Perspective: I have two sons diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum.
It's not all about the money... but the money is such a large factor that it ensures the whole modern circus is involved: media coverage, "medical doctors" who offer "research based" "treatments," therapists, schools, celebrities, lawyers, legislature mandated programs, etc. It's all quite nauseating. And, in the end, you still have a huge problem to deal with, and 90% of these clowns that are purporting to help you are either out to line their own pockets, or just make a living - in the end it's all the same. A great deal of them waste your time, some actively make things worse.
Occasionally, someone who really cares does come along to help, and that help is sorely needed after dealing with all the bogus crap, not to mention the basic challenge of helping your children fit in to society well enough that they will be able to have some kind of decent life after you are gone.
Vaccines are just one tiny piece of the big picture.
Years, like about 4 years. And (conspiracy theory) several early studies reported a significant downward shift in diagnosis rates at the time of the change, those studies are no longer updated and reported (read: funded) and they are starting to be replaced by bald assertions that nothing changed. (/conspiracy theory)
We have a cultural problem. It's not about the scientific method. People believe in conspiracy theories. People believe in shadowy corporations who are secretly out to get them. People believe in secret cover-ups. People believe everyone's got a hidden agenda or a conflict of interest.
The world isn't actually as actively evil as all that - but the net effect of current systems of political lobbying, regulatory (shallow) oversight, and confidential / protected information isn't far off.
People tend to simplify, viz. "God is watching you." Not really, but in a way the effect is the same.
The autism spectrum is a broad category. I think part of the dramatic increase in diagnosis is due to a threshold of severe cases being recently recognized, and now due to awareness, the whole spectrum is being caught.
In the past, most autistics weren't very severe and were simply passed off as "odd, shy, geeky, etc." Something seems to be ratcheting up the severity in those pre-disposed during the last 10-15 years. I haven't seen any good studies comparing industrialized vs non-industrialized areas - but my gut tells me it's somehow related to the modern environment.
IAAP (I am a physician - specifically pediatrics). First off, "you" may have been "fine" when you "got measles," but the population of England wasn't. Measles isn't chicken pox - it's a LOT worse. It's pretty rare to die of pox, but measles will kill you, give you encephalitis, make you go deaf, or a lot of horrible, horrible things. It's not just a bunch of itchy spots for a month.
Take a moment, get out of your own head, and read your own writing. Do you come off as an overbearing self-appointed oracle of all wisdom? Please don't take personal offense, this is what physicians are trained to be. A lot of what is happening today is backlash against this perception.
Most people (not only physicians) who stand fast in positions of authority quoting absolutes are actually somewhat ignorant and afraid that their authority is being questioned.
I place a lot more weight behind opinions that seem to consider all viewpoints (even the wacko ones) and make a rational decision, rather than those that quote absolute truths.
Television, especially specific programs he is familiar with, has an obvious narcotic/stimulant affect on our autistic son.
For behavior improvement, we have cut television viewing down to about 2 hours a week, and we only include that because he WILL encounter television in the rest of the world and we don't want him to totally freak out when he does.
Video can't be the sole trigger for autistic development, and removing it doesn't reverse anything, but it certainly has a strong effect.
Statistically, if I shake out this revolver, 99% of the time, all 6 shells will fall out (no, you don't get to count them on the floor). Now, spin the cylinder, and you only have a 1 in 600 chance of a live round in the chamber. I'm not aiming at the heart, mind you, only the kneecap. If you let me pull the trigger, it will probably prevent some childhood diseases that are highly survivable with today's medical technology. It's your son's kneecap.
C'mon, it's probably just fine, and besides, we're going to make you fill out a bunch of paperwork and feel like a social outcast if you don't let me pull the trigger - didn't you study statistics? It's going to be just fine.
And, as a patient, how do we identify you and your type of doctor? Are you the ones that we cannot get an appointment with because of your loyal patient base and copious referrals? That has been my experience.
My personal angle on why healthcare is so screwed in the US (besides the obvious insurance fiasco), is the AMA's chokehold on physician supply at the med school and certification level. If we had twice as many MDs, it does NOT follow that they would each make half as much money - it would change the landscape of healthcare, and I can only believe that the change would be for the better. It's not like there aren't sufficient MD candidates of sufficient quality applying to good medical schools.
Physicians are often not extremely in tune with the real needs of parents - pediatricians will rip off a quick script for Ritalin (or, referral to a specialist who will do the same) if it means that the kids will be easier to handle during their annual checkups.
Parents get to live with the children the other 364 days a year, and be responsible for them at least until they are of legal age - much longer if the parent has any compassion or caring for their offspring.
Same thing happened to my son after his HepA just after 2yrs of age - 108 fever for about 12 hours, controlled after a trip to the ER - no seizures, fever resolved within a couple of days, normal activity levels within about 2 weeks, but afterwards he started showing signs of CDD
and now he is clearly, severely autistic.
Yes, autism has a large genetic component. No, there is absolutely no PROOF that the fever reaction to the vaccine was the cause of the coincident CDD. However, autism is a spectrum condition and of seven family members in four generations identifiable as "somewhere" on the spectrum, he is radically farther from normal than the rest of us. None of the rest of us exhibited noticeable CDD.
As children, most of "the seven" had many of the diseases that these vaccines prevent, including Mumps, Chicken Pox, etc. and all but one of the adults has gone on to success in the world, with marriage, career, home ownership, children, etc.
The drug companies sell these "legally mandatory" vaccines based on short term economic studies that show cost-benefit of jabs vs. preventing an outbreak. They push the side-effect cost to the margin as "negligible". They are mandated because they won't work if they don't reach herd-immunity compliance levels.
It will be very costly to determine if there are life-long debilitating side effects from new drugs; but it is important not only to those families "in the margins" who have to cope with life-long conditions, but to society as a whole, dealing with lost productivity of the affected people and their family/caregivers, and the increased need for therapy, counseling, and in some cases prisons to handle the affected population.
I submit to our lawmakers that they should require this costly long term side effect studies BEFORE legally mandating new vaccines. But, the payoff for such studies comes long after most lawmakers political careers will sunset, and the short term payoff to drug companies for a new mandatory vaccine is astronomical.
For me, it's cost-benefit. The MacBookPro is bitch-worthy because it's reaching that nuisance cost exceeding cost of replacement threshold (5 minutes per day vs cost of whatever replaces it).
Fixing the Vista box just isn't worth it at this stage, I lose about 3-5 minutes a week to its flakiness - I could spend several hours with Dell for a 50% chance that they might do something about it with a further 50% chance that whatever they do won't really work. Add to that the risk that my system setup might be hosed during the repair attempts and we're risking maybe 100 hours of re-setup against the possible repair; and, no, I don't trust (Windows based whole system) backup software to function properly, either - there's a time investment in doing that properly and a further chance that it still doesn't work even if you did it properly. There's the other possible solution of plumping out $400 for another box that might work right, but even with that option, there's several hours invested in transferring the system over, and a strong chance of new and worse weirdness than I've presently got.
The worst option of all is investing the time and effort required to learn and keep current in PC technology sufficiently to diagnose and cost-efficiently fix all little nuisances that crop up. Five minutes a week is small beer compared to that treadmill.
Yep, it does feel like a good thing - definite peace of mind, especially on laptops, but unless the warranty is being sold at a loss, it really is a sucker's game in the long run.
I prefer to take my lumps in the rare cases that an extended warranty would matter, rather than fighting to get the repair done on a machine that's getting out of date anyway. It's just kind of ironic that the first machine where this would matter is an (insert halo here) Apple, I've got an old WindowsME notebook that still works as well as it ever did, except for the brick that used to be the battery, and even that was lasting nicely until we added a WiFi card.
What's distressing here? That they have to keep building supercomputers the same way they always have? I worked with an ex IBM'er from their supercomputing algorithms department, he and I BSed about future chip performance alot in the late 2006 - early 2007 timeframe. We were both convinced that the current approaches to CPU design were going to top out in usefulness at 8 to maybe 16 cores due to memory bandwidth.
I guess the guys at Sandia had to do a little more than BS about it before they published, but c'mon guys, this has been obvious for a while. And, if it's obvious to all of us out here, don't you think that Intel knew about it during their 2002 roadmap meetings?
First: the free repair offer only extended for 2 years from original purchase, and I find out about it here today, 30 months after original purchase, when I have been having the problem for the last 12 months (though, actually, only really badly for the last 6 months.)
Second: I have the ATY,RadeonX1600 graphics.
No more stress over when to send the thing in for repair, though. I'm just muddling through using the MBP less and less while a $400 Dell-Vista box picks up the things it can't do, like drive the 24" monitor on my desktop, play Pandora music, and run a web browser without (as much) fear of crashing - oh yeah, that Vista box goes black on me about once a week or so, but half the time it recovers within a few minutes, half the time not... ain't technology grand?
A thousand thanks... (actually, more like 2400 thanks if I was going to replace with a similar product).
Next gut wrenching life decision, during what 6-12 week period do I wish to sacrifice access to my laptop to take advantage of this "free" repair? (just hip-shooting on the repair time, but actual experience with a MacPro repair at the local shop was longer....)
I've had an intermittent graphics card problem with an '06 MacBookPro for a while now... it leads to occasional system freeze, maybe once a day, sometimes recently a lot more. One warning that a freeze may be imminent is the appearance of thin horizontal light blue lines during what appear to be block-copys of graphics (like scrolling a browser page) - freezes often come during intense operations like a Genie style minimize, but even turning all these off, the freezes still come. There are scattered reports of similar problems, mostly when new, and my experience tracks with these (more frequent when external monitor is connected, etc.)
Bottom line - I didn't pay the 15% AppleCare tax, so I'm SOL in terms of support from Apple, they haven't admitted to anything systemic, though it obviously is at least somewhat reproduceable. What I'd really like them to do is publish a kind of tech bulletin telling how to correct the problem if you have it, but I suppose that might take business away from their Genius bars (nearest one being 2 hours drive from here.)
If they wanted a reputation as a truly awesome company, they would develop and release that kind of info instead of suppressing it to affect the (false, and repugnant) air of perfection.
Lesson 2: you're already into this deal, too late to renegotiate. If you move on to "professor" status, you'll have justification for why you want rights to all software you develop - then.
Yep, sounded too good to be true - I saw a post somewhere by an optimistic Moonlight user that it would "be easy to do..." Translated to from the Linux enthusiast to real-world speak usually means something like "I think I got it to work once, before it crashed... I'm sure you could too if you spent hundreds of hours on it like I did, no I didn't really write down what I did otherwise I'd have already published a how=to."
There is a rapidly growing suite of "tool" software that's free and works on all major OSs - these are probably the most powerful tools for the kids to learn because they can transfer their knowledge anywhere in "computerland."
As others have said, good teachers are key. I've found lots of cheerleaders in education that just go flat when you leave the room - all of their enthusiasm for what you're doing to help evaporates in the face of the daily grind.
... Here we are in 2008, and who has actual market share? OSX...
What this tells me is that people (people with more money than time) value ease of use. When you look at the broad market, there are lots more people with spare cash than there are people with spare time and the inclination to learn how to make a PC work.
The Linux community has done a wonderful job of building the system, documenting it and making it accessible - to themselves, and they are in a clear minority of the computer using population.
It's a little self-fulfilling, for the Linux building community to work, it expects its members to be competent and take the time to research and think before asking and communicate clearly when asking - does this describe the majority of actual people you meet in everyday life?
Back to topic, the only reason I even opened this article is because Netflix delivers content via Silverlight, and I subscribe to Netflix, and I have a Debian box hooked up to a 19" monitor and decent set of speakers in the den. It's great for hulu, would be nice if it could play the Netflix too... but it's not worth much to me, I can already get Netflix on other screens. When it's dead simple to install and use, I'll become a user.
For my money, the whole Ares launch system is a waste of time, money, and effort, too. We could probably be on Mars in ten years if they followed the Mars Direct/Direct Launcher path.
Yeah, but perception is all there is. The shuttle has two black eyes now, so it's getting retired. Besides, an Ares just looks like it could be redirected to rain down a 1000 unit MIRV with any kind of warheads we choose. I'm really surprised that W didn't order a new Saturn V to be built and tested in response to the emerging "new world order" that includes Indian moon probes and Chinese nationals in space. NASA probably convinced him that the Ares would be more impressive and could be delivered just as fast.
Cool idea, but the only incentive I'm seeing is promotional at this stage, and that requires an exuberant economy.
More interesting than sending 5 pounds of cheese is devising a way to make cheese from the available raw materials on site... far fetched? yes. far more useful? of course.
We don't want our Mars settlers eating Soylent Green.
Problem with a 10 month lead time is the orbit cycle... If we're going, we're going, and there's a minimum amount of preparation that's going to be needed - sending the housing one conjunction ahead of the people allows for not sending the people if the housing gets screwed. Yeah, it would be nice if the world could all unite to join the mission, might even be what the economy needs, instead of WPA projects picking up trash and building parks we could tool up for the Mars mission with a secure spending plan that everyone can get comfortable with so they can start handing out loans again....
If I were to plan an appealing Mars mission, it would involve landing robotic craft with prefabbed habitats two years (or more) before humans are scheduled to arrive. The robots could send back images and data about how nice and cozy the habitats are (or are not), and they might even get busy harvesting water from the local glacier.
Not as appealing as the idea of landing on a beach and being treated as gods, but that didn't really work out to be so easy, either.
Slashdot Mirror
Perspective: I have two sons diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum.
It's not all about the money... but the money is such a large factor that it ensures the whole modern circus is involved: media coverage, "medical doctors" who offer "research based" "treatments," therapists, schools, celebrities, lawyers, legislature mandated programs, etc. It's all quite nauseating. And, in the end, you still have a huge problem to deal with, and 90% of these clowns that are purporting to help you are either out to line their own pockets, or just make a living - in the end it's all the same. A great deal of them waste your time, some actively make things worse.
Occasionally, someone who really cares does come along to help, and that help is sorely needed after dealing with all the bogus crap, not to mention the basic challenge of helping your children fit in to society well enough that they will be able to have some kind of decent life after you are gone.
Vaccines are just one tiny piece of the big picture.
The mercury was removed years ago
Years, like about 4 years. And (conspiracy theory) several early studies reported a significant downward shift in diagnosis rates at the time of the change, those studies are no longer updated and reported (read: funded) and they are starting to be replaced by bald assertions that nothing changed. (/conspiracy theory)
We have a cultural problem. It's not about the scientific method. People believe in conspiracy theories. People believe in shadowy corporations who are secretly out to get them. People believe in secret cover-ups. People believe everyone's got a hidden agenda or a conflict of interest.
The world isn't actually as actively evil as all that - but the net effect of current systems of political lobbying, regulatory (shallow) oversight, and confidential / protected information isn't far off.
People tend to simplify, viz. "God is watching you." Not really, but in a way the effect is the same.
The autism spectrum is a broad category. I think part of the dramatic increase in diagnosis is due to a threshold of severe cases being recently recognized, and now due to awareness, the whole spectrum is being caught.
In the past, most autistics weren't very severe and were simply passed off as "odd, shy, geeky, etc." Something seems to be ratcheting up the severity in those pre-disposed during the last 10-15 years. I haven't seen any good studies comparing industrialized vs non-industrialized areas - but my gut tells me it's somehow related to the modern environment.
No, my gut is not peer-reviewed, is yours?
IAAP (I am a physician - specifically pediatrics). First off, "you" may have been "fine" when you "got measles," but the population of England wasn't. Measles isn't chicken pox - it's a LOT worse. It's pretty rare to die of pox, but measles will kill you, give you encephalitis, make you go deaf, or a lot of horrible, horrible things. It's not just a bunch of itchy spots for a month.
Take a moment, get out of your own head, and read your own writing. Do you come off as an overbearing self-appointed oracle of all wisdom? Please don't take personal offense, this is what physicians are trained to be. A lot of what is happening today is backlash against this perception.
Most people (not only physicians) who stand fast in positions of authority quoting absolutes are actually somewhat ignorant and afraid that their authority is being questioned.
I place a lot more weight behind opinions that seem to consider all viewpoints (even the wacko ones) and make a rational decision, rather than those that quote absolute truths.
Television, especially specific programs he is familiar with, has an obvious narcotic/stimulant affect on our autistic son.
For behavior improvement, we have cut television viewing down to about 2 hours a week, and we only include that because he WILL encounter television in the rest of the world and we don't want him to totally freak out when he does.
Video can't be the sole trigger for autistic development, and removing it doesn't reverse anything, but it certainly has a strong effect.
Statistically, if I shake out this revolver, 99% of the time, all 6 shells will fall out (no, you don't get to count them on the floor). Now, spin the cylinder, and you only have a 1 in 600 chance of a live round in the chamber. I'm not aiming at the heart, mind you, only the kneecap. If you let me pull the trigger, it will probably prevent some childhood diseases that are highly survivable with today's medical technology. It's your son's kneecap.
C'mon, it's probably just fine, and besides, we're going to make you fill out a bunch of paperwork and feel like a social outcast if you don't let me pull the trigger - didn't you study statistics? It's going to be just fine.
And, as a patient, how do we identify you and your type of doctor? Are you the ones that we cannot get an appointment with because of your loyal patient base and copious referrals? That has been my experience.
My personal angle on why healthcare is so screwed in the US (besides the obvious insurance fiasco), is the AMA's chokehold on physician supply at the med school and certification level. If we had twice as many MDs, it does NOT follow that they would each make half as much money - it would change the landscape of healthcare, and I can only believe that the change would be for the better. It's not like there aren't sufficient MD candidates of sufficient quality applying to good medical schools.
Physicians are often not extremely in tune with the real needs of parents - pediatricians will rip off a quick script for Ritalin (or, referral to a specialist who will do the same) if it means that the kids will be easier to handle during their annual checkups.
Parents get to live with the children the other 364 days a year, and be responsible for them at least until they are of legal age - much longer if the parent has any compassion or caring for their offspring.
Same thing happened to my son after his HepA just after 2yrs of age - 108 fever for about 12 hours, controlled after a trip to the ER - no seizures, fever resolved within a couple of days, normal activity levels within about 2 weeks, but afterwards he started showing signs of CDD and now he is clearly, severely autistic.
Yes, autism has a large genetic component. No, there is absolutely no PROOF that the fever reaction to the vaccine was the cause of the coincident CDD. However, autism is a spectrum condition and of seven family members in four generations identifiable as "somewhere" on the spectrum, he is radically farther from normal than the rest of us. None of the rest of us exhibited noticeable CDD.
As children, most of "the seven" had many of the diseases that these vaccines prevent, including Mumps, Chicken Pox, etc. and all but one of the adults has gone on to success in the world, with marriage, career, home ownership, children, etc.
The drug companies sell these "legally mandatory" vaccines based on short term economic studies that show cost-benefit of jabs vs. preventing an outbreak. They push the side-effect cost to the margin as "negligible". They are mandated because they won't work if they don't reach herd-immunity compliance levels.
It will be very costly to determine if there are life-long debilitating side effects from new drugs; but it is important not only to those families "in the margins" who have to cope with life-long conditions, but to society as a whole, dealing with lost productivity of the affected people and their family/caregivers, and the increased need for therapy, counseling, and in some cases prisons to handle the affected population.
I submit to our lawmakers that they should require this costly long term side effect studies BEFORE legally mandating new vaccines. But, the payoff for such studies comes long after most lawmakers political careers will sunset, and the short term payoff to drug companies for a new mandatory vaccine is astronomical.
For me, it's cost-benefit. The MacBookPro is bitch-worthy because it's reaching that nuisance cost exceeding cost of replacement threshold (5 minutes per day vs cost of whatever replaces it).
Fixing the Vista box just isn't worth it at this stage, I lose about 3-5 minutes a week to its flakiness - I could spend several hours with Dell for a 50% chance that they might do something about it with a further 50% chance that whatever they do won't really work. Add to that the risk that my system setup might be hosed during the repair attempts and we're risking maybe 100 hours of re-setup against the possible repair; and, no, I don't trust (Windows based whole system) backup software to function properly, either - there's a time investment in doing that properly and a further chance that it still doesn't work even if you did it properly. There's the other possible solution of plumping out $400 for another box that might work right, but even with that option, there's several hours invested in transferring the system over, and a strong chance of new and worse weirdness than I've presently got.
The worst option of all is investing the time and effort required to learn and keep current in PC technology sufficiently to diagnose and cost-efficiently fix all little nuisances that crop up. Five minutes a week is small beer compared to that treadmill.
Yep, it does feel like a good thing - definite peace of mind, especially on laptops, but unless the warranty is being sold at a loss, it really is a sucker's game in the long run.
I prefer to take my lumps in the rare cases that an extended warranty would matter, rather than fighting to get the repair done on a machine that's getting out of date anyway. It's just kind of ironic that the first machine where this would matter is an (insert halo here) Apple, I've got an old WindowsME notebook that still works as well as it ever did, except for the brick that used to be the battery, and even that was lasting nicely until we added a WiFi card.
What's distressing here? That they have to keep building supercomputers the same way they always have? I worked with an ex IBM'er from their supercomputing algorithms department, he and I BSed about future chip performance alot in the late 2006 - early 2007 timeframe. We were both convinced that the current approaches to CPU design were going to top out in usefulness at 8 to maybe 16 cores due to memory bandwidth.
I guess the guys at Sandia had to do a little more than BS about it before they published, but c'mon guys, this has been obvious for a while. And, if it's obvious to all of us out here, don't you think that Intel knew about it during their 2002 roadmap meetings?
Double bummer:
First: the free repair offer only extended for 2 years from original purchase, and I find out about it here today, 30 months after original purchase, when I have been having the problem for the last 12 months (though, actually, only really badly for the last 6 months.)
Second: I have the ATY,RadeonX1600 graphics.
No more stress over when to send the thing in for repair, though. I'm just muddling through using the MBP less and less while a $400 Dell-Vista box picks up the things it can't do, like drive the 24" monitor on my desktop, play Pandora music, and run a web browser without (as much) fear of crashing - oh yeah, that Vista box goes black on me about once a week or so, but half the time it recovers within a few minutes, half the time not... ain't technology grand?
A thousand thanks... (actually, more like 2400 thanks if I was going to replace with a similar product).
Next gut wrenching life decision, during what 6-12 week period do I wish to sacrifice access to my laptop to take advantage of this "free" repair? (just hip-shooting on the repair time, but actual experience with a MacPro repair at the local shop was longer....)
I've had an intermittent graphics card problem with an '06 MacBookPro for a while now... it leads to occasional system freeze, maybe once a day, sometimes recently a lot more. One warning that a freeze may be imminent is the appearance of thin horizontal light blue lines during what appear to be block-copys of graphics (like scrolling a browser page) - freezes often come during intense operations like a Genie style minimize, but even turning all these off, the freezes still come. There are scattered reports of similar problems, mostly when new, and my experience tracks with these (more frequent when external monitor is connected, etc.)
Bottom line - I didn't pay the 15% AppleCare tax, so I'm SOL in terms of support from Apple, they haven't admitted to anything systemic, though it obviously is at least somewhat reproduceable. What I'd really like them to do is publish a kind of tech bulletin telling how to correct the problem if you have it, but I suppose that might take business away from their Genius bars (nearest one being 2 hours drive from here.)
If they wanted a reputation as a truly awesome company, they would develop and release that kind of info instead of suppressing it to affect the (false, and repugnant) air of perfection.
Lesson 2: you're already into this deal, too late to renegotiate. If you move on to "professor" status, you'll have justification for why you want rights to all software you develop - then.
Yep, sounded too good to be true - I saw a post somewhere by an optimistic Moonlight user that it would "be easy to do..." Translated to from the Linux enthusiast to real-world speak usually means something like "I think I got it to work once, before it crashed... I'm sure you could too if you spent hundreds of hours on it like I did, no I didn't really write down what I did otherwise I'd have already published a how=to."
There is a rapidly growing suite of "tool" software that's free and works on all major OSs - these are probably the most powerful tools for the kids to learn because they can transfer their knowledge anywhere in "computerland."
As others have said, good teachers are key. I've found lots of cheerleaders in education that just go flat when you leave the room - all of their enthusiasm for what you're doing to help evaporates in the face of the daily grind.
Ummmmm... don't I remember doing this on Google Docs back in 2006?
... Here we are in 2008, and who has actual market share? OSX...
What this tells me is that people (people with more money than time) value ease of use. When you look at the broad market, there are lots more people with spare cash than there are people with spare time and the inclination to learn how to make a PC work.
The Linux community has done a wonderful job of building the system, documenting it and making it accessible - to themselves, and they are in a clear minority of the computer using population.
It's a little self-fulfilling, for the Linux building community to work, it expects its members to be competent and take the time to research and think before asking and communicate clearly when asking - does this describe the majority of actual people you meet in everyday life?
Back to topic, the only reason I even opened this article is because Netflix delivers content via Silverlight, and I subscribe to Netflix, and I have a Debian box hooked up to a 19" monitor and decent set of speakers in the den. It's great for hulu, would be nice if it could play the Netflix too... but it's not worth much to me, I can already get Netflix on other screens. When it's dead simple to install and use, I'll become a user.
For my money, the whole Ares launch system is a waste of time, money, and effort, too. We could probably be on Mars in ten years if they followed the Mars Direct/Direct Launcher path.
Yeah, but perception is all there is. The shuttle has two black eyes now, so it's getting retired. Besides, an Ares just looks like it could be redirected to rain down a 1000 unit MIRV with any kind of warheads we choose. I'm really surprised that W didn't order a new Saturn V to be built and tested in response to the emerging "new world order" that includes Indian moon probes and Chinese nationals in space. NASA probably convinced him that the Ares would be more impressive and could be delivered just as fast.
Cool idea, but the only incentive I'm seeing is promotional at this stage, and that requires an exuberant economy.
More interesting than sending 5 pounds of cheese is devising a way to make cheese from the available raw materials on site... far fetched? yes. far more useful? of course.
We don't want our Mars settlers eating Soylent Green.
Problem with a 10 month lead time is the orbit cycle... If we're going, we're going, and there's a minimum amount of preparation that's going to be needed - sending the housing one conjunction ahead of the people allows for not sending the people if the housing gets screwed. Yeah, it would be nice if the world could all unite to join the mission, might even be what the economy needs, instead of WPA projects picking up trash and building parks we could tool up for the Mars mission with a secure spending plan that everyone can get comfortable with so they can start handing out loans again....
If I were to plan an appealing Mars mission, it would involve landing robotic craft with prefabbed habitats two years (or more) before humans are scheduled to arrive. The robots could send back images and data about how nice and cozy the habitats are (or are not), and they might even get busy harvesting water from the local glacier.
Not as appealing as the idea of landing on a beach and being treated as gods, but that didn't really work out to be so easy, either.