For simply getting to low Earth orbit, the most viable long-term solution is obviously the true space-plane. I'm not talking about the supposedly "reusable" space shuttle here, or even the ill-fated crew return vehicle. I'm talking about a space vehicle with plane-like operations: it takes off horizontally, accellerates to about Mach 12 with various air-breathing propulsions (scramjets and air liquifaction engines come to mind), switches to rockets for the final boost into orbit, does its thing, and then glides back into the atmosphere for a powered horizontal landing. No expendable components. No multi-billion-dollar support facilities. Just a hangar, a fuel pump, and a pilot.
Such a vehicle would not need to be as heavy as current lifting rockets, since it would not have to carry all of its oxidizer on board; much of it would be collected from the atmosphere. In fact, the only oxidizer the craft would have to carry at all is for the rocket stage, and with an air liquifaction engine, separation mechanism, and clever flight path, even that could be collected on the way up! Plus, the cost of operation would decline dramatically, as the vehicle could basically land, refuel, and go again. Like a commercial airliner, which makes many flights a day.
Of course, this is all pretty far off as far as current technology goes. NASA's having trouble getting to Mach 6 with the Hyper-X, let alone Mach 12. But this is where space travel will eventually lead, and this is where it MUST lead for space to become commercially viable. Getting to orbit is the hard part. Once there, jumping between planets becomes trivial using nuclear rockets or low-thrust electric propulsion.
Yes, I agree. Nuclear launchers could be a fantastically efficient way to get people into space and off to Mars.
However, in this world of Tom Clancy movienovels and WMD propoganda, the public has a hard time wrapping its brain around anything involving the words "nuclear," "fission," or "reaction." The space program is nothing without popular support and the populous currently believes the mantra "Nuclear = Evil." Sad, but true.
NASA is not going to die. Most people seem to forget that NASA stands for National Aeronautics and Space Administration. There's an awful lot more going on than a few robotic probes and shuttle launches.
What is abundantly clear, however, is that Bush's "space initiative" is nothing more than smoke and mirrors designed to boost his approval ratings. Let's crunch a few numbers: Bush's plan set aside an additional $12 billion for developing a "Saturn Mark II" launch vehicle with a capsule capable of landings on both the Moon and Mars. Not only is the number ridiculous, but so is the method for obtaining the funds. Bush claims that $1 billion will be allocated by Congress, and the additional $11 billion will be found by restructuring NASA, including ending shuttle flights. So we'll finish up the station by 2010, auction the shuttles on eBay, and be on the Moon by 2015? Riiiight. First of all, NASA won't have any free funds from ending the shuttle program until at least 2010 when the station is complete, and then that only leaves 5 years for development of a completely new vehicle and support system. Even then, the shuttle's budget is only about $4 billion. The remaining $7 billion will have to be earned by cutting into NASA's remaining $11 billion. So once again, the Aeronautics branch of NASA is getting the shaft in favor of a bloated and fatally optimistic manned space program. Sound familiar? It's the shuttle all over again.
Since the federal government seems to be waffling on what it thinks NASA should be doing, I am in favor of a much less glamorous "bottom-up" approach to space exploration. Let the private entrepreneurs build simple craft to get us barely out of the atmosphere. From there, the craft get slightly more sophisticated, and through the magic of technological evolution from several sources, we end up exploring the solar system in ways we can't even dream of now. We can parallel this growth to that of the internet: it started as a large, well funded government program (ARPANET), but it wasn't until the little guy started to find commercial opportunities that it really took off (Amazon, anyone?) If we had relied on the DoD to create the internet for us, we'd be stuck with an online copy of the Library of Congress, distributed through a huge router the size of a steel factory and transmitting over a 9600 baud connection.
While Bush has his head in the sand, the X-Prize and the X-Prize Cup will be ruling the upper atmosphere! I plan on retiring at the Shady Craters Lunar Resort.
And, to keep this little tirade on topic: The Hubble Telescope has performed beautifully and well beyond its intended lifespan. There are other, better space telescopes in the works. Let's save the shuttle flight for station hardware and let the telescope retire with dignity.
So the DVD releases are going to contain more new footage? Because if I remember right, there was no Naboo celebration scene at the end of Episode VI: just Cloud City, Mos Eisley, Endor, and Coruscant.
Leave it to George "Theatrical Releases are First Drafts" Lucas to give us 15 versions of the same movie.
...and because it's a fantasy universe, no one will complain when I refuse to accept the existence of George's buzzkillers: the mitichlorians and the immaculate conception.
They don't exist. Never happened.
**sticks fingers in ears and hums the Imperial March**
The thing we have to remember about all the Star Wars movies is that they are based on the cheesy pulp sci-fi novels of the 1950s. Everything in the universe is a little hokey/cartoonish, themes are a little simplistic, characters have a never-ending supply of one-liners, and there's an overall feeling that each movie is just an episode in a much larger story.
Staying true to that while still making a movie entertaining, engaging, and intriguing is a very fine line. One step to the right and the movie loses it's childhood fascination, and one step to the left creates a Saturday morning cartoon.
Episodes IV, V, and VI treaded this line extremely well. Episode IV had the advantage of being the first: the filmmakers could simply introduce the SW universe and its concepts (good vs. evil, the Force, master/apprentice relationships, etc.) and the movie turned out to be pretty good (it also didn't hurt that the storyline followed a single arc, with only hints of other information). On top of that, it introduced fantastic special effect that no one had ever seen before, including making space battles look like war footage. Episodes V and VI had it a little rougher since the SW universe was not new, but they were likewise successes because the writers created intriguing new stories and populated them with genuinely likable characters (or, in the case of Vader, characters we could identify with). The universe also expanded from the simple good vs. evil to a place where betrayal and redemption are possible.
So then 15 years pass and we are presented with Episodes I and II. On the surface, they look much the same as IV, V and VI: one-liners, wonderful special effects, villians, good guys, they have it all. Right? Wrong. The difference lies in the writing. While the dialog in Episodes IV, V, and VI may have been a little contrived and/or hokey ("Your problem is you don't have enough scoundrels in your life." "If there's a bright center to the universe, you're on the planet that it's farthest from.") it still seemed natural enough to be palatable. Contrast this with the dialog from Episodes I and II ("Once those droids will take control of the surface, they will take control of you." "I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere. Not like you. You're everything soft and smooth.") which is downright painful. None of the actors in the movies are bad, with the possible exception of the much-debated Jar-Jar, but they can only do so much with awful material. I'll bet even the wooden performance of Hayden Christiansen would have been fine if the dialog had been better (for reference, see Mark Hamill). In the midst of George's search for gee-whiz CGI effects and action figures, he lost sight of that very thin line, and the movies shifted to the left, into stupid Saturday morning cartoons.
Recently, on a whim, I decided to watch Episode II with the DVD commentary track. To my delight, I discovered that the movie became infinitely better with the commentary track. I didn't have to listen to the awful dialog, I was still able to see the fantastic special effects, and I was listening to the moviemakers talk about what the movie was supposed to be: they would describe the underlying emotions of a scene for example, and their explanations would make far more sense than the innane chatter dribbling from the characters' mouths. Seriously. It makes the movie watchable.
Yet every scenario you describe involves respected companies (Mobil, Harrah's, Safeway, etc.) carrying out highly illegal collusion or surveillance activities. That sounds fairly paranoid to me.
All I'm trying to say here is that there are no privacy issues unique to Speedpass. Since the number is useless without the database, anyone wishing to gain your personal information would have to either hack into the database or purchase it illegally from a company with access. In either case, they don't need the number at all, once they have the database. This makes Speedpass no more of a privacy issue than any credit card. These shadowy figures you describe could do the same things with a Visa database.
No system of monetary transfer is without SOME privacy issues. Hell, I could lift fingerprints from your cash and trace your purchases, if I wanted to. But reasonable people take a look at the statistics and conclude that the risk is acceptable for them to get on with their lives. There is no such thing as zero risk, and when the numbers get small enough, the system can be declared safe. So in that sense, no, I don't think there are privacy issues with the Speedpass. I think it's a sound system of convenient payment. If you feel that the risks of such convenience are too high for you, then fine. Feel free to use one of many other forms of payment. But don't start crying wolf about systems that are perfectly acceptable and considered safe by the vast majority of the population, including the system's designers and operators.
All of the scenarios you describe about companies sharing or obtaining information about you for advertising purposes (or worse) involve either hacking into Mobil's database once they have the number (illegal!) or colluding with other companies (also illegal!). Or maybe Speedpass (read: Exxon Mobil Corp., the largest US oil company) will go out of business and sell their member database. I doubt it.
The Speedpass is JUST A NUMBER. If a store nabs your credit card information and your Speedpass number with the intent of selling it, why would they need your damn Speedpass number? They could do just as much damage with the credit card number alone. And how often to retailers sell their customers' credit card information? Never, unless you're shopping online at The Fetish Shack. No information-selling company is going to gain anything by getting your Speedpass number. It's meaningless without Mobil's database, and they'd either have to hack into it, or have a contract with Mobil (which I doubt any shady retailer has). And Mobil's database has ALL the Speedpass numbers. The hackers wouldn't need yours.
There is only one instance I can think of where people could abuse your Speedpass number. They could build a device to scan for Speedpass numbers and walk around the street collecting them. Then they could build their own RFID device, with the number they stole, and buy gas with it. Since they wouldn't have your personal information, they couldn't change your account settings or get cash from it. They could only purchase things from Speedpass-enabled stores. And once you (or Mobil) saw the strange charges on your account, the number would be disabled, and you would be issued a new one. You are FAR more likely to have your credit card stolen by Hank's House of Horny online than you are for someone to abuse your Speedpass.
My point here is that there is not some huge corporate conspiracy to track your every move and report it to some greasy spammer. Will you stop using built-in sprinklers because someone could know your watering habits? Will you stop subscribing to magazines because Time Warner now knows where you live? Will you never use a bank account because your bank needs to know your Social Security number? Stop pretending every company is out to get you.
But P2P technology is not radically different from, say, hosting an FTP server on your home computer. Basically, a P2P network is simply a long list of active file servers, with some added search and partial-download perks. It helps the file searcher work around problems such as firewalls and DHCP addresses, which are usually associated with home-user ISPs. Point-to-point file transfer software existed when the DMCA was signed, and had for many years. It just wasn't mainstream.
My point here is that I don't think the ruling would have changed if P2P existed in 1998, since in a way, it did. Verizon is still not liable for the copyrighted information stored on home users' computers, even if they are sharing that information with the world via a public FTP site.
Most home-user ISPs have clauses in their contracts which prohibit running servers from a home computer (unless that right is bought specifically as a service), and there may come a day when P2P like KaZaA and WinMX are ruled to be "servers," since members of the general public can access the files. So Verizon may have to stop allowing such "file servers" on their network, according to their home user contract, but they are still not legally responsible for the content ON the servers, and therefore cannot be forced to give up names.
Slashdot Mirror
For simply getting to low Earth orbit, the most viable long-term solution is obviously the true space-plane. I'm not talking about the supposedly "reusable" space shuttle here, or even the ill-fated crew return vehicle. I'm talking about a space vehicle with plane-like operations: it takes off horizontally, accellerates to about Mach 12 with various air-breathing propulsions (scramjets and air liquifaction engines come to mind), switches to rockets for the final boost into orbit, does its thing, and then glides back into the atmosphere for a powered horizontal landing. No expendable components. No multi-billion-dollar support facilities. Just a hangar, a fuel pump, and a pilot.
Such a vehicle would not need to be as heavy as current lifting rockets, since it would not have to carry all of its oxidizer on board; much of it would be collected from the atmosphere. In fact, the only oxidizer the craft would have to carry at all is for the rocket stage, and with an air liquifaction engine, separation mechanism, and clever flight path, even that could be collected on the way up! Plus, the cost of operation would decline dramatically, as the vehicle could basically land, refuel, and go again. Like a commercial airliner, which makes many flights a day.
Of course, this is all pretty far off as far as current technology goes. NASA's having trouble getting to Mach 6 with the Hyper-X, let alone Mach 12. But this is where space travel will eventually lead, and this is where it MUST lead for space to become commercially viable. Getting to orbit is the hard part. Once there, jumping between planets becomes trivial using nuclear rockets or low-thrust electric propulsion.
No, but Jack Black did have a bit part as a pilot in Waterworld, which featured the stunt talents of one Scott Hubbell!
From there, I think it's only one more step to Kevin Bacon...
Yes, I agree. Nuclear launchers could be a fantastically efficient way to get people into space and off to Mars.
However, in this world of Tom Clancy movienovels and WMD propoganda, the public has a hard time wrapping its brain around anything involving the words "nuclear," "fission," or "reaction." The space program is nothing without popular support and the populous currently believes the mantra "Nuclear = Evil." Sad, but true.
NASA is not going to die. Most people seem to forget that NASA stands for National Aeronautics and Space Administration. There's an awful lot more going on than a few robotic probes and shuttle launches.
What is abundantly clear, however, is that Bush's "space initiative" is nothing more than smoke and mirrors designed to boost his approval ratings. Let's crunch a few numbers: Bush's plan set aside an additional $12 billion for developing a "Saturn Mark II" launch vehicle with a capsule capable of landings on both the Moon and Mars. Not only is the number ridiculous, but so is the method for obtaining the funds. Bush claims that $1 billion will be allocated by Congress, and the additional $11 billion will be found by restructuring NASA, including ending shuttle flights. So we'll finish up the station by 2010, auction the shuttles on eBay, and be on the Moon by 2015? Riiiight. First of all, NASA won't have any free funds from ending the shuttle program until at least 2010 when the station is complete, and then that only leaves 5 years for development of a completely new vehicle and support system. Even then, the shuttle's budget is only about $4 billion. The remaining $7 billion will have to be earned by cutting into NASA's remaining $11 billion. So once again, the Aeronautics branch of NASA is getting the shaft in favor of a bloated and fatally optimistic manned space program. Sound familiar? It's the shuttle all over again.
Since the federal government seems to be waffling on what it thinks NASA should be doing, I am in favor of a much less glamorous "bottom-up" approach to space exploration. Let the private entrepreneurs build simple craft to get us barely out of the atmosphere. From there, the craft get slightly more sophisticated, and through the magic of technological evolution from several sources, we end up exploring the solar system in ways we can't even dream of now. We can parallel this growth to that of the internet: it started as a large, well funded government program (ARPANET), but it wasn't until the little guy started to find commercial opportunities that it really took off (Amazon, anyone?) If we had relied on the DoD to create the internet for us, we'd be stuck with an online copy of the Library of Congress, distributed through a huge router the size of a steel factory and transmitting over a 9600 baud connection.
While Bush has his head in the sand, the X-Prize and the X-Prize Cup will be ruling the upper atmosphere! I plan on retiring at the Shady Craters Lunar Resort.
And, to keep this little tirade on topic:
The Hubble Telescope has performed beautifully and well beyond its intended lifespan. There are other, better space telescopes in the works. Let's save the shuttle flight for station hardware and let the telescope retire with dignity.
Not pantented, persay, but you will certainly need to purchase some real estate first ...
So the DVD releases are going to contain more new footage? Because if I remember right, there was no Naboo celebration scene at the end of Episode VI: just Cloud City, Mos Eisley, Endor, and Coruscant.
Leave it to George "Theatrical Releases are First Drafts" Lucas to give us 15 versions of the same movie.
...and because it's a fantasy universe, no one will complain when I refuse to accept the existence of George's buzzkillers: the mitichlorians and the immaculate conception.
They don't exist. Never happened.
**sticks fingers in ears and hums the Imperial March**
Agreed.
The thing we have to remember about all the Star Wars movies is that they are based on the cheesy pulp sci-fi novels of the 1950s. Everything in the universe is a little hokey/cartoonish, themes are a little simplistic, characters have a never-ending supply of one-liners, and there's an overall feeling that each movie is just an episode in a much larger story.
Staying true to that while still making a movie entertaining, engaging, and intriguing is a very fine line. One step to the right and the movie loses it's childhood fascination, and one step to the left creates a Saturday morning cartoon.
Episodes IV, V, and VI treaded this line extremely well. Episode IV had the advantage of being the first: the filmmakers could simply introduce the SW universe and its concepts (good vs. evil, the Force, master/apprentice relationships, etc.) and the movie turned out to be pretty good (it also didn't hurt that the storyline followed a single arc, with only hints of other information). On top of that, it introduced fantastic special effect that no one had ever seen before, including making space battles look like war footage. Episodes V and VI had it a little rougher since the SW universe was not new, but they were likewise successes because the writers created intriguing new stories and populated them with genuinely likable characters (or, in the case of Vader, characters we could identify with). The universe also expanded from the simple good vs. evil to a place where betrayal and redemption are possible.
So then 15 years pass and we are presented with Episodes I and II. On the surface, they look much the same as IV, V and VI: one-liners, wonderful special effects, villians, good guys, they have it all. Right? Wrong. The difference lies in the writing. While the dialog in Episodes IV, V, and VI may have been a little contrived and/or hokey ("Your problem is you don't have enough scoundrels in your life." "If there's a bright center to the universe, you're on the planet that it's farthest from.") it still seemed natural enough to be palatable. Contrast this with the dialog from Episodes I and II ("Once those droids will take control of the surface, they will take control of you." "I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere. Not like you. You're everything soft and smooth.") which is downright painful. None of the actors in the movies are bad, with the possible exception of the much-debated Jar-Jar, but they can only do so much with awful material. I'll bet even the wooden performance of Hayden Christiansen would have been fine if the dialog had been better (for reference, see Mark Hamill). In the midst of George's search for gee-whiz CGI effects and action figures, he lost sight of that very thin line, and the movies shifted to the left, into stupid Saturday morning cartoons.
Recently, on a whim, I decided to watch Episode II with the DVD commentary track. To my delight, I discovered that the movie became infinitely better with the commentary track. I didn't have to listen to the awful dialog, I was still able to see the fantastic special effects, and I was listening to the moviemakers talk about what the movie was supposed to be: they would describe the underlying emotions of a scene for example, and their explanations would make far more sense than the innane chatter dribbling from the characters' mouths. Seriously. It makes the movie watchable.
Yet every scenario you describe involves respected companies (Mobil, Harrah's, Safeway, etc.) carrying out highly illegal collusion or surveillance activities. That sounds fairly paranoid to me.
All I'm trying to say here is that there are no privacy issues unique to Speedpass. Since the number is useless without the database, anyone wishing to gain your personal information would have to either hack into the database or purchase it illegally from a company with access. In either case, they don't need the number at all, once they have the database. This makes Speedpass no more of a privacy issue than any credit card. These shadowy figures you describe could do the same things with a Visa database.
No system of monetary transfer is without SOME privacy issues. Hell, I could lift fingerprints from your cash and trace your purchases, if I wanted to. But reasonable people take a look at the statistics and conclude that the risk is acceptable for them to get on with their lives. There is no such thing as zero risk, and when the numbers get small enough, the system can be declared safe. So in that sense, no, I don't think there are privacy issues with the Speedpass. I think it's a sound system of convenient payment. If you feel that the risks of such convenience are too high for you, then fine. Feel free to use one of many other forms of payment. But don't start crying wolf about systems that are perfectly acceptable and considered safe by the vast majority of the population, including the system's designers and operators.
All of the scenarios you describe about companies sharing or obtaining information about you for advertising purposes (or worse) involve either hacking into Mobil's database once they have the number (illegal!) or colluding with other companies (also illegal!). Or maybe Speedpass (read: Exxon Mobil Corp., the largest US oil company) will go out of business and sell their member database. I doubt it.
The Speedpass is JUST A NUMBER. If a store nabs your credit card information and your Speedpass number with the intent of selling it, why would they need your damn Speedpass number? They could do just as much damage with the credit card number alone. And how often to retailers sell their customers' credit card information? Never, unless you're shopping online at The Fetish Shack. No information-selling company is going to gain anything by getting your Speedpass number. It's meaningless without Mobil's database, and they'd either have to hack into it, or have a contract with Mobil (which I doubt any shady retailer has). And Mobil's database has ALL the Speedpass numbers. The hackers wouldn't need yours.
There is only one instance I can think of where people could abuse your Speedpass number. They could build a device to scan for Speedpass numbers and walk around the street collecting them. Then they could build their own RFID device, with the number they stole, and buy gas with it. Since they wouldn't have your personal information, they couldn't change your account settings or get cash from it. They could only purchase things from Speedpass-enabled stores. And once you (or Mobil) saw the strange charges on your account, the number would be disabled, and you would be issued a new one. You are FAR more likely to have your credit card stolen by Hank's House of Horny online than you are for someone to abuse your Speedpass.
My point here is that there is not some huge corporate conspiracy to track your every move and report it to some greasy spammer. Will you stop using built-in sprinklers because someone could know your watering habits? Will you stop subscribing to magazines because Time Warner now knows where you live? Will you never use a bank account because your bank needs to know your Social Security number? Stop pretending every company is out to get you.
But P2P technology is not radically different from, say, hosting an FTP server on your home computer. Basically, a P2P network is simply a long list of active file servers, with some added search and partial-download perks. It helps the file searcher work around problems such as firewalls and DHCP addresses, which are usually associated with home-user ISPs. Point-to-point file transfer software existed when the DMCA was signed, and had for many years. It just wasn't mainstream.
My point here is that I don't think the ruling would have changed if P2P existed in 1998, since in a way, it did. Verizon is still not liable for the copyrighted information stored on home users' computers, even if they are sharing that information with the world via a public FTP site.
Most home-user ISPs have clauses in their contracts which prohibit running servers from a home computer (unless that right is bought specifically as a service), and there may come a day when P2P like KaZaA and WinMX are ruled to be "servers," since members of the general public can access the files. So Verizon may have to stop allowing such "file servers" on their network, according to their home user contract, but they are still not legally responsible for the content ON the servers, and therefore cannot be forced to give up names.