country to be able to make money and not pay any taxes on it. Bill Gates is not stupid, its pretty obvious now is a GREAT time to dole out all that cash in Microsoft's coffers as dividends, tax free. The dividend tax returns in 2007 though Little George is no doubt going to push to make the cut permanent.
Much of the recent economic "prosperity" is being pumped by tax policy that is letting the wealthy make out like bandits. The current tax code is a huge economic stimulus and that is good to pull an economy out of a recession. It is bad because its leading to huge deficits, and it is MASSIVELY unfair to working people who are getting chump change for tax incentives while the rich are harvesting huge windfalls, some of which they may reinvest in the U.S. and U.S. jobs, much of which is probably being invested in China, India, etc. or being blown on luxury goods.
You can sure tell when Republican's have complete control of things, because it is TOTALLY sweet to be a wealthy shareholder and it totally sucks to work for a living. The amazing thing is millions of working people who are being totally screwed by the Republicans, economicly, keep voting for them anyway. Republicans have some true genius, because they can sucker working people in to voting against their own economic interest by using wedge issues and scare tactics like terrorism, gay marriage, abortion, religion, etc.
Obviously they could have weathered the storm but they would have had to jump on single chip GPU's and push them in to PC's at a critical juncture, when the Pentium Pro and NT came out. They had the engineering talent to do it, especially considering many of their engineers DID do it at Nvidia in particular.
The problem is they had a management that resisted change and failed to grasp that a major shift was coming do to both hardware and software advances. As I said originally I think Jim Clark did see the shift but rather than coping with it and forcing SGI to make a hard right turn, the stories indicated he mostly went around SGI telling everyone SGI was doomed because of the change. The CEO walking around saying SGI was doomed was a bad thing so you can see McCracken and the board pushing him out over it.
Unfortunately you had a visionary exec who did see the problem but wasn't able to fix it, and the other execs at SGI were either so technologicly ignorant they didn't see it coming or were in denial. I think McCracken was in the technologicly ignorant camp. He was a respectable suit brought in to lend SGI credibility with Wall Street, a lot like Carly. He had no clue how to run a tech company. Most of the other senior execs, outside of Clark, were apparently in denial that the shift was coming.
Another key factor in the mix was that SGI did attempt a PC graphics card at one point but it was to early and flopped. The OS, CPU and graphics technology wasn't ready to make it work. They kind of got burned on it and it made them reluctant to try it when the time was right. Again they didn't have the management with the vision to see when the right time came.
They'd also got burned on the ill fated ACE initiative. If you don't remember what that was, it was when Window NT was just about to come out. It was actually MIPS centric initially. Compaq, Microsoft and SGI came within a whisker of forming a partnership that might have turned PC's to MIPS to run NT. Don't remember who got cold feet, I think it was Compaq probably because they decided dropping IA-32, and all the legacy Windows apps, was to big a change to risk. I imagine that further put SGI off attempting another foray in to the PC space.
If you mean the rather high value of their stock at the time they went on the merger binge with Cray, Alias and Wavefront it probably did fuel some insanity but I doubt it was the driving factor. At the time there was a lot of merger mania and the McCracken/Jermoluk management team was not a good one. I'm guessing Jermoluk was the one mentioned in the article who forgot the meeting with Fortune. He was a partier, and a hard charger, he had some charisma and some brilliance but he was also a flake much of the time and weak on strategy and vision.
SGI did make all the people that owned Cray, Alias and Wavefront stock rich because they bought them at a huge premium and most of those people dumped their stock right after the merger. SGI later sold both of them at huge writoffs(though they bought them with stock so it wasn't real money).
Cray was a basket case when SGI bought them. The one era when supercomputing rocked SGI's world was when the R8000 came out. It was revolutionary in having a lot of floating point and I/O in a cheap multiprocessor machine. It totally wiped out the bottom end of Cray's market. It was rumored at the time the government may have coerced SGI in to buying Cray because they didn't want Cray to go under because they were a still a strategic asset to the U.S. and certain agencies.
Unfortunately the one high value asset Cray had in the pipe was in a partnership with SUN, (what was the name?) Starfire, E-10000, something like that. Unfortunately SUN held the rights to it when SGI/Cray merged and it proved to be a raging success for SUN and totally hammered SGI in the HPC market right after the merger. It was irony that SGI got the smoldering ruin part of Cray when they bought them and SUN got the one Cray product that rocked, though its was SPARC based so SGI couldn't have made it work whatever.
SGI plunged into supercomputing partially because the R-8000 was such a success but they never matched that success in any subsequent product. The R-8000 totally messed up the MIPS road map because it was all floating point and no integer so it sucked in their workstation market. R-10000 was mediocre in both integer and floating point so wasn't a raging success in either. IA-64 is back to the R-8000 model great floating point on vector Fortran code but sucking wind at everything else. SGI can't win now because they have no viable CPU strategy at this point other than beg IBM for theirs or maybe jump on the 64 bit AMD bandwagon but I imagine their partnership with Intel precludes that.
It shold also be noted there was also a massive culture clash between the SGI and Cray camps after the merger, like there often is. They fought like cats and dogs, and knifed each other in the back at every opportunity, often in front of customers. It was a complete disaster of a merger and hastened SGI's demise.
As I recall Ed McCracken and Tom Jermolak were completely awed by the Cray name and all that impressive looking big iron and they bought the company using their dicks to do the thinking instead of their brains.
I don't think its really anything like Buran except maybe its going to have some manuevering ability during reentry. It is a lifting body but its not nearly as heavy or complex as the Buran/Shuttle, no wings, tail, landing gear, cockpit, etc.
The Astronautix article someone posted further up has more detail than the article I posted.
Sounds to me like its a capsule just shaped somewhat more like a lifting body but at some point its just going to pop a parachute and land like their current capsules.
I think it could be best described as a lifting body capsule. It also sounds like they've been working on it for a while they just haven't advertised it much.
"But it doesn't matter to SGI, which lags way behind IBM and Sun in HPC sales. It's not the market, it's the company."
No trust me its the market. It takes a ton of R&D money to stay on top of the HPC market, floating point and I/O in particular, and it gets worse with each new generation of chips.
Don't think its doing any wonders financially for SUN, they are in almost as bad a shape as SGI.
IBM is in it more for the PR and prestige. They are big enough they can afford the R&D costs especially with other big companies alongside like Sony, Toshiba and Apple. They are also a lot better at pushing the PowerPC technology in to both the low and high end. I'd sure like to know if IBM is making any serious money in their HPC efforts, I seriously doubt it once you factor out the R&D costs.
SGI simple lacked the resources to sustain MIPS development for HPC on its own, especially with MIPS going lowend and SGI trying to go high end and floating point with it. Now they are trying to keep both MIPS alive and make IA64 work and neither one of them do outside of the few niches where IA64 doesn't suck, or where they are building highly specialed systems for special government customers with deep pockets.
"In short, it would be much safer for somebody like Paul Allen or some other billionaire to invest in American companies instead where the legal system is more stable and predictable."
I forgot to answer this. Two problems
- If Allen goes with Scaled Composites, T/Space etc where his money would have impact chances are its going to be a long time before they make it to LEO. Suborbital is good for a stunt and a rush for rich bored tourists but you can't do anything else useful with it.
- If he were to go with Lockheed/Boeing who are the only ones going in to LEO anytime soon they will just swallow his money and he wont get anything out of it.
The Russians in the space agency are far more entrepreneurial than most people think though granted the Russian government is an untrustworthy mess, and it is a country rife with corruption, of course you could say almost the same about the U.S. thanks the Bush administration and one corprate scandal after another.
I guess I should have qualified this probably isn't really a high profit venture, its more like a prestige and love of space exploration venture.
You see about 2010 when the U.S. retires the shuttle chances are high the Russians are going to be the only game in town for putting people in to orbit or maybe going to the moon for at least 4 years until the CEV MIGHT come on line.
You are also going to have this huge investment in the ISS assuming NASA manages to kind of finish it by 2010, that is also probably going to be completely dependent on the Russians to supply and crew.
Its not an accident Russia is targeting Kliper for 2010. If they pull it off they will pretty much take over the ISS, on the cheap, and take advantage of all the money NASA has squandered on it.
The Europeans, Japanese and Canadians in particular have a lot of money sunk in ISS that they've gotten next to nothing out of and many of their modules are still sitting on the ground. I sure could see them being willing to pony up some cash if it means they keep the ISS alive, get it up to a 6 man crew, and start doing some research in it. Don't think they are real pleased that the U.S. is planning to throw together the pieces and then give up on the ISS and the Shuttle.
Sure seems to me like the Chinese might also like to get in the game. They could sure spare $350 million especially if they get technology sharing in the process. It would jumpstart their rather slow manned space effort.
I can see a lot of potential angles for Kliper that might might prove to be interesting, and I wager the Russians see every one of them too.
Ethicly yes working for Microsoft must be a bitter pill. Not sure working on Longhorn, Office or IE(does anyone actually still work on IE) are the greatest jobs in the world, Longhorn kind of sounds like a multiyear death march.
On the other hand if you want to do research there probably aren't many places better than Microsoft Research. There aren't many companies, especially software companies, spending $6 billion a year(or whatever it is today) on research, much of it pure research where some of the best people in the computer business just go off and putter on things that interest them, which may never turn in to anything or which may be huge.
As I recall one thing to Microsoft's credit is they are pretty good about giving people offices instead of cramming people in to cubes, and that counts for a LOT to some people. Cube farms are one step above livestock farms for people.
Speaking of SGI I see Kurt Akeley moved to Microsoft Research. If you don't the name he was the father of big chunks of OpenGL and the 3D graphics you spend all your time using in games today. He's alongside Jim Blinn and Michael Cohen, another OpenGL luminary.
Though having praised Microsoft Research I really don't have a handle on how much actual useful stuff they turn out as a group. Sometimes you get the impression they recruit a lot of big names and those people just go there and putter around and never do anything major the rest of their lives, having had their day in the sun and being past their prime.
I suspect you may need to be young and in a desperate startup fighting to survive, like SGI was in its early years, to make the breakthroughs that revolutionize things.
The were doomed about the time Jim Clark realized the PC's and Windows had come far enough along that they were going to rule the world, and thanks to their economy of scale, low margins and fast product cycles proprietary workstations were doomed.
Clark then preceded to start telling everyone at SGI the bad news, it hacked off Ed McCracken among others, they forced him out and they lost their visionary. He went on to make a fortune on Netscape on the PC, SGI meanwhile had no vision and started spiraling in.
A major disruptive shift was occuring in the market, the visionary saw it, everyone else at SGI refused to see it. At the nexus was the first Windows NT release, the Pentium Pro, single chip graphics engines like Glint and Voodoo(today Nvidia and ATI), oh and Microsoft bought Softimage and made them port to the PC at which point everyone realized expensive 3D workstations were dead, everyone except the people at SGI.
If I recall correctly Pentium Pro was the first chip with some of the fruits of Intel's outright theft of Digital's Alpha architecture at which point IA32 started to not suck for the first time. If you recall Intel partnered with DEC with the idea of adopting at least part of Alpha. After they looked at all of the Alpha's inner secrets, they backed out, used all of DEC's IP anyway and it caught Intel up with RISC. DEC won a court case over it a long time later but by then the damage was done and Intel was rewarded handsomely for thievery.
At the same time SGI was rushing in to the supercomputing market which isn't a market that has ever or will ever sustain a fast growing company. Its a quirky market, where you survive on good will, whims and largesse of the U.S. government, which is pretty much the only thing keeping SGI alive today. 9/11 probably saved SGI from bankruptcy because they can live on the big surge in Defense and Intelligence spending, building high end systems that almost no one but the government will buy.
Was checking and 10 billion roubles sure does sound like an insurmountable obstacle. Then you check the exchange rate which as of Dec 31, 2004 was 28 roubles to the dollar. So divide 10 billion roubles and divide by 28 and you get:
$357 million
Russia took in $86 billion dollars in oil revenue in 2004 and in fact their economy is doing a lot better thanks to high oil and gas prices and the Yukos debacle mostly behind them now.
NASA, Boeing and Lockheed are spending $500 millions dollars just this year on CEV and when its gone they will have done next to nothing. Another $1 billion dollars which is 28 billion roubles is slated for CEV in the 2006 budget.
Geez, this is one case for outsourcing I'd jump at. Give the Russians the $357 million and come back and pick up your space craft in 2010, even if it overruns to $500 million and 2011 you'll still be WAY ahead of the CEV
If CEV stays on budget, which would be a miracle for NASA and these contractors its gonna cost 179 billion roubles just through 2009 and then you still have 5 more years to go before the first manned launch to LEO. For another five years you would have to at least double the first 5 years to so you are at 360 billion roubles to get CEV to its first LEO launch, 36X more expensive than Kliper.
I sure hope the Europeans, Indians, Japanese, Chinese, or some wealthy private adventurers(Paul Allen you out there?) gives the Russians the money after they show it at the Paris Air Show.
"Anyways, Caprica-Boomer becomes pregnant (a not-so-virgin birth) and there's a glowing child in a crib, which Balter sees in a vision induced by the Cylon in his head (presumably). If there are similar motifs in Islam then I'm not aware, but feel free to correct me."
Not sure I follow your point but thats pretty normal today. At what point was it clearly established that Caprica-Boomer and Helo are Cylon. If they both turn out to be human and the "glowing child" you seems to be obsessing on so much turns out to be a human baby Jesus and the savior of the human race that just pushes the show further in to right wing wacko territory. Not saying that is the case, having seen a total of about 4 episodes, but I think you are talking about a season ending cliffhanger and you have no more clue about whats actually going to happen to your Cylon baby Jesus in season two than I do.
I know exactly what it means. I have no clue what you are talking about with the "another movie" part. I've said repeatedly in one or more episodes exploited the 9/11 hijackings not some "movie". Just to repeat because you missed it, one of their early episodes was a spaceship hijacking and it was being flown in to the ships in the fleet. And of course a decision had to be made as to whether to shootdown the hijacked space craft. In case this doesn't sound familiar to you its a story line straight from 9/11, hijacking planes, crashing hijacked planes, and government debating whether to order shooting down hijacked planes. They are using the 9/11 tragedy for a story line, they are exploiting 9/11 for dramatic impact. Get it.
Well at this point I don't care because attempting an intelligent debate with you is proving to be a waste of time.
Kliper has an uphill funding battle but its a tribute to the Russian Space Agencies that in spite of that they still find a way to keep doing stuff in space. They will also benefit that the Russian government has regained some control of its big oil reserves. Their oil and gas fields, thanks to high prices, are bringing in big cash reserves to Russia if they keep them from beeing looted by plutocrats and foreign companies.
You may not have noticed but they are the only nation that has always been able to put men in space pretty much continuously since 1960. The U.S. has gone through 3 long periods with no manned launch vehicle and is going in to another one when the shuttle is retired.
Hate to break it to you but listing the litany of failed U.S. launch vehicles has zero relevance to anything relating to Kliper. Its just proof positive that the nexus of politicians, NASA and its contractors have completely lost the ability to do anythingin the manned space program.
Kliper is an incremental improvement on Soyuz, a big one, but its not like most of these failed U.S. attempts which were radical departures and failed as a result. To their tribute they are bending metal on a full scale mockup while I'm pretty sure Boeing and Lockheed are still working on 3D fantasies for CEV. If they do manage a launch in 2010 that is still 4 years ahead of CEV.
Slashdot Mirror
The obvious question, why just because you've opted to buy stocks, and are lucky enough to have the money to put in them, should you be special and not have to pay taxes on your income.
Why if I put money in to a savings account which in turn is loaned out to small businesses or to buy houses, why is the money I make in interest still taxed and your dividends are not.
You are stating something obvious, you are getting income, not paying any taxes on it an you are glad, duh.
The thing you are missing is the massive inequity.
It is less objectional if small investors reap the windfall, but it doesn't change the fact that the very wealthy, like Bill Gates are reaping enormous windfalls and not paying their fair of the tax burden. If they don't we have to either:
A. Run huge deficits which we are
B. Someone else has to pick up the slack, for example the government steals the Social Security surplus coming out of the wages of working people who are often barely getting by.
Low or no taxes on dividends would be less objectionable if corporations were paying a fair share of the tax burden. There share is down to 8% of the total tax burden last I heard and they are engaged in wholesale tax dodges and loophole exploitation. If they don't pay any taxes and they started doleing out huge dividends as Microsoft is doing there is potential for a giant untaxed economy and it is disproportionally going to the wealthy.
Try not paying taxes on wages, you will be in jail in no time.
The fundamental thing Republicans never get is that if you allow all the wealth to concentrate in the hands of an ever smaller economic elite, you are eventually going to have 95% of your people in poverty and 5% enormously wealthy. Many third world countries are like that and its enormously unhealthy. The U.S. was like this during the robber baron era at the end of the 19th century. The wealth concentration in the hands of a few led to massive unrest among everyone else, it started the Progressive Movement. Our progressive tax system arose during this era to reign in the wealth concentration and it restored some balance. The U.S. entered an era in the 20th century where America developed a big and healthy middle class. That healthy middle class is rapidly disappearing thanks to a tax code that is allowing the rich to get richer at a blinding pace, and working people's jobs and incomes are under assault thanks to outsourcing and illegal immigration and an increasingly regressive tax code.
As an aside I see today the U.S. trade deficit grew by a whopping 24% from 2003 to 2004. It passed $600 billion dollars. The U.S. simply can't continue to export its jobs and wealth at this rate and not end up with a smoldering economic ruin for working people and the middle class. Not to worry the wealthy elite will be OK, they will still be racking in untaxed dividends and investing their money in China, and the rich continue to get richer.
...or Sony comes out with EQ3 and all of your ancestors are trapped in EQ2 purgatory, not dead, but not alive, like all the characters and guilds in EQ1 that can't be transfered to EQ2.
"You were 4 when Reagan was"
Why don't you stop trying to pretend like you have psychic abilities, because you don't, and it just makes you look stupid. Do you actually think you are psychic? I was out of school and working for a living when Reagan siezed power.
"I accused you of being a liberal "
Well you were wrong again, your psychic powers are really slipping. I'm socially liberal which means I believe in live and let live. When it comes to big government I'm an arch conservative or maybe libertarian. I pretty much want the whole thing to go away. The only place I don't fit the mold and which makes me not a libertarian is I'm a huge believer in regulating the hell out of corporations because if someone doesn't keep them in check they are going to make life not worth living on this planet. Greed is a great motivator but its also a great destroyer when left unchecked.
"What, by prosecuting a war against our enemies."
No, by shreding our constitution, due process and rule of law. If we don't preserve those then you'll win some battles and lose the war. You really don't deserve American citizenship because apparently have no clue what its actually all about. Just a hint its our constitution, due process and the rule of law, not letting anyone be below the protection of the law and not letting anyone be above the law, most of all the President. Me thinks you would be happier in a nice right wing dictatorship though the U.S. practicly there so I guess you are in the right place. Me I think the New Republican party would be reviled by out founding fathers if they were alive to see it.
Hate to break it to you, but you aren't going to beat Al Qaida by invading one country after another. All your going to do is bankrupt the U.S. and turn the whole world against you. I know my history well enough to recognize paranoid delusionals like you and Joe McCarthy who start seeing enemies behind every rock, and you will become more dangerous to this country than external enemies. You should study Joe McCarthy sometime and learn from his mistakes before you repeat them. He died in disgrace you know because eventually everyone figured out he was wrong, out of control and dangerous.
"Democrats always claim to be fiscally responsible"
The problem here is you are still ranting about Democrats like they matter. They are irrelevant now. I know its an obsession for right wing nut cases and you can't stop ranting about them but to me they are irelavant. Why don't you rant about Bill Clinton while your here, he's only been gone 4 years. Just because the Democrats are pathetic, doesn't make the Republicans right and good by default.
"Wrong again. Reagan, through tax cuts DOUBLED treasury revenues beginining in 1982"
Simple answer here. Look at a chart of budget deficits. You will notice there are two staggering periods of deficits since 1972. The '80's during Reaganomics and since Little George siezed power. I'm all for tax cuts to stimulate the economy, the key point is you need to cut spending to so the deficits don't erase the benefits and the Republican's, despite their rhetoric, don't.
"If you want to get rid of the deficit, cut taxes and spending."
The problem here is you keep lecturing on something I already know and agree with. The problem is you keep kidding your self that the Republican's actually do that. At least for Reagan and Little George, they cut taxes, cut domestic spending and explode spending on defense, they generate huge deficits and the economy never generates enough revenue to correct the shortfalls. Meanwhile we accumulate staggering debts and an ever bigger percentage of our economu, the budget and our tax dollars go to maintaing debts that are being consistently produced at overwhelming levels under right wing presidents. The liberal conspiracy theory is they are trying to bankrupt the U.S. government so they wipe out the Fed
"A capsule is an extraordinarily efficient way to design anything ..."
No argument its a good design approach excepting for the fact that its probably TINY inside. Conic capsules have severe size limitations which is probably why Kliper is using a different geometry, they seem to be tapping the benefits of the lifting body but without most of the weight penalties like landing gear.
Correct me if I'm wrong but the CEV plan appears to be to spend billions of dollars and 10 years to build a capsule not very different from the one we had 40 years ago and which the Russians already have, Soyuz.
The other point being you can't jam astronauts in one and send them on a multiyear mission to Mars which is what Boeing's plan seems to be doing. A Mars mission needs to be more like a small space station with room to exercise, room to get away from each other, lots of cargo space, tacked in front of a big propulsion system. Most sci fi designs for Mars put water tanks around at least part of the habitat for some shielding since you need lots of water anyway and you will need some serious shielding if there is a big solar storm.
"First we gotta go there, then we get out and walk around and come back"
Uh, we've already been there, walked around and came back. If you will recall after Apollo 12 everyone stopped caring and wondered what we were wasting all the money for. Apollo 13 regained excitement briefly and then everyone stopped caring again and when everyone stopped caring the money stopped flowing.
NASA runs a high danger of having huge excitement for the first return mission to the Moon and then everyone will say, uh we did that already, whats the point. Even putting a permanent presence on the moon isn't going to be any better unless you have a reason for people to be there, you have to have them doing something you can only do if you have people there, and that has real value. Harvesting fuel for a fusion reactor is the only reason I've seen and we dont have the fusion reactor. Maybe you could harvest moon dust for shielding and building big structures but that is kind of out there.
The only mission you can build a case for is putting a permanent colony on Mars as in people go there, have babies and don't come back. Mars has a enough resources to have a reasonable chance of becoming self sustaining, and then you have a whole new biosphere and that is something that matters. The Moon is dead and always will be, you will be stuck resupplying a colony there forever or more likely just stop going.
Problem is going to Mars is so far out in this grand plan its going to run out of money and die before it even starts.
Of course we've squandered 200 billion on Iraq so far and anything you do in space would be better than that insanity. I'd take a colony on the Moon over that any day, even if there is no point in putting a colony on the Moon.
"... in the new Moon/Mars plans, it's because those things worked."
It worked to the Moon, Mars is a completely different and MUCH harder challenge. What worked for a week long trip to the Moon ISN'T going to have much relevance going to Mars.
"But right now, all Kliper's got are some engineering plans and a mock-up, and the mock-up isn't done yet. They're not planning for it to fly until 2010, which is two years after the completion of CEV's first spiral."
Outside the boosters which the U.S., Russia and ESA all Boeing has is computer generated fantasy unless they are actually dusting off the blueprints for Apollo. Reusing those would be something since that is a tested design.
Russia is bending metal on a full scale mockup, hopefully one they can use for atmospheric tests though its not clear from the information out at the moment. From the Astronautix article they've apparently been doing substantial work on the concept throughout the 90's.
All in all comparing Russia's track record in recent years versus NASA, Lockheed and Boeing I'll bet on Russia ev
Thats nice and all but I wager they don't build anything past step 4 by 2014 which is what I'm comparing to Kliper for 1/36th the price.
The Boeing booster is going to end up being the current Titan IV heavy which isn't going to be good enough unless you do multiple launches.
You'll note the capsule is a pathetic little thing nearly identical to the one Apollo had 40 years ago. In fact the whole lunar plan is just a regurgitation of Apollo, excepting they are missing one key component the Saturn V. I think it would be cheaper and more likely to work if they just dust off the the Apollo plans if they are just going to DO Apollo again. That lander is amazingly similar to the LEM except its inflatible.
The shuttle derived cargo lifter would rock but chances are currently slim to none it will actually happen. Its amazing that Boeing wouldn't have settled on one or the other by now if they are going to launch one by 2008. Going with Titan Heavy versus a Shuttle derived heavy lifter are two COMPLETELY different programs, with the second one taking a LOT longer to develop though it would be a lot more capable in both mass and volume.
Note that getting out of LEO isn't scheduled before 2015-2020 and I'm guessing its going to be closer to the later than the former. My 36X times the cost of Kliper for CEV is going to get you a pathetic little capsule in LEO in 2014, less capability than Kliper most probably not more, certainly not 36X more.
There isn't ANYTHING substantive in that plan to go to Mars, other than the delusion that they are going to use that same dinky little Apollo module which isn't going to cut it. They have this inflatable habitat in there but I think they only inflate that on surface. Its pretty apparent that they aren't thinking about Mars at all in that Constellation plan. The business plan smacks of:
- Build Apollo ripoff, without Saturn V
- Go to Moon
- ???
- Send tiny Apollo capsule to Mars, propulsion system TBD, sometime around 2050.
If you want to actually put people on the surface of the Moon or Mars for an extended period you need to drop a real habitat, fairly large, and bury it to shield it. You're also going to need some serious power, either solar or nuclear. Note there are no solar panels on their lander and I know they are to chicken to go nuclear so that means they must be using fuel on board and that means they aren't staying any length of time.
Believe it or not you want to get the habitat to the surface and leave it there so making it inflatible and like a LEM is not a great idea. I thought the plan was to actually put a colony on the Moon and Mars with long duration stays, not send an inflatible LEM to the surface and come back a few days later, JUST LIKE APOLLO.
I assure you I can draw those same pretty pictures, and they will have about the same value, if not more, than those in the end, and I'm willing to do it for a mere $100 million dollars.
You, like the Republicans always do when they talk about taxes for workers, left out the payroll taxes dumbass. Social Security is 12.5% by itself, when you count the 6.25% employer contribution they conceal from workers. Add in Medicare and unemployment and what you and your employer pay every two weeks out of your pay check is actuall well over 30% even if you are in a low income bracket.
You can pretend that those aren't taxes, rather entitlements, but that is only true if you live long enough to reach retirement age, and then live long enough after that to get all the money you put in back, and Social Security and Medicare aren't gutted by the time you get there, and the U.S. government hasn't cratered under massive deficits by then.
It wouldn't be quite so bad if the surplus from my payroll taxes was actually being put in to high yield long term T bills or something but in fact the government is just spending it in the general fund and intentionally giving everyone the worst possible return on it. If you take the Social Security surplus out of the budgets for the last few years the deficits would be truly enormous.
Private accounts don't change the situation because the Republican's are STILL going to make you pay the taxes, and the money will still be locked up until you retire. Only difference is if you die before you use it you can pass it on to your heirs but me being single that doesn't count for anything. Only improvement is the money is going to be put in the hands of Wall Street, instead of politicians so they can steal the money instead, the return will probably be some better unless Wall Street manipulates it. If private accounts do happen its going put some serious extra pressure on financing the deficits, the Chinese and Japanese will have to pick up more slack.
If you read the article, and I should have mentioned it in my post, the Russians have plans to use Kliper to go to the moon too. I doubt there is really ANY difference in the mission requirements between Kliper and the first iteration of CEV.
I hate to break it to you, the only reason CEV is so vastly more expensive is because NASA, Boeing and Lockheed are in the loop and of course the wage rates are higher in the U.S. than the U.S.S.R., especially after Boeing and Lockheed slap on their overhead. I assure you NASA, Lockheed and Boeing are experts at wasting money, you need look no further than the Shuttle and the ISS to see that.
As best I understand it the CEV prototype launches in 2008 wont address ANYTHING involving manned flight, going to the moon or mars. Its going to be a tin can that isn't man rated launched on a more less existing booster, heavy lift versions of Atlas, Delta or Titan and will barely make it to LEO. Not sure the first launches in 2014 with men will do anything but LEO either. Somebody is going to have to build a major new heavy launcher to go back to the moon or do multiple launches (i.e. fuel and a space tug on one, and then the CEV on another).
Its very much open to doubt if the CEV in its first iterations will address going to the Moon or Mars at all in 2014 either though it remains to be seen what they propose. I think there is at least a chance they will have to develop landers on top of the CEV to go to the moon(and a better booster). I'm skeptical that they are going to land the whole CEV on the moon and blast if off from there. The Apollo strategy was the right one for a lot of reasons. To do the Moon right chances are a several vehicles will be required.
Its completely delusional to think CEV will be usable at all for going to Mars. The requirements for going to LEO and the Moon are VASTLY different from those for going to Mars. If you use the same vehicle for all three its going to be either complete overkill for LEO and the Moon or woefully inadequate for Mars. The Mars vehicle is going to have to a completely different vehicle and boosters, its going to have to be way bigger or the crew will both run out of supplies and go bonkers trapped for that long in a tiny capsule.
I wouldn't be surprised if they try to do a shuttle with CEV, and do one size fits all for all three missions, but it will be the same disaster the Shuttle was, heavy and expensive, jack of all trades, master of none.
Hmmmm. Someone from Lockheed must have some mod points this morning :)
Sorry man, I know the truth about your company hurts, but that doesn't exactly make it flamebait. Its not exactly a secret that has the U.S. Government in general and the Republican party in particular wrapped around their little finger, much to the detriment of U.S. taxpayers. All those big campaign contributions and that revolving door hiring generals and politicians does buy influence, a lot of it.
Here is the proposed Russian replacement for Soyuz called Kliper. Astronautix has a little more detail on it. They are planning to show a full size model at the Paris air show in June.
Its an interesting hybrid of lifting body and capsule, it will reenter like a lifting body but pop a parachute and land with a thud like Soyuz. I think its fairly similar to canceled X vehicle Burt Rutan was developing as the ISS lifeboat.
It will carry 6 people or 700 Kilo's of cargo. If you hang one of these on the ISS as the emergency vehicle you could raise the manning level to six people and actually do some research on it for a change. The cargo capacity also appears well suited to resupply the ISS, it can carry a lot more than Progress and Soyuz.
They hope to have it flying by 2010 which just happens to be about when the Shuttle stops flying. They need $10 billion roubles to finish it which sounds like a lot but the exchange rate is 28 roubles to the dollar so that is only $350 million dollars. By contrast NASA is wasting $500 billion on CEV this year alone and they wont get ANYTHING for it other than pretty computer generated images. Building CEV is going to cost at least 36 times as much as Kliper and is scheduled to be 4 years later for its first manned launch, 2010 versus 2014.
Sure looks to me like Russia is hoping to fill the void the Shuttle is going to leave in 2010 with Kliper and essentially take over the ISS if they get the funding to develop it. Whatever happens the Russians are going to be the ONLY people putting people in to LEO on a regular basis from 2010 to 2014, maybe the Chinese will launch a few people too. NASA ought to be ashamed, very ashamed, again.
Seems to me like the Europeans or Japanese should jump at helping with the funding for Kliper. Their investment in ISS has been largely destroyed by NASA's failures, most of their modules are sitting on the ground and they may never get the astronauts onboard the ISS needed to do their planned research. For $350 million they could save their ISS investment and in partnership with Russia develop their own manned space program free of the boat anchor that is NASA, Boeing, Lockheed.
Seems to me like the Chinese could partner with Kliper as well with their new found wealth and jump start their rather slow manned space effort, especially if they get technology sharing in return for cash.
P.S.
I submitted the Kliper article when it came out a few days ago and it was rejected. It is real news versus this fluff piece. Hate to break it to you the shuttle has been scheduled to launch in May for a while now, its not news. The breaking news will be if they manage to stay on schedule for a change.
I was unaware that Lockheed was making a power play for control of the labs but it is 100% believable.
Lockheed has turned in to an all powerful cancer on America, they are THE case study in Eisenhower's prescient warning about the undue influence of the military-industrial complex after World War II.
Here is a pretty good article on how they run the government, instead of the government running them. Some of its a stretch as is St. Clair's way but he has lots of fascinating little tid bits you never see in main stream press.
A few choice lines:
- each household in the U.S. is estimated to pay $228 just to Lockheed in their taxes each year.
- Through heavy exploitation of tax loopholes their tax rate is around 7%, try getting that tax rate if you work for a living.
- The C-130J debacle described in the article is classic. The planes have so many design flaws they are useless to the Air Force. Some of them were to be Hurricane chaser replacements but the composite propellers are so flawed you can't fly them in bad weather. I heard a DOD budget briefing last week and it appears they are finally shutting down this disaster of a program. Instead of punishing Lockheed for incompetence they are going to pay them another billion dollars or so in shut down costs to reward Lockheed for delivering planes that are worthless.
I assure you Lockheed has plenty of incompetence of its own and there is NO way it should take over more national labs, but it probably will because it has acquired such massive influence over the government, and especially over the Republicans.
Actually I'm a old enough to remember both Democrats and Reagan quite well. I dont think I said anything pro Democrat in the whole piece you just LEPT to the conclusion I'm both liberal and Democrat without a basis because you are a dumbass. I dislike both parties equally excepting the Republican's have complete control of government now and are massively dangerous and are massively abusing their power. The Democrats are so impotent now they are nearly irrelevent so who whats the point in ranting about them.
... your already sqealing."
I think the key point you miss is Democrats don't campaign on fiscal responsibility and conservatism. Both Reagan and Bush the second did. Both Reagan and Bush presided over the staggering deficits that dwarf anything the Democrats manages, because they both slash taxes for the rich AND don't control spending. You might give Reagan a pass and blame it on the Dems in congress though most of the red ink came from his policies. But Little George has ZERO excuse because his party controls everything.
"Now you and your ilk will squeal like stuck pigs when Bush suggests that we cut spending... Oh wait
Wrong again. First off chances by the time Congress and the Republican's in congress get done all the spending cuts will have disappeared and the red ink will still be there. You also gloss over much of the voluminous red ink is do to a massive explosion in defense, intelligence and homeland security spending which is going up not being cut. I do have a problem slashing domestic spending, and running deficits, while the Bush administration is squandering hundreds of billions of dollars on a completely optional war in Iraq.
Bottomline is what I hate most about Republicans is the HYPOCRISY. If they did what their rhetoric has been for decades and were real conservatives I'd LOVE them. I want them to gut the Federal government and slash both spending and taxes, but they DON'T do anything about all the pork going to their rich friends, and the ROUTINELY cut taxes for their same rich friends and working people get chump change. That I disapprove of.
Kind of high and mighty about your grasp of the series versus mine. You forgot you've seen the whole first season while its mid season in the U.S. Its not to bright to stagger broadcast of a series in different countries in the Internet age because one country can spoiler it to death for the rest of the world at a minimum or put it on a bit torrent worst case.
The series did redeem itself some in the episode on tonight in the U.S. when Adama shut down the McCarthyist independent tribunal and called it a witch hunt so I'm willing to give it a second chance if it will play up the show the bad side of the post 9/11 world.
This episode did make it a little more obvious Caprica-boomer is Cylon though its not something I would bet in a series with a lot of plot twists.
I suspect you are reading more in to the options thing that is really there. You see taxation and regulation is running against options and in favor of dividends at the moment. Options used to be practicly free money to hand out in previous years, but there is huge pressure now for companies to account for options since they dilute the value of shares owned by shareholders who bought them and previously were largely unaccounted for. Executives in particularly were massively abusing them to give themselves windfall profits, even if they weren't performing.
If you are a Microsoft employee I imagine you are maxing out your stock purchases lately and wanting cash bonuses to buy more stock.
You see, Microsoft paid out a $3 dollar dividend in December. It single handedly raised average income in the U.S. by 3.7% in December, without the dividend it would have been 0.8%. Though it should be noted that is an average, chances are the lion's share of it went in to the pockets of a few people, Gate's, Balmer, Allen, etc.
You see the Republican's passed a dividend tax cut in 2003 I think it was. I'm a little hazy on it but I think the tax on dividends is 0% at the moment. Just remember that if you work for a living when you see all those massive deductions out of your paycheck you can't escape. If you make $30K a year you are still probably paying 30% in withholding and payroll deductions. If you're Bill Gates at the moment you can pay billions of dollars to yourself in dividends and pay almost no taxes. Here is what Warren Buffet had to say about it when the Republicans were shoving it through.
The Republican argument was dividend taxes were double taxation, because the company paid taxes on it when the money was made and it was unfair to tax it again when it was paid out as a dividend. The little catch they didn't mention was big corporations exploit so many loopholes in the tax code, and take advantage of so many shelters they often don't pay any taxes in the first iteration.
If you were to go the options route you would pay a big chunk of the windfall of cashing them in capital gains taxes, not as much as you used to but a lot, compared to the 0% you pay on dividends at the money. Its pretty rare in the country to be able to make money and not pay any taxes on it. Bill Gates is not stupid, its pretty obvious now is a GREAT time to dole out all that cash in Microsoft's coffers as dividends, tax free. The dividend tax returns in 2007 though Little George is no doubt going to push to make the cut permanent.
Much of the recent economic "prosperity" is being pumped by tax policy that is letting the wealthy make out like bandits. The current tax code is a huge economic stimulus and that is good to pull an economy out of a recession. It is bad because its leading to huge deficits, and it is MASSIVELY unfair to working people who are getting chump change for tax incentives while the rich are harvesting huge windfalls, some of which they may reinvest in the U.S. and U.S. jobs, much of which is probably being invested in China, India, etc. or being blown on luxury goods.
You can sure tell when Republican's have complete control of things, because it is TOTALLY sweet to be a wealthy shareholder and it totally sucks to work for a living. The amazing thing is millions of working people who are being totally screwed by the Republicans, economicly, keep voting for them anyway. Republicans have some true genius, because they can sucker working people in to voting against their own economic interest by using wedge issues and scare tactics like terrorism, gay marriage, abortion, religion, etc.
Obviously they could have weathered the storm but they would have had to jump on single chip GPU's and push them in to PC's at a critical juncture, when the Pentium Pro and NT came out. They had the engineering talent to do it, especially considering many of their engineers DID do it at Nvidia in particular.
The problem is they had a management that resisted change and failed to grasp that a major shift was coming do to both hardware and software advances. As I said originally I think Jim Clark did see the shift but rather than coping with it and forcing SGI to make a hard right turn, the stories indicated he mostly went around SGI telling everyone SGI was doomed because of the change. The CEO walking around saying SGI was doomed was a bad thing so you can see McCracken and the board pushing him out over it.
Unfortunately you had a visionary exec who did see the problem but wasn't able to fix it, and the other execs at SGI were either so technologicly ignorant they didn't see it coming or were in denial. I think McCracken was in the technologicly ignorant camp. He was a respectable suit brought in to lend SGI credibility with Wall Street, a lot like Carly. He had no clue how to run a tech company. Most of the other senior execs, outside of Clark, were apparently in denial that the shift was coming.
Another key factor in the mix was that SGI did attempt a PC graphics card at one point but it was to early and flopped. The OS, CPU and graphics technology wasn't ready to make it work. They kind of got burned on it and it made them reluctant to try it when the time was right. Again they didn't have the management with the vision to see when the right time came.
They'd also got burned on the ill fated ACE initiative. If you don't remember what that was, it was when Window NT was just about to come out. It was actually MIPS centric initially. Compaq, Microsoft and SGI came within a whisker of forming a partnership that might have turned PC's to MIPS to run NT. Don't remember who got cold feet, I think it was Compaq probably because they decided dropping IA-32, and all the legacy Windows apps, was to big a change to risk. I imagine that further put SGI off attempting another foray in to the PC space.
If you mean the rather high value of their stock at the time they went on the merger binge with Cray, Alias and Wavefront it probably did fuel some insanity but I doubt it was the driving factor. At the time there was a lot of merger mania and the McCracken/Jermoluk management team was not a good one. I'm guessing Jermoluk was the one mentioned in the article who forgot the meeting with Fortune. He was a partier, and a hard charger, he had some charisma and some brilliance but he was also a flake much of the time and weak on strategy and vision.
SGI did make all the people that owned Cray, Alias and Wavefront stock rich because they bought them at a huge premium and most of those people dumped their stock right after the merger. SGI later sold both of them at huge writoffs(though they bought them with stock so it wasn't real money).
Cray was a basket case when SGI bought them. The one era when supercomputing rocked SGI's world was when the R8000 came out. It was revolutionary in having a lot of floating point and I/O in a cheap multiprocessor machine. It totally wiped out the bottom end of Cray's market. It was rumored at the time the government may have coerced SGI in to buying Cray because they didn't want Cray to go under because they were a still a strategic asset to the U.S. and certain agencies.
Unfortunately the one high value asset Cray had in the pipe was in a partnership with SUN, (what was the name?) Starfire, E-10000, something like that. Unfortunately SUN held the rights to it when SGI/Cray merged and it proved to be a raging success for SUN and totally hammered SGI in the HPC market right after the merger. It was irony that SGI got the smoldering ruin part of Cray when they bought them and SUN got the one Cray product that rocked, though its was SPARC based so SGI couldn't have made it work whatever.
SGI plunged into supercomputing partially because the R-8000 was such a success but they never matched that success in any subsequent product. The R-8000 totally messed up the MIPS road map because it was all floating point and no integer so it sucked in their workstation market. R-10000 was mediocre in both integer and floating point so wasn't a raging success in either. IA-64 is back to the R-8000 model great floating point on vector Fortran code but sucking wind at everything else. SGI can't win now because they have no viable CPU strategy at this point other than beg IBM for theirs or maybe jump on the 64 bit AMD bandwagon but I imagine their partnership with Intel precludes that.
It shold also be noted there was also a massive culture clash between the SGI and Cray camps after the merger, like there often is. They fought like cats and dogs, and knifed each other in the back at every opportunity, often in front of customers. It was a complete disaster of a merger and hastened SGI's demise.
As I recall Ed McCracken and Tom Jermolak were completely awed by the Cray name and all that impressive looking big iron and they bought the company using their dicks to do the thinking instead of their brains.
I don't think its really anything like Buran except maybe its going to have some manuevering ability during reentry. It is a lifting body but its not nearly as heavy or complex as the Buran/Shuttle, no wings, tail, landing gear, cockpit, etc.
The Astronautix article someone posted further up has more detail than the article I posted.
Sounds to me like its a capsule just shaped somewhat more like a lifting body but at some point its just going to pop a parachute and land like their current capsules.
I think it could be best described as a lifting body capsule. It also sounds like they've been working on it for a while they just haven't advertised it much.
"But it doesn't matter to SGI, which lags way behind IBM and Sun in HPC sales. It's not the market, it's the company."
No trust me its the market. It takes a ton of R&D money to stay on top of the HPC market, floating point and I/O in particular, and it gets worse with each new generation of chips.
Don't think its doing any wonders financially for SUN, they are in almost as bad a shape as SGI.
IBM is in it more for the PR and prestige. They are big enough they can afford the R&D costs especially with other big companies alongside like Sony, Toshiba and Apple. They are also a lot better at pushing the PowerPC technology in to both the low and high end. I'd sure like to know if IBM is making any serious money in their HPC efforts, I seriously doubt it once you factor out the R&D costs.
SGI simple lacked the resources to sustain MIPS development for HPC on its own, especially with MIPS going lowend and SGI trying to go high end and floating point with it. Now they are trying to keep both MIPS alive and make IA64 work and neither one of them do outside of the few niches where IA64 doesn't suck, or where they are building highly specialed systems for special government customers with deep pockets.
"In short, it would be much safer for somebody like Paul Allen or some other billionaire to invest in American companies instead where the legal system is more stable and predictable."
I forgot to answer this. Two problems
- If Allen goes with Scaled Composites, T/Space etc where his money would have impact chances are its going to be a long time before they make it to LEO. Suborbital is good for a stunt and a rush for rich bored tourists but you can't do anything else useful with it.
- If he were to go with Lockheed/Boeing who are the only ones going in to LEO anytime soon they will just swallow his money and he wont get anything out of it.
The Russians in the space agency are far more entrepreneurial than most people think though granted the Russian government is an untrustworthy mess, and it is a country rife with corruption, of course you could say almost the same about the U.S. thanks the Bush administration and one corprate scandal after another.
I guess I should have qualified this probably isn't really a high profit venture, its more like a prestige and love of space exploration venture.
You see about 2010 when the U.S. retires the shuttle chances are high the Russians are going to be the only game in town for putting people in to orbit or maybe going to the moon for at least 4 years until the CEV MIGHT come on line.
You are also going to have this huge investment in the ISS assuming NASA manages to kind of finish it by 2010, that is also probably going to be completely dependent on the Russians to supply and crew.
Its not an accident Russia is targeting Kliper for 2010. If they pull it off they will pretty much take over the ISS, on the cheap, and take advantage of all the money NASA has squandered on it.
The Europeans, Japanese and Canadians in particular have a lot of money sunk in ISS that they've gotten next to nothing out of and many of their modules are still sitting on the ground. I sure could see them being willing to pony up some cash if it means they keep the ISS alive, get it up to a 6 man crew, and start doing some research in it. Don't think they are real pleased that the U.S. is planning to throw together the pieces and then give up on the ISS and the Shuttle.
Sure seems to me like the Chinese might also like to get in the game. They could sure spare $350 million especially if they get technology sharing in the process. It would jumpstart their rather slow manned space effort.
I can see a lot of potential angles for Kliper that might might prove to be interesting, and I wager the Russians see every one of them too.
Ethicly yes working for Microsoft must be a bitter pill. Not sure working on Longhorn, Office or IE(does anyone actually still work on IE) are the greatest jobs in the world, Longhorn kind of sounds like a multiyear death march.
On the other hand if you want to do research there probably aren't many places better than Microsoft Research. There aren't many companies, especially software companies, spending $6 billion a year(or whatever it is today) on research, much of it pure research where some of the best people in the computer business just go off and putter on things that interest them, which may never turn in to anything or which may be huge.
As I recall one thing to Microsoft's credit is they are pretty good about giving people offices instead of cramming people in to cubes, and that counts for a LOT to some people. Cube farms are one step above livestock farms for people.
Speaking of SGI I see Kurt Akeley moved to Microsoft Research. If you don't the name he was the father of big chunks of OpenGL and the 3D graphics you spend all your time using in games today. He's alongside Jim Blinn and Michael Cohen, another OpenGL luminary.
Though having praised Microsoft Research I really don't have a handle on how much actual useful stuff they turn out as a group. Sometimes you get the impression they recruit a lot of big names and those people just go there and putter around and never do anything major the rest of their lives, having had their day in the sun and being past their prime.
I suspect you may need to be young and in a desperate startup fighting to survive, like SGI was in its early years, to make the breakthroughs that revolutionize things.
Kind of a grandiose assessment of SGI's demise.
The were doomed about the time Jim Clark realized the PC's and Windows had come far enough along that they were going to rule the world, and thanks to their economy of scale, low margins and fast product cycles proprietary workstations were doomed.
Clark then preceded to start telling everyone at SGI the bad news, it hacked off Ed McCracken among others, they forced him out and they lost their visionary. He went on to make a fortune on Netscape on the PC, SGI meanwhile had no vision and started spiraling in.
A major disruptive shift was occuring in the market, the visionary saw it, everyone else at SGI refused to see it. At the nexus was the first Windows NT release, the Pentium Pro, single chip graphics engines like Glint and Voodoo(today Nvidia and ATI), oh and Microsoft bought Softimage and made them port to the PC at which point everyone realized expensive 3D workstations were dead, everyone except the people at SGI.
If I recall correctly Pentium Pro was the first chip with some of the fruits of Intel's outright theft of Digital's Alpha architecture at which point IA32 started to not suck for the first time. If you recall Intel partnered with DEC with the idea of adopting at least part of Alpha. After they looked at all of the Alpha's inner secrets, they backed out, used all of DEC's IP anyway and it caught Intel up with RISC. DEC won a court case over it a long time later but by then the damage was done and Intel was rewarded handsomely for thievery.
At the same time SGI was rushing in to the supercomputing market which isn't a market that has ever or will ever sustain a fast growing company. Its a quirky market, where you survive on good will, whims and largesse of the U.S. government, which is pretty much the only thing keeping SGI alive today. 9/11 probably saved SGI from bankruptcy because they can live on the big surge in Defense and Intelligence spending, building high end systems that almost no one but the government will buy.
Was checking and 10 billion roubles sure does sound like an insurmountable obstacle. Then you check the exchange rate which as of Dec 31, 2004 was 28 roubles to the dollar. So divide 10 billion roubles and divide by 28 and you get:
$357 million
Russia took in $86 billion dollars in oil revenue in 2004 and in fact their economy is doing a lot better thanks to high oil and gas prices and the Yukos debacle mostly behind them now.
NASA, Boeing and Lockheed are spending $500 millions dollars just this year on CEV and when its gone they will have done next to nothing. Another $1 billion dollars which is 28 billion roubles is slated for CEV in the 2006 budget.
Geez, this is one case for outsourcing I'd jump at. Give the Russians the $357 million and come back and pick up your space craft in 2010, even if it overruns to $500 million and 2011 you'll still be WAY ahead of the CEV
If CEV stays on budget, which would be a miracle for NASA and these contractors its gonna cost 179 billion roubles just through 2009 and then you still have 5 more years to go before the first manned launch to LEO. For another five years you would have to at least double the first 5 years to so you are at 360 billion roubles to get CEV to its first LEO launch, 36X more expensive than Kliper.
I sure hope the Europeans, Indians, Japanese, Chinese, or some wealthy private adventurers(Paul Allen you out there?) gives the Russians the money after they show it at the Paris Air Show.
"Anyways, Caprica-Boomer becomes pregnant (a not-so-virgin birth) and there's a glowing child in a crib, which Balter sees in a vision induced by the Cylon in his head (presumably). If there are similar motifs in Islam then I'm not aware, but feel free to correct me."
Not sure I follow your point but thats pretty normal today. At what point was it clearly established that Caprica-Boomer and Helo are Cylon. If they both turn out to be human and the "glowing child" you seems to be obsessing on so much turns out to be a human baby Jesus and the savior of the human race that just pushes the show further in to right wing wacko territory. Not saying that is the case, having seen a total of about 4 episodes, but I think you are talking about a season ending cliffhanger and you have no more clue about whats actually going to happen to your Cylon baby Jesus in season two than I do.
"exploit" another movie"
I know exactly what it means. I have no clue what you are talking about with the "another movie" part. I've said repeatedly in one or more episodes exploited the 9/11 hijackings not some "movie". Just to repeat because you missed it, one of their early episodes was a spaceship hijacking and it was being flown in to the ships in the fleet. And of course a decision had to be made as to whether to shootdown the hijacked space craft. In case this doesn't sound familiar to you its a story line straight from 9/11, hijacking planes, crashing hijacked planes, and government debating whether to order shooting down hijacked planes. They are using the 9/11 tragedy for a story line, they are exploiting 9/11 for dramatic impact. Get it.
Well at this point I don't care because attempting an intelligent debate with you is proving to be a waste of time.
Kliper has an uphill funding battle but its a tribute to the Russian Space Agencies that in spite of that they still find a way to keep doing stuff in space. They will also benefit that the Russian government has regained some control of its big oil reserves. Their oil and gas fields, thanks to high prices, are bringing in big cash reserves to Russia if they keep them from beeing looted by plutocrats and foreign companies.
You may not have noticed but they are the only nation that has always been able to put men in space pretty much continuously since 1960. The U.S. has gone through 3 long periods with no manned launch vehicle and is going in to another one when the shuttle is retired.
Hate to break it to you but listing the litany of failed U.S. launch vehicles has zero relevance to anything relating to Kliper. Its just proof positive that the nexus of politicians, NASA and its contractors have completely lost the ability to do anythingin the manned space program.
Kliper is an incremental improvement on Soyuz, a big one, but its not like most of these failed U.S. attempts which were radical departures and failed as a result. To their tribute they are bending metal on a full scale mockup while I'm pretty sure Boeing and Lockheed are still working on 3D fantasies for CEV. If they do manage a launch in 2010 that is still 4 years ahead of CEV.