But this should make all the Young Libertarians on Slashdot delirious with delight. Isn't the price of freedom supposed to be eternal vigilance?
Yes. Vigilance against the Government. I'm far more worried about Washington and Albany than I am about a handful of naked savages residing in caves who managed to pull off a single mass casualty attack only through luck and our own incompetence.
If, however, your position is that the government should fund and develop space travel until such time as profitability can be established, then I absolutely agree with you.
That was my point. The internet wasn't really profitable until the 90s (though there were a few exceptions, as others pointed out). That doesn't mean that building it was a waste of time or money though.
I don't think 5 years is unreasonable if we threw our unconditional support behind it.
I disagree, though I'd love to be proven wrong. How long did it take from conception to completion to design, build and test the A380? Presumably with the full benefit of the internet, CAD/CAM and everything else that you mentioned. Do you think that a space craft capable of going to Mars and returning would be less complicated than the A380?
Ten years is probably more reasonable though I think we'd both agree that neither timeline is realistic with the current amount of funding that NASA receives.
I'm not using them to justify the "entire" program. I picked one accomplishment out of many to highlight. Do you honestly believe that the whole shuttle and ISS program is nothing more than a PR campaign?
No, I don't think business will jump in with both feet. I never said anything of the sort. All I think is that gutting the manned space program is incredibly short-sighted. There will come a day when spaceflight is profitable. That could be tomorrow if we discover some rare and profitable material (not likely), it could be within our lifetimes (somewhat more likely) or it could come afterwards. Either way, I think it's in our long term interest to do everything we can to develop space flight technologies and to study the effect that space flight has on the human body.
The dinosaurs died out because they didn't have a space program. Personally I'd prefer that homo sapien not suffer the same fate.
Imagine if we spent $600B PER YEAR on finding alternative energy. Imagine if we spent $600B in one year on NASA. We'd be at Mars within 5 years. We slapsticked the Moon mission together in, what now looks like record time.
You must be a Democrat if you think that merely throwing large amounts of money at a problem is all that is required to solve it. You could write NASA a blank check tomorrow and it would still take more than 5 years to get to Mars. You think you can design, build and test a spacecraft overnight? You think you can train the guys who will fly it overnight?
Universal health care would cost an estimate $70B. $70. For ~1/10th of what we spend blowing people up we could give every man woman and child in America full health care.
The problem with our health care system isn't a lack of money. The problem with our health care system is that large bureaucracies (Governmental and corporate) spend most of the money and remove the consumer from the process of determining value. You can throw 70B or even 600B more at the problem and it's only going to get worse.
I would support the Democrats in spite of their "great society" ambitions if they were serious about fixing the real underlying problems in our system. Unfortunately all they want to do is add more people into it. That may allow them to claim political victory but all it's doing is propping up a system that gobbles up an ever increasing slice of our treasure.
If you want a serious discussion about health care check out my journal and read the article that I linked. It might enlighten you.
It should also be clear even to a jackass such as yourself that you can't predict whether or not space exploration will be economically profitable in the mid to long term.
TFA doesn't say that it will stop artillery. It says they fired a "mechanical multicaliber gun" at 1,400 feet per second. It doesn't say what calibers or bullet weights they were using but the speed of 1,400 fps suggests that they are testing it against handgun equivalents. There are many off the shelf rifle calibers that will easily achieve twice that velocity. It would be interesting to see if this material is proof against them or if it's only useful against handguns.
People who keep making this argument need to face the fact that there's a reason that private companies aren't going to the moon (or into space in general). It's not because the government is stopping them - if there was money to be made, big companies would route around the government. The problem is that there's no money in it.
There was no money in the internet either until the 1990s. I guess building it before then was a waste of time and money.
I don't carry cash. I bet the advent of widespread debit/credit card use has really put a crimp in the panhandler lifestyle. I keep waiting to run into one with a credit card machine.
In any event, it's much more fun to tell them to get a job when they beg for money. This will generate a reaction ranging from "fuck you" to just walking away. If you are lucky they will try to take a swing at you and you can test out your new taser;)
More than the sum of ALL OTHER COUNTRIES combined.
What's your point? We could spend the money in other ways? Yeah, maybe. Unless the world destabilized and we had to step in at a later date and spend even more money to pick up the pieces.
This is like walking around with $600 in your pocket and giving a bum on the street $3.
So NASA is a homeless bum in your world view? Maybe we should tell them to get a job;)
Talk *is* cheap. And I honestly don't think that the US government has the stomach for space exploration any more. The people certainly don't... space is a hostile environment. If you feel that any loss of life is completely unacceptable, you'll never get out there, because the environment itself will kill you if you give it a chance.
What makes you think the American people feel that any loss of life is completely unacceptable? Most of the polls that I saw following the Columbia disaster showed an increase in support for the space program. I don't think the American people have a problem with the fact that space flight is an inherently dangerous activity. They do have a problem when incompetence leads to fatalities (who cares what the engineers say about the temperature and o-rings? let's launch!) but there's never been a majority of Americans that would scrap the whole program over them.
Either way, stop wasting resources on money sinks like the ISS and a pointless shuttle program. They're little more than giant PR programs.
That's extremely unfair. The shuttle hasn't lived up to it's original billing (cheap, reusable) or flown as many flights as was envisioned but to claim it's nothing more than a giant PR program is rather dismissive of everything that it has accomplished. No shuttle == no hubble repair mission == no hubble for the last 15 years.
No, I'm just enough of a realist to know that war comes with human misery and that the alternative of continuing to live under Saddam would have been worse for the 2/3'rds of the country that wasn't Sunni.
It's funny how your quoted death toll keeps rising the longer we talk. Originally it was 100k. Now it's "hundreds of thousands". I suspect that if we continue this conversation long enough the entire population of Iraq will have died and it will all be George W. Bush's fault.
No matter what word games you play, there is an enormous number of civilians who would be alive if were not for the invasion Iraq.
And they'd be living under the thumb of a brutal dictator that gassed his own people and oppressed 2/3'rds of the population. In fact, tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians were already dying before the invasion, because Saddam was intercepting humanitarian aid and using it for his own ends. But I guess those facts don't matter to you, do they?
It's cute that you say we "caused" the deaths of 100k civilians when your own link lists deaths caused by insurgents and terrorists. I guess we made them murder civilians or something.
Yeah. Bill Clinton was totally different than GWB. He never would have signed stupid laws that took away our rights or called for regime change in Iraq.
The appointing of Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court members is also completely independant of the Executive Branch.
I'm reasonably certain that the Governor of Massachusetts is part of the Executive Branch of Government. Perhaps you meant to say the appointment process is completely independent of the Federal executive?
Which is an inherent problem with expanding the powers of the executive branch. Even if there's a lot of complaining about it at the time, there's not much incentive for the next guy to back out of those powers once they've been established. There was lots of complaining from some Republicans when Clinton made the FISA court into a rubber-stamping operation after Oklahoma City, but then they ignored FISA entirely after 9/11.
There's another problem as well. Loyalty to political party is apparently more important than loyalty to the Constitution and checks and balances. Can you imagine the reaction from Congressional Republicans if Bill Clinton had been the one running the War on Terror?
Slashdot Mirror
Let's just declare martial law and get it over with.
Why do you assume they are acting with nefarious intent when a much simpler explanation is good old fashioned Governmental incompetence?
But this should make all the Young Libertarians on Slashdot delirious with delight. Isn't the price of freedom supposed to be eternal vigilance?
Yes. Vigilance against the Government. I'm far more worried about Washington and Albany than I am about a handful of naked savages residing in caves who managed to pull off a single mass casualty attack only through luck and our own incompetence.
If, however, your position is that the government should fund and develop space travel until such time as profitability can be established, then I absolutely agree with you.
That was my point. The internet wasn't really profitable until the 90s (though there were a few exceptions, as others pointed out). That doesn't mean that building it was a waste of time or money though.
I don't think 5 years is unreasonable if we threw our unconditional support behind it.
I disagree, though I'd love to be proven wrong. How long did it take from conception to completion to design, build and test the A380? Presumably with the full benefit of the internet, CAD/CAM and everything else that you mentioned. Do you think that a space craft capable of going to Mars and returning would be less complicated than the A380?
Ten years is probably more reasonable though I think we'd both agree that neither timeline is realistic with the current amount of funding that NASA receives.
Which post would that be?
but the tip of a whip is the fastest thing short of a fighter jet.
Or a bullet. Or a photon. Or the speed with which you will roll your eyes at my corrections ;)
I'm not using them to justify the "entire" program. I picked one accomplishment out of many to highlight. Do you honestly believe that the whole shuttle and ISS program is nothing more than a PR campaign?
No, I don't think business will jump in with both feet. I never said anything of the sort. All I think is that gutting the manned space program is incredibly short-sighted. There will come a day when spaceflight is profitable. That could be tomorrow if we discover some rare and profitable material (not likely), it could be within our lifetimes (somewhat more likely) or it could come afterwards. Either way, I think it's in our long term interest to do everything we can to develop space flight technologies and to study the effect that space flight has on the human body.
The dinosaurs died out because they didn't have a space program. Personally I'd prefer that homo sapien not suffer the same fate.
Imagine if we spent $600B PER YEAR on finding alternative energy. Imagine if we spent $600B in one year on NASA. We'd be at Mars within 5 years. We slapsticked the Moon mission together in, what now looks like record time.
You must be a Democrat if you think that merely throwing large amounts of money at a problem is all that is required to solve it. You could write NASA a blank check tomorrow and it would still take more than 5 years to get to Mars. You think you can design, build and test a spacecraft overnight? You think you can train the guys who will fly it overnight?
Universal health care would cost an estimate $70B. $70. For ~1/10th of what we spend blowing people up we could give every man woman and child in America full health care.
The problem with our health care system isn't a lack of money. The problem with our health care system is that large bureaucracies (Governmental and corporate) spend most of the money and remove the consumer from the process of determining value. You can throw 70B or even 600B more at the problem and it's only going to get worse.
I would support the Democrats in spite of their "great society" ambitions if they were serious about fixing the real underlying problems in our system. Unfortunately all they want to do is add more people into it. That may allow them to claim political victory but all it's doing is propping up a system that gobbles up an ever increasing slice of our treasure.
If you want a serious discussion about health care check out my journal and read the article that I linked. It might enlighten you.
It should also be clear even to a jackass such as yourself that you can't predict whether or not space exploration will be economically profitable in the mid to long term.
Maybe they used a .357 magnum revolver and invented that term so none of the hoplophobes in the media would freak out ;)
TFA doesn't say that it will stop artillery. It says they fired a "mechanical multicaliber gun" at 1,400 feet per second. It doesn't say what calibers or bullet weights they were using but the speed of 1,400 fps suggests that they are testing it against handgun equivalents. There are many off the shelf rifle calibers that will easily achieve twice that velocity. It would be interesting to see if this material is proof against them or if it's only useful against handguns.
I have ants where I live
I would hope so, unless you are posting from the ISS ;)
The ants don't care about their own dead, apparently
Actually a lot of ants will collect their dead. It's really quite amazing to watch too.
People who keep making this argument need to face the fact that there's a reason that private companies aren't going to the moon (or into space in general). It's not because the government is stopping them - if there was money to be made, big companies would route around the government. The problem is that there's no money in it.
There was no money in the internet either until the 1990s. I guess building it before then was a waste of time and money.
I've given money to panhandlers plenty of times
I don't carry cash. I bet the advent of widespread debit/credit card use has really put a crimp in the panhandler lifestyle. I keep waiting to run into one with a credit card machine.
In any event, it's much more fun to tell them to get a job when they beg for money. This will generate a reaction ranging from "fuck you" to just walking away. If you are lucky they will try to take a swing at you and you can test out your new taser ;)
More than the sum of ALL OTHER COUNTRIES combined.
What's your point? We could spend the money in other ways? Yeah, maybe. Unless the world destabilized and we had to step in at a later date and spend even more money to pick up the pieces.
This is like walking around with $600 in your pocket and giving a bum on the street $3.
So NASA is a homeless bum in your world view? Maybe we should tell them to get a job ;)
Talk *is* cheap. And I honestly don't think that the US government has the stomach for space exploration any more. The people certainly don't... space is a hostile environment. If you feel that any loss of life is completely unacceptable, you'll never get out there, because the environment itself will kill you if you give it a chance.
What makes you think the American people feel that any loss of life is completely unacceptable? Most of the polls that I saw following the Columbia disaster showed an increase in support for the space program. I don't think the American people have a problem with the fact that space flight is an inherently dangerous activity. They do have a problem when incompetence leads to fatalities (who cares what the engineers say about the temperature and o-rings? let's launch!) but there's never been a majority of Americans that would scrap the whole program over them.
Either way, stop wasting resources on money sinks like the ISS and a pointless shuttle program. They're little more than giant PR programs.
That's extremely unfair. The shuttle hasn't lived up to it's original billing (cheap, reusable) or flown as many flights as was envisioned but to claim it's nothing more than a giant PR program is rather dismissive of everything that it has accomplished. No shuttle == no hubble repair mission == no hubble for the last 15 years.
No, I'm just enough of a realist to know that war comes with human misery and that the alternative of continuing to live under Saddam would have been worse for the 2/3'rds of the country that wasn't Sunni.
It's funny how your quoted death toll keeps rising the longer we talk. Originally it was 100k. Now it's "hundreds of thousands". I suspect that if we continue this conversation long enough the entire population of Iraq will have died and it will all be George W. Bush's fault.
No matter what word games you play, there is an enormous number of civilians who would be alive if were not for the invasion Iraq.
And they'd be living under the thumb of a brutal dictator that gassed his own people and oppressed 2/3'rds of the population. In fact, tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians were already dying before the invasion, because Saddam was intercepting humanitarian aid and using it for his own ends. But I guess those facts don't matter to you, do they?
Huh ? That's like saying show me 3 people who have a nice pair of running shoes and I'll show you 3 guys who can't afford a car.
We need a +1 car analogy mod.... ;)
It's cute that you say we "caused" the deaths of 100k civilians when your own link lists deaths caused by insurgents and terrorists. I guess we made them murder civilians or something.
Yeah. Bill Clinton was totally different than GWB. He never would have signed stupid laws that took away our rights or called for regime change in Iraq.
The appointing of Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court members is also completely independant of the Executive Branch.
I'm reasonably certain that the Governor of Massachusetts is part of the Executive Branch of Government. Perhaps you meant to say the appointment process is completely independent of the Federal executive?
Which is an inherent problem with expanding the powers of the executive branch. Even if there's a lot of complaining about it at the time, there's not much incentive for the next guy to back out of those powers once they've been established. There was lots of complaining from some Republicans when Clinton made the FISA court into a rubber-stamping operation after Oklahoma City, but then they ignored FISA entirely after 9/11.
There's another problem as well. Loyalty to political party is apparently more important than loyalty to the Constitution and checks and balances. Can you imagine the reaction from Congressional Republicans if Bill Clinton had been the one running the War on Terror?