My experience with Truax was to get him to cross the street (literally) and meet with Ron Packard -- the congressman who sponsored the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990. The LSPA was signed into law. I testified before Congress on follow-up legislation for commercial incentives.
While in Washington DC, I met with Dana Rohrabacher and told him of Truax's desire to do a trans-Pacific rocket-delivery system for over-night "FedEx" type services based on a scaled down version of the Sea Dragon -- and indicated the commercial incentives legislation could clear the way for private funding by removing the threat of government competition. Rohrabacher then initiated the DC-X program within his district, which was government funded. I happened to be present at a meeting between a group of investors and a private launch service company (intending on commercializing the MX-missile's production lines for launch services) the day the DC-X funding was announced. The investors decided not to bother competing with the government's deep pockets and terminated the meeting upon hearing the announcement. The potential of DC-X to create new "FedEx-like" services across the Pacific was mentioned in the press.
Then when grassroots space enthusiasts, totally fed up with NASA's lawlessness and detemination to destroy the pioneering spirit of the US, start offeringtheirown launch technology prizes, NASA waits until one of them embarrasses it before providing even lip-service to the prize award concept.
Finally,
a private entrepreneur is offering $50 million of his own money as an incentive for other private investors to create a de facto replacement for the Space Shuttle* and NASA responds by trying to pump taxpayer money into the same good old boy network that has so effectively destroyed hope among pioneering peoples that they can embark on a new age of exploration to escape the burgeoning bureaucracies that proclaim themselves the hope of mankind while destroying its spirit.
Please stick to websites that are for people who need to have their egos stroked about how politically correct they are.
Adults are here considering hard questions about how we might be freed from Microsoft's long-standing monopolistic tyranny by the gift of diversity to the Longhorn OS.
I'm just curious how many lines of code they had their monkies pound out to put this feature into their crappy software architecture? Every line of code is another opportunity for a security hole/bug. Let's hear it for more and cheaper H-1b programmers -- Bill Gates' terminal addiction -- the last best hope of a world without Microsoft!
Prizes like the Nobel, McArthur and this are fundamentally bad prizes. They are subjective hence politicized.
The correct way to spend such money is demonstrated by the Ansari X-Prize, the Bowery/CATS prize and the fusion prize legislation submitted by Robert W. Bussard to Congress. All of these set forth operational technical criteria for the award before it is known who will win the prize. It make it far harder for politicians posing as scientists and technologists to steal the credit and money due others.
You bring up a good point. Scientific societies must carefully define the conditions for intervention. Perhaps "clear and present danger" is a poor choice of words but the scientific definition of these terms may be adequate. Here's a stab at such a definition:
Scientific clarity means neither the model nor the conditions to which it applies are vague. Present means the conditions under which the model predicts danger exist. Danger means there is a product, probability * damage, that is above some threshold. Below that threshold either you are dealing with a probability that is too low or you are dealing with a level of damage that is, for that level of society (federal, state, county, local,...) too low to be concerned with.
This is basically what actuarial science is about.
This whole issue arises because the central government presumes to dictate to parents what is best for their children to learn. So parents have to fight each other to get control of their own childrens' educations!
Sure there are would-be JudeoChristian theocrats. But there are would-be Political Correctness theocrats. Finally, there are the Theocrats of Scientism -- the belief that Science should dictate how children are taught and how public officals should render policy.
Now I happen to be in the Scientism camp but the thing that separates me from the theocrats of all stripes is that I don't insist that others have my religious beliefs crammed down their throats.
Indeed, anyone who believes themselves to be scientific has a conundrum when it comes to applying state power to others:
How dare they?
Science starts and ends with humility toward our knowledge and its own limitations.
The best we can ask of others is to allow us to pursue a scientific mode of living our lives -- we can never presume to tell them how to live theirs so long as they do not present a clear and present danger to our own scientific society.
We can however, and indeed must if we are truly scientific, request that we be allowed to watch the process of their lives so we may learn from their experiments in living. However internally unscientific those experiments are, they are nevertheless scientifically valuable when brought to contrast with other such experiments.
I see 802.11b radios on sale for $10 and people are ditching their existing 11b radios for 11g radios so that means there are more used 11b around.
These systems would mesh together to form a parallel and redundant broadband topology providing connectivity.
With the connectivity the only barrier to full functionality is apps, written in JS/XSL/whatever else is provided by the browser, cached locally from remote servers. AJAX goes part of the way there.
And however bad it is, it's much better than high infant mortality and short lifespans (and don't forget brutal dictators and violent religious strife).
Brutal dictators and violent religious strife aren't characteristics of traditional tribal culture -- they're characteristics of development gone awry as it so often does.
High infant mortality and short lifespans have been with humans for a very long time. People are built to suffer those losses more than they're built to not even know why they're trying to fill some vague void with their 2 hour commutes to meaningless jobs to pay for gadgets.
And how the hell are you supposed to get a job delivering papers with all the third world slaves coming into the country, driven from their homelands by "development", to deliver papers for less than minimum wage?
What the third world needs is to not lose track of its traditional cultures of self-sufficiency -- even if that means high infant mortaility, short life-span, tribal skirmishes and no "democracy" or computers.
Hopefully however these cultures can learn from the sickness pervading the developed world as a result of urbanization and retain some of their roots while they admit technology as a defensive measure.
And developed peoples need to stop thinking of "poverty" in terms of monetary income -- but rather in terms of security of food, water, shelter and viable families -- something many people in developed countries have lost due to dependence on money without adequate security of money supplies.
If there is going to be just one browser distributed you may as well make it a browser that can support something more than JavaScript and since everything is stored in 'markup' these days you may as well choose a browser like Mozilla/Firefox where the xsl support is good. I suppose I could have added SVG support as well.
Basically you want a good application platform that can get its apps downloaded as web pages and cached locally.
Both of these companies were not just major users of H-1b and outsourcing -- they were the leaders of this trend.
Now we have Bill Gatesjonesing for an unlimited H-1b fix to his software that is already a veritable cornucopia of ecological foment comparable only with the body of an AIDS patient in advanced stages of neuropathy.
Again, Microsoft isn't just another H-1b user -- its a mainline corporate junkie of the H-1b fix that's proven only to put stockholders in a fix.
This isn't ironic or puzzling -- it is entirely predictable and it was
predicted by people who are now going to take the information industry
back from the brainiacs who thought they were being very clever and
cosmo and, above-all, fashionable, by throwing open the doors of the US
to the world.
I am fighting with our government to allow H1B visas cap to be raised.
I was in at the White House talking to the chief of staff to get the
H1B visa cap raised. We already half way through the fiscal year,
capped out on the number of really bright Israelis and Indians.
It has been downhill for Sun as well as the entire computer industry.
Why do we let these guys live? They're not necessary to the process. Once they strike gold, their job is done.
Gates struck deal that gave him a natural monopoly. There were other operating systems for the 808x family around and any one of them could have been the predominant one shipped by IBM with its PC. Any one of them would have formed a natural monopoly on that platform and made the owner rich.
Such monopoly profits are called "economic rent" which everyone with any sort of mental faculties about economics, including such staunch advocates
of laissez-faire capitalism, as
Milton
Friedman recognize as the most appropriate source of tax revenue. Since economic rent is subsidized, rather than taxed -- due to the abandonment of the principles of Henry George -- Gates was given state support as he imposed a horrible operating system on the world and became its richest man as a consequence.
Like any welfare queen -- it corrupted his character which wasn't that good to begin with.
So now he, like the rest of the loons running the software industry, think having more fingers writing more code is the way to create good code -- and he's salivating over the virtually endless supply of fingers that can type out so many lines of code that no one will be able to figure out what is going on with the damn OS anymore.
Rather than importing all those H-1b visa guys, let's take all Gates' money, give it to all the unemployed American programmers his age and export him to India.
I don't expect you to answer this here but the question becomes, "What are the common characteristics of these 'details' that suck up the most time and energy?"
Computers are good at being indefatigable -- so where can they help with detail work? It seems they could help a lot if you could better characterize it.
and
He estimates that he gave two decades of solid work to Star Wars, not including a hiatus to raise three adopted kids as a single father.
Obviously the time has come for payback from his fans.
How many young Star Wars couples would be willing to raise their very own George Lucas Love Clone?
Come on, George. Donate some nuclei. Leave the midichlorian, er, mitochondrian DNA to the egg donor.
Face it -- its the right thing to do.
Bit serially, this guy has done a lot for digital cinema and his accumulated capital seems most appropriately put to use cultivating young talent. The academic cinema schools where he and his contemporaries got their start just aren't what they used to be but he could certainly help advance the state of the art in home "home schooled" digital movie production.
This would get kids in the hinterlands producing movies from their own myths, starting from the same age Spielberg was when he first got a hold of a movie camera.
Probably the best way to do it would be to get together with someone like John Carmack and define a series of prize awards for technologies that are critical to bringing the cost of movie production down.
I wish that the same bill that the US Congress passed in the early 1960's that prohibited government agencies from competing with private communications satellites had instead, or in addition, prohibited government agencies from competing with private launch service companies -- even if that meant the first man on the moon was a Russian communist.
Your logic is essentially that of someone looking at the Jamestown settlement and claiming it is ridiculous to think the colonization of the New World would be largely a fiat accompli within a century.
You understand the limitations of government space programs quite well and underestimate the exponential power curves of economic growth.
Oh, I see... you can't understand when numbers are presented to you with references to sources. That's OK. The adults are thinking for you. I'll bet you can call me a "poopy head" too, can't you?
2] Large numbers of humans cannot leave the earth
There is no way we could move even 1/1000th the world population off the earth even if there was someplace to go. The resources/pollution needed to do this make it a non-starter for addressing population growth.
Actually, this was effectively debunked by Gerard O'Neill in his book "2081" if not his earlier book "The High Frontier".
The earth to orbit transportation economics of an electromagnetic catapult system (other systems are possible such as Hans Moravec's Rotovator(tm)) result in far less environmental impact than sustaining the same human terrestrially.
Moreover, the energy and transportation scale required to have a net depopulation would be comparable to the current airline industry.
Slashdot Mirror
My experience with Truax was to get him to cross the street (literally) and meet with Ron Packard -- the congressman who sponsored the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990. The LSPA was signed into law. I testified before Congress on follow-up legislation for commercial incentives. While in Washington DC, I met with Dana Rohrabacher and told him of Truax's desire to do a trans-Pacific rocket-delivery system for over-night "FedEx" type services based on a scaled down version of the Sea Dragon -- and indicated the commercial incentives legislation could clear the way for private funding by removing the threat of government competition. Rohrabacher then initiated the DC-X program within his district, which was government funded. I happened to be present at a meeting between a group of investors and a private launch service company (intending on commercializing the MX-missile's production lines for launch services) the day the DC-X funding was announced. The investors decided not to bother competing with the government's deep pockets and terminated the meeting upon hearing the announcement. The potential of DC-X to create new "FedEx-like" services across the Pacific was mentioned in the press.
Hasn't the space shuttle program done enough damage to the pioneering heritage of the US already?
First, NASA delivers a space transportation system with a cost per lb to leo that is an order of magnitude higher than it promised.
Then, NASA stomps out private investment in launch service companies because it would dilute the monopoly value of the bad technology NASA produced.
Then when grassroots space enthusiasts try to get NASA to stop stomping out privately financed space transportation companies, and passed legislation requiring NASA to follow the Reagan policy of purchasing commercial launch services whenever possible, NASA thumbs its nose at the taxpayers most interested in space and launches the Advanced Communications Technology Satellite via the Shuttle.
Then when grassroots space enthusiasts, totally fed up with NASA's lawlessness and detemination to destroy the pioneering spirit of the US, start offering their own launch technology prizes, NASA waits until one of them embarrasses it before providing even lip-service to the prize award concept.
Finally, a private entrepreneur is offering $50 million of his own money as an incentive for other private investors to create a de facto replacement for the Space Shuttle* and NASA responds by trying to pump taxpayer money into the same good old boy network that has so effectively destroyed hope among pioneering peoples that they can embark on a new age of exploration to escape the burgeoning bureaucracies that proclaim themselves the hope of mankind while destroying its spirit.
Kill NASA before it kills the human spirit.
*An exploding myth.
Adults are here considering hard questions about how we might be freed from Microsoft's long-standing monopolistic tyranny by the gift of diversity to the Longhorn OS.
Thanks.
I'm just curious how many lines of code they had their monkies pound out to put this feature into their crappy software architecture? Every line of code is another opportunity for a security hole/bug. Let's hear it for more and cheaper H-1b programmers -- Bill Gates' terminal addiction -- the last best hope of a world without Microsoft!
The correct way to spend such money is demonstrated by the Ansari X-Prize, the Bowery/CATS prize and the fusion prize legislation submitted by Robert W. Bussard to Congress. All of these set forth operational technical criteria for the award before it is known who will win the prize. It make it far harder for politicians posing as scientists and technologists to steal the credit and money due others.
Thanks.
I can see they've no hope of being any competition at all come the real db revolution.
Scientific clarity means neither the model nor the conditions to which it applies are vague. Present means the conditions under which the model predicts danger exist. Danger means there is a product, probability * damage, that is above some threshold. Below that threshold either you are dealing with a probability that is too low or you are dealing with a level of damage that is, for that level of society (federal, state, county, local,...) too low to be concerned with.
This is basically what actuarial science is about.
Sure there are would-be JudeoChristian theocrats. But there are would-be Political Correctness theocrats. Finally, there are the Theocrats of Scientism -- the belief that Science should dictate how children are taught and how public officals should render policy.
Now I happen to be in the Scientism camp but the thing that separates me from the theocrats of all stripes is that I don't insist that others have my religious beliefs crammed down their throats.
Indeed, anyone who believes themselves to be scientific has a conundrum when it comes to applying state power to others:
How dare they?
Science starts and ends with humility toward our knowledge and its own limitations.
The best we can ask of others is to allow us to pursue a scientific mode of living our lives -- we can never presume to tell them how to live theirs so long as they do not present a clear and present danger to our own scientific society.
We can however, and indeed must if we are truly scientific, request that we be allowed to watch the process of their lives so we may learn from their experiments in living. However internally unscientific those experiments are, they are nevertheless scientifically valuable when brought to contrast with other such experiments.
These systems would mesh together to form a parallel and redundant broadband topology providing connectivity.
With the connectivity the only barrier to full functionality is apps, written in JS/XSL/whatever else is provided by the browser, cached locally from remote servers. AJAX goes part of the way there.
Brutal dictators and violent religious strife aren't characteristics of traditional tribal culture -- they're characteristics of development gone awry as it so often does.
High infant mortality and short lifespans have been with humans for a very long time. People are built to suffer those losses more than they're built to not even know why they're trying to fill some vague void with their 2 hour commutes to meaningless jobs to pay for gadgets.
And how the hell are you supposed to get a job delivering papers with all the third world slaves coming into the country, driven from their homelands by "development", to deliver papers for less than minimum wage?
Hopefully however these cultures can learn from the sickness pervading the developed world as a result of urbanization and retain some of their roots while they admit technology as a defensive measure.
And developed peoples need to stop thinking of "poverty" in terms of monetary income -- but rather in terms of security of food, water, shelter and viable families -- something many people in developed countries have lost due to dependence on money without adequate security of money supplies.
Basically you want a good application platform that can get its apps downloaded as web pages and cached locally.
Probably the best thing for folks to do is just subscribe to the MeshAP user list and ask questions.
Such a bootable cdrom (based on Slackware) is already available from LocustWorld.
Maybe the Ubuntu guys should port it over from Slackware.
Both of these companies were not just major users of H-1b and outsourcing -- they were the leaders of this trend.
Now we have Bill Gates jonesing for an unlimited H-1b fix to his software that is already a veritable cornucopia of ecological foment comparable only with the body of an AIDS patient in advanced stages of neuropathy.Again, Microsoft isn't just another H-1b user -- its a mainline corporate junkie of the H-1b fix that's proven only to put stockholders in a fix.
This isn't ironic or puzzling -- it is entirely predictable and it was predicted by people who are now going to take the information industry back from the brainiacs who thought they were being very clever and cosmo and, above-all, fashionable, by throwing open the doors of the US to the world.
Ever since Scott McNealy said:
It has been downhill for Sun as well as the entire computer industry.First Sun.
Then HP.
Now Microsoft.
Guess what, suckers?
You lose.
Gates struck deal that gave him a natural monopoly. There were other operating systems for the 808x family around and any one of them could have been the predominant one shipped by IBM with its PC. Any one of them would have formed a natural monopoly on that platform and made the owner rich.
Such monopoly profits are called "economic rent" which everyone with any sort of mental faculties about economics, including such staunch advocates of laissez-faire capitalism, as Milton Friedman recognize as the most appropriate source of tax revenue. Since economic rent is subsidized, rather than taxed -- due to the abandonment of the principles of Henry George -- Gates was given state support as he imposed a horrible operating system on the world and became its richest man as a consequence.
Like any welfare queen -- it corrupted his character which wasn't that good to begin with.
So now he, like the rest of the loons running the software industry, think having more fingers writing more code is the way to create good code -- and he's salivating over the virtually endless supply of fingers that can type out so many lines of code that no one will be able to figure out what is going on with the damn OS anymore.
Rather than importing all those H-1b visa guys, let's take all Gates' money, give it to all the unemployed American programmers his age and export him to India.
Well then this seems to be a good starting point.
I don't expect you to answer this here but the question becomes, "What are the common characteristics of these 'details' that suck up the most time and energy?"
Computers are good at being indefatigable -- so where can they help with detail work? It seems they could help a lot if you could better characterize it.
and He estimates that he gave two decades of solid work to Star Wars, not including a hiatus to raise three adopted kids as a single father.
Obviously the time has come for payback from his fans.
How many young Star Wars couples would be willing to raise their very own George Lucas Love Clone?
Come on, George. Donate some nuclei. Leave the midichlorian, er, mitochondrian DNA to the egg donor.
Face it -- its the right thing to do.
Bit serially, this guy has done a lot for digital cinema and his accumulated capital seems most appropriately put to use cultivating young talent. The academic cinema schools where he and his contemporaries got their start just aren't what they used to be but he could certainly help advance the state of the art in home "home schooled" digital movie production.
This would get kids in the hinterlands producing movies from their own myths, starting from the same age Spielberg was when he first got a hold of a movie camera.
Probably the best way to do it would be to get together with someone like John Carmack and define a series of prize awards for technologies that are critical to bringing the cost of movie production down.
I wish that the same bill that the US Congress passed in the early 1960's that prohibited government agencies from competing with private communications satellites had instead, or in addition, prohibited government agencies from competing with private launch service companies -- even if that meant the first man on the moon was a Russian communist.
Your logic is essentially that of someone looking at the Jamestown settlement and claiming it is ridiculous to think the colonization of the New World would be largely a fiat accompli within a century.
You understand the limitations of government space programs quite well and underestimate the exponential power curves of economic growth.
Oh, I see... you can't understand when numbers are presented to you with references to sources. That's OK. The adults are thinking for you. I'll bet you can call me a "poopy head" too, can't you?
The numbers are there. No fundamental technological breakthroughs required nor even materials advances.
Actually, this was effectively debunked by Gerard O'Neill in his book "2081" if not his earlier book "The High Frontier".
The earth to orbit transportation economics of an electromagnetic catapult system (other systems are possible such as Hans Moravec's Rotovator(tm)) result in far less environmental impact than sustaining the same human terrestrially.
Moreover, the energy and transportation scale required to have a net depopulation would be comparable to the current airline industry.
I already responded to this question.