I agree. I loved Morrowind. When I finished it, I would have bought any Bethesda RPG automatically. But Oblivion was so disappointing that I'm now very skeptical about ever buying one of their games again.
Oblivion had some redeeming moments - a couple of side quests were very cleverly designed, and the Dark Brotherhood storyline was well-written - but for the most part it was ruined by a hackneyed plot, poorly-conceived monster/treasure scaling, little connection to the rich Elder Scrolls lore, and the complete lack of inter-faction politics. That, and the fact that it required an endless number of crawls through nearly identical randomly-generated dungeons to complete. And the UI was absolutely insulting to PC users.
I have very few hopes for Fallout III at this point.
Well, a full Ring cycle takes (a) a huge production budget and (b) big-name singers who can handle the roles. So that pretty much means it's going to be done infrequently, and by major opera companies. They have a finite number of seats available, and there are people who will fly halfway around the world to see a production. Limited supply, big demand means high prices.
That said, we bought our tickets to Seattle Opera's Ring last summer about 18 months in advance. We didn't need to be super-well connected opera snobs nor filthy rich, just able to plan ahead and put our money down when the time came. It was well worth it - the most amazing opera I've ever attended.
Oh, in response to the grandparent, I don't really think that LOTR:The Musical and Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen are direct competitors, or that the former is intended to steal audience from the later. I sure don't know many people who would willingly see both!
What you're not getting is that the USA isn't the only democratic government on earth
You originally claimed that "democracy is just mob rule". I've offered you some reasons why it is not mob rule in any sense, and was designed explicitly with a goal of preventing mob rule.
I've chosen examples from the US government, because I live there and am most familiar with it. But you can find similar examples in the design of parlimentary systems, constitutional monarchies and other variants used in other countries.
So where's your counterexample? What democracy would you point to that is actually like mob rule?
What you just said is that democracy is not mob rule because a democratic consistitutional republic such as the USA has checks and balances. That's like saying that apples are not suseptible to pests because you use herbicides to keep pests away.
Not quite. Mob rule is where you get a lot of people together and they do whatever they want. Lynching is the quintessential example of mob rule. Or said differently, mob rule is the antithesis of the "rule of law", and it doesn't bear a lot of resemblance to the behavior of a democratic government, in the USA or elsewhere.
In the US system, no matter how big of a majority you get, there are a lot of constraints on what you can do with that power. The Bill of Rights is one type of limit. The rivalries between different branches of government is another. These are not accidental features, but were clearly part of Madison's goals when he drafted the Constitution. And historically, they've largely worked as they were intenteded to.
So in your example, it's more like saying that an apple genetically engineered to resist pests is indeed successful at resisting pests. That's why such an apple was created in the first place!
Democracy is just mob rule. Obviously suggesting that we should replace it with a dictatorship is a step backwards, but are there any steps forward?
Democracy is, ephatically, not mob rule. I'd recommend reading The Federalist to learn exactly how concerned the American framers were with preventing the majority from running roughshod over the minority. Similar countermajoritarian features are part of almost every modern constitutional government.
We are, as maybe you are suggesting, probably capable of coming up with various procedural and structural enhancements to democracy as it's currently practiced. But modern democracies implements some fundamental principles (limited government, separation of powers, the accountability of leaders via elections, etc.) that are likely to be part of any government that successfully secures liberty and prosperity for its citizens.
Congratulations on writing the worst suggestion ever to receive a "+3 Insightful" moderation.
When I make micropayments, just as when I pay subscriptions, I want the money to go to content providers that I personally choose to read and support.
I have no interest whatsoever in paying some generic "content licensing fee" and having it divvy'd up to the cronies of political office holders.
And given how jealously journalists of all flavors guard their first amendment rights, I can't imaging that many would want to sign up for such a system of government control. Any content provider that would sign up is, almost certainly, one that I'd have no interest in reading!
What I've never understood: what are the benefits of space exploration? Sure it gives information about space, but what's the use?
Asteroid mining.
Go on - please be specific here. What minerals do you intend to mine? What is their current and projected cost from terrestrial sources? How much will it cost to locate the target asteroid? How much will it cost to launch equipment, retrieve the minerals from the asteriod, and land the minerals on Earth?
If you believe sum of those answers is positive, why are you posting on slashdot instead of raising capital for your asteroid mining venture?
Build really big solar energy collectors, put them into space, and beam the energy to Earth with microwaves.
What design do you plan to use for the collectors? And for the receiving station? What are the regulatory and safety concerns about microwave beams from orbit, i.e. where can you reasonably put the receiving station? After doing all that, how will the marginal cost-per-kwh compare to, say, a natural-gas or nuclear plant?
Self-sufficient space colonies - survival of the species in case of a large meteor strike or something similar is a benefit.
How do we make a self-sufficient colony? Can you point to examples (antarctica, undersea, space station) where humans have done this successfully? If some fundamental research questions are still unresolved, what program of investigation can be expected to answer them? And finally, when you have the design of a colony, how many tons of material will you need to launch to get it going? What will be the costs for launch and assembly?
I don't really expect that you'd have answers to all those questions. I'm just pointing out that it's absurd to talk about benefits in the absence of costs. The reason why none of the "benefits" on your list are happening today is that they either make no economic sense, or they are impossible with current technology.
The most fundamental barrier to all manned space applications seems to be the cost per pound of access to low earth orbit. Close behind it is the cost of keeping humans alive once they get to space. It's entirely appropriate to research ways of lowering those costs, but don't expect to see any of the items on your list until both fall an order of magnitude or more.
I attribute the decline in the U.S. primary education system to the following ills:
1. Significantly reduced funding with respect to inflation, leading to mediocrity in staffing and inadequate facilities. The tax cutting regime that started with Ronald Reagan in California has starved the schools of adequate funds to operate.
OK, that's a reasonable hypothesis. Let's see what the data says. This is a spreadsheet from the 2004 federal budget, showing total educational outlays from 1962 - 2004. The bottom line is the one you want to look at, showing that educational outlays have grown approx 8x in constant 1996 dollars during that time. They did decline under Reagan (as you note), but then grew again under Bush I, Clinton and Bush II. So significantly reduced funding is probably not a cause of educational failure, and certainly not a cause from 1990-present.
2. Parents take less interest in their own education, as jobs become more demaning. Relatively wealthy parents work long hours at "exempt" jobs, unable to assist their kids with homework. The kids are raised by TV instead.
This isn't as easy to validate with data, although I'd be interested in seeing any that you might have. Of the teachers I know personally, most say that lack of parental involvement in their kids' education is a big factor in student failure. That's not exactly the same thing as your argument, but it's similar. So I agree that this is a partial cause.
3. Fundamentalist religious forces are demanding the weaking of science and math education in schools because these subjects don't coincide with their mythology. No wonder U.S. students are so weak in these subjects!
It's certainly true that fundamentalists want to change the teaching of evolution. I hadn't heard they were opposed to math - maybe you'll provide a link. To date, they've had no notable success in doing so, and the Supreme Court has remained unsympathetic to arguments that teaching biological evolution infringes on 1st ammendment religious freedoms. So it's hard to see how this could be a cause of educational decline today, although maybe it could become one if the political & legal situation changes.
I'll posit two other causes for you to consider:
4. American schools have an entrenched bureaucracy and union structure that is powerful enough to block virtually any proposed reform, save that of pumping more money into the existing system. For example, in Washington State, our teachers' unions campaigned vigorously and successfully against our recent charter school referrendum.
5. There are very few feedback mechanisms in the public school system, where a teacher's job performance determines his professional success, or where parents can choose to remove their students (and tax dollars) from a failing school. In most other professions, these feedback mechanisms are the way in which failing "firms" are reformed or replaced.
And which private company launched a human into sub-orbital flight in the 1960's. Oh, that's right - there aren't any.
The private company that landed probes on nearly all of the closest planets? Oh, that's right - there aren't any.
I could go on for hours.
Perhaps you could go on for hours, but here are a couple for you to consider:
Which government has found a way to get suborbital flights for $25M R&D? Oh that's right - there aren't any.
Which government has developed a reusable spacecraft that can be launched twice within 6 days? Oh that's right - there aren't any.
Which government has designed a launch vehicle for the purpose of selling commercial tourist flights for $200K each? Oh that's right - there aren't any.
If your goal for manned spaceflight is to have the occasional huge spectacle taking government employees into space, followed by long stretches of inactivity or wasteful boondoggles, well, then I can see why you'd like NASA's approach. Personally, my goal for manned spaceflight is that I'd like to go there myself someday. Scaled Composites' achievements look infinitely more relevant to that end than the ones you mention.
I do agree with you that NASA is likely to be better at space science (probes to planets) than private industry. NASA would be a healthier agency if they focused on that, and stopped spending billions on the Shuttle and IIS.
I normally stay well clear of politics on Slashdot, but you wrote a reasonable post, deserving a reasonable response. I'd suggest reading
this backgrounder
on the ways in which Al-Quaeda has become involved in Chechnya since the first Chechen war in the early '90s. I've learned a lot by reading Dan Darling's stuff. He's definitely a solid researcher on Al-Quaeda and affiliates.
The short version might be: Al-Quaeda looks for conflicts between Muslim and non-muslim states, and sees to inflame them and entangle them with Al-Quaeda's larger goals. Chechnya is one example where they have done so successfully.
We certainly are in agreement, though, that Russia's actions in Chechnya over the last decade have been astoundingly brutal. It's worth stating in Russia's defense that when they tried to pull out, Chechnya came to resemble Afghanistan as more of a "terrorism-sponsored state" than the other way around. But nevertheless, they've leveled Grozny twice in a decade - the response to last week's massacre is going to be exceedingly ugly.
"What's so great about that?" you might ask. If you want it in one word, that word is "Mining". Consider: in a nickel-iron asteroid, there is an amount of metal roughly equivalent to the metal mined in the course of human history. Not to mention rare heavy metals - Iridium, Osmium, Platinum - things that are scarce on earth but relatively more abundant in asteroids. A mining operation of that scale is more than lucrative - it also presents a way to attain necessary raw materials without tearing open the surface of our own planet.
But in the next paragraph you say
If there is a sufficient profit motive in space, companies will find ways to do things cheaper and faster and, arguably, better (not being a terrible believer in an unregulated market, this last point is debatable). Prove that we can go get to the money, and people will go get it.
So why isn't, say, Halburton falling over itself to mine some of those asteroids to realize the "more than lucrative" profits? A few minutes reflection makes it clear that asteroid mining must not be as profitable as you suppose. Here
is a USGS report showing 40 year price history for the metals you mention. (Click on "Platinum-Group Metals" in the PDF table of contents). Iridium, Osmium & Platinum are all selling well below their historical inflation-adjusted peak. Econ 101 tells us that the supply of these metals must have been growing faster than the demand for them, at least when looking at long term trends.
So the reason that Halburton is not mining Iridium from asteroids is that, plain and simple, even $400/oz for Iridium cannot cover the cost of mining, transporting & de-orbiting that metal from asteroids. I think what you meant to argue is that at some unknown time in the future when Iridium is much scarcer than it is today, and access to space is much cheaper than it is today, asteroid mining might be a lucrative business. Sadly, most "lucrative" commercial space opportunties prove just as ephemeral upon close examination. Remember the 80's propaganda about micro-gravity pharmaceuticals manufacture on the space station?
Personally, I do not believe that space will be conquered until private individuals and private companies find a reason to live & work there. I don't believe any amount of NASA technology boondoggles or NASA programs to put government employees in orbit will accomplish this. On the other hand, I'm pretty optimistic that within 5 years, we'll see a vigorous sub-orbital space tourism market as a result of the current X-Prize competitors' efforts. I think that NASA might have a positive contribution on space technology development if relies more on prizes and incentives for non-government actors. Big NASA projects like the Shuttle & space station (and I suspect a mission to Mars) accomplish nothing but the distribution of pork and the elimination of budget for more worthwhile projects.
Author is in the wrong field
on
Out of Gas
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· Score: 1
The author of the book is a physicist, not a resource economist, so it's probably be to expected that his conclusions about the future price of natural resources are wrong. People are notorious for saying silly thing when they speak outside of their area of expertise.
To summarize the views of many economists, the stone age did not end for lack of stones, and the oil age will not end for lack of oil. Eventually, other sources of energy will become sufficiently cheaper/cleaner/better, and the economy will gradually shift to them. But there's no reason to expect that the shift from oil to, say, nuclear fusion will be any more traumatic than the shift from coal to oil was a century ago.
One interesting article on the subject of oil prices, by MIT economist Morris Adelman, is here.
it still has quite a few obvious enhancements needed (exception handling in stored procs for example).
Well, then 2005 is going to be your lucky day (and mine too!). Yukon includes a T/SQL try-catch syntax for structured exception handling in stored proceudres.
However, their claim to fame is that the type system is much more expressive; it is possible to define types like "date" or "mp3" in them, and ensure that wrong data cannot be supplied to functions.
I must not be understanding what you're saying here. Most oo frameworks already include a functionally rich date type. And if I were building an app that managed mp3 files among other file types, I'd certainly create an mp3 class to wrap those files.
I guess what I'm saying is that in Java or.Net, you can easily write
public void PlayMp3OnDate(DateTime date, MP3 file) {}
and ensure that you're only passed dates and mp3s. What more do you get from a "dependent type system"?
Re:Check it as a PERCENTAGE of his total wealth.
on
Bill Gates to be Knighted
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· Score: 3, Informative
The Gates Foundation has an endowment of approximately $24 Billion. When you put $5 in the collection plate, you have, perhaps, paid for one meal for one homeless person. When you donate $24B, you can, among other things, spend more than $65,000,000 per year to treat AIDS in the developing world.
Look, you don't have to like Bill G's company or the software they make, but until you've figured out how to earn a few billion and donate it to charity, you should not try to insult the generosity of those who have.
It's an embarrasment that in 2003 we don't have a multitude of different vehicles available for all sorts of specialized space missions. NASAs mandate ought to be the development and maintenance of a large fleet of spacefaring vehicles. Systems need to be developed so that a launch can happen anytime of any day so that the problem of how and when to get up there becomes a matter of deciding when your cargo is ready.
Well, it would be an embarrasment if we had vast numbers of missions being held up for lack of launchers, but that's just not the case. If you want to launch a satellite, you have your choice of Ariane, Delta, Soyuz, and probably others. The reason we don't have a fleet of launchers in all shapes and sizes is that current capacity pretty much matches the demand for launches from governments, scientists and industry at current launch costs.
NASA's mandate, IMO, should be to research & prototype technologies that lower the cost-per-pound to orbit, perhaps combined with the unmanned space exploration that it does competently at present. The history of the Space Shuttle boondoggle (from the '70s thru present) pretty much proves that NASA will fail if asked to be "Greyhound + UPS" in space , i.e. to build, operate and maintain a fleet of space vehicles, and provide launch services to all government & private customers.
Until launch costs come down substantially (perhaps by an order of magnitude, perhaps more), there will not be significant new markets for space or the ability to fund significantly more manned missions. And I have little belief that NASA will contribute to that reduction in cost, as the bulk of its budget will be squandered on Shuttle+IIS for the forseeable future. I think a much more optimistic scenario is for X-Prize style vehicles to open markets in tourism and rapid package delivery that over time provide a cost-effective infrastructure for a broad, private, commercial presence in LEO.
I work for, and own stock in, a database publishing company. After reading the/. story, I thought I should start making plans for my retirement as Congress was about to shoveling cash into my grubby hands. But after reading the Yahoo article, I don't really see it happening. *sigh*
For those who are having trouble parsing the proposed legislation, consider the following scenario: You get the bright idea to publish a directory of computer consultancies in the Pacific North West, knowing that time-pressed IT geeks would love a fast way to find specialists with a particular skill. So you start a company, spend a year finding and calling individuals & other companies, asking how big they are, what services they offer, what types of projects they tackle, what certifications their staff has, etc.
Finally the big day arrives and you print your directory and mail it to 10000 Seattle-area IT workers. Two weeks later, you're web surfing and find nwcomputerservices.com. And it's got all your data! Same companies, same info, even some of the same mistakes! You're pissed - they've ripped you off. But when you talk to your lawyer, she tells you there's little you can do. It's not illegal for them to copy your data, as long as they didn't duplicate your published (and copyrighted) printed directory.
In practice, US directory publishers work around this situation via license agreements, existing law, etc. So while this law would probably be a good thing (similar laws exist in the EU and probably elsewhere), it's hard to see that it's going to massively transfer cash to directory owners, or make us all slaves to the big corporations, or whatever else michael was worrying about when he posted the article.
In that case, I would suggest avoiding Wagnerian operas as well; one of Wagner's operas can last 3 hours, with or without intermissions!
It's so true. I just went to Seattle Opera's production of Parsifal last night. 244 minutes of music plus two 30 minute intermissions. Now that's an "extended edition"!
Awesome performance, though. Highly recommended for any music fans in the Seattle area.
This is probably the article you were referring to.
It makes perhaps the most damning case against the proposed profiling: it won't catch more terrorists. The crux of the argument is that a terrorist cell can probe security multiple times with multiple people to determine who the system will flag. They then carry out their operation using the people not flagged by CAPPS.
The authors mathematically model this proposition, and conclude that security is best increased by focusing on "administrative measures" that apply to all passengers, such as better metal detectors and El Al-style passenger interviews.
This is always trotted out when NASA's budget needs defending, but it's a really weak argument. Basically it asks you to justify NASA's actions based on their accidental consequences. In other words, "we completely failed at the task of building a cost-effective, reliable, reuasble launch vehicle, but hey, look at the cool stuff we paid for along the way!"
You might ask yourself two questions about spinoffs: 1) If the technology in question has genuine commercial potential, do you really believe its maker won't bring it to market without a NASA subsidy?
2) If you heard this justification in any other field of endeavor ("ok Mr. Customer, we didn't succeed in building your ecommerce site, but we did manage to spin off a very impressive server farm and some really cool animated graphics"), would you consider the money well spent?
That's comparing apples and oranges. IBM couldn't have pulled money from, say, mainframes to support OS/2 even if they had wanted to--their customers would have crucified them. Effectively, Microsoft could dedicate their $3.8bn revenue to Windows, while IBM's resources in that area were almost zero in comparison.
Sorry, I don't agree. Resource allocation decisions aren't handed down on stone tables by some Diety. They are made by the corporation's executives! MSFT also had competing priorities in '93 (Win95, Office, NT, Backoffice, the future MSN, etc.), but their mgmt obviously saw the strategic importance of the desktop OS and put the appropriate $$ into development & sales.
If IBM had decided that owning the default desktop OS was a corporate priority, they wouldn't have put "almost zero" resources on it. Had they decided otherwise, they could have dwarfed Microsoft's investment in the area. Although, as you say, they'd have had to take it out of some projects they deemed a lower priority.
I do agree with you that legacy of their antitrust troubles in the 70s & 80s probably held them back. It's hard to be a nimble competitor when your every move is scrutinized by lawyers, the courts and an unfriendly press. It's certainly ironic that Microsoft a decade later finds itself in almost the same position.
How was IBM supposed to compete with a product which comes with every PC?
In 1993 IBM reported revenues of $62.7B. Microsoft reported $3.8B that year. In other words, IBM was more than 16x Microsoft's size at the time in question. If IBM was serious about competing with them in the OS market, they might have:
Pre-installed OS/2 on their own computers
Payed for world-class branding, marketing & pr for their product
Given away OS/2 for 2 years to gain marketshare
Underbid MSFT for OEM contracts with Dell & Compaq and written off the loss
The fact is that they chose to do none of these things. This seems more evidence of IBM's incompetence and lack of corporate direction than of Microsoft's monopoly powers at that point in time. It's one thing to say that Microsoft in 1993 could effectively block underfunded startups from entering some software markets. But it's laughable to claim that the largest IT company in the world couldn't compete with them, had they gotten their act together!
While this would be an amazing breakthrough, the donation problem would still exist. See, as a diabetic (Type I), growing a replacement pancreas from my own DNA won't help me. The replacement would be just as broken and useless as the one currently propping up my liver
While your DNA (and mine too - I'm also a type 1) contains markers that predisposed you to get diabetes, there was also a roll of the dice involved. Some unknown environmental factor - most researchers suspect a virus - triggers the autoimmune attack that actually makes one diabetic.
If you could grow a new pancreas from your own stem cells, it would still contain the markers for diabetes, but it would also contain the same functional, insulin-producing beta cells that you had prior to becoming diabetic. If you never had another autoimmune attack, you'd be non-diabetic for the rest of your life. One quick writeup of this theory can be found in Dr. Bernstein's book.
So far as I've read, a pancreas grown from someone else's cells would face the same tissue rejection issues that you see in today's experimental pancreas transplants.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. I loved Morrowind. When I finished it, I would have bought any Bethesda RPG automatically. But Oblivion was so disappointing that I'm now very skeptical about ever buying one of their games again.
Oblivion had some redeeming moments - a couple of side quests were very cleverly designed, and the Dark Brotherhood storyline was well-written - but for the most part it was ruined by a hackneyed plot, poorly-conceived monster/treasure scaling, little connection to the rich Elder Scrolls lore, and the complete lack of inter-faction politics. That, and the fact that it required an endless number of crawls through nearly identical randomly-generated dungeons to complete. And the UI was absolutely insulting to PC users.
I have very few hopes for Fallout III at this point.
Well, a full Ring cycle takes (a) a huge production budget and (b) big-name singers who can handle the roles. So that pretty much means it's going to be done infrequently, and by major opera companies. They have a finite number of seats available, and there are people who will fly halfway around the world to see a production. Limited supply, big demand means high prices.
That said, we bought our tickets to Seattle Opera's Ring last summer about 18 months in advance. We didn't need to be super-well connected opera snobs nor filthy rich, just able to plan ahead and put our money down when the time came. It was well worth it - the most amazing opera I've ever attended.
Oh, in response to the grandparent, I don't really think that LOTR:The Musical and Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen are direct competitors, or that the former is intended to steal audience from the later. I sure don't know many people who would willingly see both!
You originally claimed that "democracy is just mob rule". I've offered you some reasons why it is not mob rule in any sense, and was designed explicitly with a goal of preventing mob rule.
I've chosen examples from the US government, because I live there and am most familiar with it. But you can find similar examples in the design of parlimentary systems, constitutional monarchies and other variants used in other countries.
So where's your counterexample? What democracy would you point to that is actually like mob rule?
Not quite. Mob rule is where you get a lot of people together and they do whatever they want. Lynching is the quintessential example of mob rule. Or said differently, mob rule is the antithesis of the "rule of law", and it doesn't bear a lot of resemblance to the behavior of a democratic government, in the USA or elsewhere.
In the US system, no matter how big of a majority you get, there are a lot of constraints on what you can do with that power. The Bill of Rights is one type of limit. The rivalries between different branches of government is another. These are not accidental features, but were clearly part of Madison's goals when he drafted the Constitution. And historically, they've largely worked as they were intenteded to.
So in your example, it's more like saying that an apple genetically engineered to resist pests is indeed successful at resisting pests. That's why such an apple was created in the first place!
Democracy is, ephatically, not mob rule. I'd recommend reading The Federalist to learn exactly how concerned the American framers were with preventing the majority from running roughshod over the minority. Similar countermajoritarian features are part of almost every modern constitutional government.
We are, as maybe you are suggesting, probably capable of coming up with various procedural and structural enhancements to democracy as it's currently practiced. But modern democracies implements some fundamental principles (limited government, separation of powers, the accountability of leaders via elections, etc.) that are likely to be part of any government that successfully secures liberty and prosperity for its citizens.
Congratulations on writing the worst suggestion ever to receive a "+3 Insightful" moderation.
When I make micropayments, just as when I pay subscriptions, I want the money to go to content providers that I personally choose to read and support.
I have no interest whatsoever in paying some generic "content licensing fee" and having it divvy'd up to the cronies of political office holders.
And given how jealously journalists of all flavors guard their first amendment rights, I can't imaging that many would want to sign up for such a system of government control. Any content provider that would sign up is, almost certainly, one that I'd have no interest in reading!
Go on - please be specific here. What minerals do you intend to mine? What is their current and projected cost from terrestrial sources? How much will it cost to locate the target asteroid? How much will it cost to launch equipment, retrieve the minerals from the asteriod, and land the minerals on Earth?
If you believe sum of those answers is positive, why are you posting on slashdot instead of raising capital for your asteroid mining venture?
What design do you plan to use for the collectors? And for the receiving station? What are the regulatory and safety concerns about microwave beams from orbit, i.e. where can you reasonably put the receiving station? After doing all that, how will the marginal cost-per-kwh compare to, say, a natural-gas or nuclear plant?
How do we make a self-sufficient colony? Can you point to examples (antarctica, undersea, space station) where humans have done this successfully? If some fundamental research questions are still unresolved, what program of investigation can be expected to answer them? And finally, when you have the design of a colony, how many tons of material will you need to launch to get it going? What will be the costs for launch and assembly?
I don't really expect that you'd have answers to all those questions. I'm just pointing out that it's absurd to talk about benefits in the absence of costs. The reason why none of the "benefits" on your list are happening today is that they either make no economic sense, or they are impossible with current technology.
The most fundamental barrier to all manned space applications seems to be the cost per pound of access to low earth orbit. Close behind it is the cost of keeping humans alive once they get to space. It's entirely appropriate to research ways of lowering those costs, but don't expect to see any of the items on your list until both fall an order of magnitude or more.
OK, that's a reasonable hypothesis. Let's see what the data says. This is a spreadsheet from the 2004 federal budget, showing total educational outlays from 1962 - 2004. The bottom line is the one you want to look at, showing that educational outlays have grown approx 8x in constant 1996 dollars during that time. They did decline under Reagan (as you note), but then grew again under Bush I, Clinton and Bush II. So significantly reduced funding is probably not a cause of educational failure, and certainly not a cause from 1990-present.
This isn't as easy to validate with data, although I'd be interested in seeing any that you might have. Of the teachers I know personally, most say that lack of parental involvement in their kids' education is a big factor in student failure. That's not exactly the same thing as your argument, but it's similar. So I agree that this is a partial cause.
It's certainly true that fundamentalists want to change the teaching of evolution. I hadn't heard they were opposed to math - maybe you'll provide a link. To date, they've had no notable success in doing so, and the Supreme Court has remained unsympathetic to arguments that teaching biological evolution infringes on 1st ammendment religious freedoms. So it's hard to see how this could be a cause of educational decline today, although maybe it could become one if the political & legal situation changes.
I'll posit two other causes for you to consider:
4. American schools have an entrenched bureaucracy and union structure that is powerful enough to block virtually any proposed reform, save that of pumping more money into the existing system. For example, in Washington State, our teachers' unions campaigned vigorously and successfully against our recent charter school referrendum.
5. There are very few feedback mechanisms in the public school system, where a teacher's job performance determines his professional success, or where parents can choose to remove their students (and tax dollars) from a failing school. In most other professions, these feedback mechanisms are the way in which failing "firms" are reformed or replaced.
Perhaps you could go on for hours, but here are a couple for you to consider:
Which government has found a way to get suborbital flights for $25M R&D?
Oh that's right - there aren't any.
Which government has developed a reusable spacecraft that can be launched twice within 6 days?
Oh that's right - there aren't any.
Which government has designed a launch vehicle for the purpose of selling commercial tourist flights for $200K each?
Oh that's right - there aren't any.
If your goal for manned spaceflight is to have the occasional huge spectacle taking government employees into space, followed by long stretches of inactivity or wasteful boondoggles, well, then I can see why you'd like NASA's approach. Personally, my goal for manned spaceflight is that I'd like to go there myself someday. Scaled Composites' achievements look infinitely more relevant to that end than the ones you mention.
I do agree with you that NASA is likely to be better at space science (probes to planets) than private industry. NASA would be a healthier agency if they focused on that, and stopped spending billions on the Shuttle and IIS.
The short version might be: Al-Quaeda looks for conflicts between Muslim and non-muslim states, and sees to inflame them and entangle them with Al-Quaeda's larger goals. Chechnya is one example where they have done so successfully.
We certainly are in agreement, though, that Russia's actions in Chechnya over the last decade have been astoundingly brutal. It's worth stating in Russia's defense that when they tried to pull out, Chechnya came to resemble Afghanistan as more of a "terrorism-sponsored state" than the other way around. But nevertheless, they've leveled Grozny twice in a decade - the response to last week's massacre is going to be exceedingly ugly.
So the reason that Halburton is not mining Iridium from asteroids is that, plain and simple, even $400/oz for Iridium cannot cover the cost of mining, transporting & de-orbiting that metal from asteroids. I think what you meant to argue is that at some unknown time in the future when Iridium is much scarcer than it is today, and access to space is much cheaper than it is today, asteroid mining might be a lucrative business. Sadly, most "lucrative" commercial space opportunties prove just as ephemeral upon close examination. Remember the 80's propaganda about micro-gravity pharmaceuticals manufacture on the space station?
Personally, I do not believe that space will be conquered until private individuals and private companies find a reason to live & work there. I don't believe any amount of NASA technology boondoggles or NASA programs to put government employees in orbit will accomplish this. On the other hand, I'm pretty optimistic that within 5 years, we'll see a vigorous sub-orbital space tourism market as a result of the current X-Prize competitors' efforts. I think that NASA might have a positive contribution on space technology development if relies more on prizes and incentives for non-government actors. Big NASA projects like the Shuttle & space station (and I suspect a mission to Mars) accomplish nothing but the distribution of pork and the elimination of budget for more worthwhile projects.
The author of the book is a physicist, not a resource economist, so it's probably be to expected that his conclusions about the future price of natural resources are wrong. People are notorious for saying silly thing when they speak outside of their area of expertise.
To summarize the views of many economists, the stone age did not end for lack of stones, and the oil age will not end for lack of oil. Eventually, other sources of energy will become sufficiently cheaper/cleaner/better, and the economy will gradually shift to them. But there's no reason to expect that the shift from oil to, say, nuclear fusion will be any more traumatic than the shift from coal to oil was a century ago.
One interesting article on the subject of oil prices, by MIT economist Morris Adelman, is here.
Well, then 2005 is going to be your lucky day (and mine too!). Yukon includes a T/SQL try-catch syntax for structured exception handling in stored proceudres.
The Gates Foundation has an endowment of approximately $24 Billion. When you put $5 in the collection plate, you have, perhaps, paid for one meal for one homeless person. When you donate $24B, you can, among other things, spend more than $65,000,000 per year to treat AIDS in the developing world.
Look, you don't have to like Bill G's company or the software they make, but until you've figured out how to earn a few billion and donate it to charity, you should not try to insult the generosity of those who have.
Well, it would be an embarrasment if we had vast numbers of missions being held up for lack of launchers, but that's just not the case. If you want to launch a satellite, you have your choice of Ariane, Delta, Soyuz, and probably others. The reason we don't have a fleet of launchers in all shapes and sizes is that current capacity pretty much matches the demand for launches from governments, scientists and industry at current launch costs.
NASA's mandate, IMO, should be to research & prototype technologies that lower the cost-per-pound to orbit, perhaps combined with the unmanned space exploration that it does competently at present. The history of the Space Shuttle boondoggle (from the '70s thru present) pretty much proves that NASA will fail if asked to be "Greyhound + UPS" in space , i.e. to build, operate and maintain a fleet of space vehicles, and provide launch services to all government & private customers.
Until launch costs come down substantially (perhaps by an order of magnitude, perhaps more), there will not be significant new markets for space or the ability to fund significantly more manned missions. And I have little belief that NASA will contribute to that reduction in cost, as the bulk of its budget will be squandered on Shuttle+IIS for the forseeable future. I think a much more optimistic scenario is for X-Prize style vehicles to open markets in tourism and rapid package delivery that over time provide a cost-effective infrastructure for a broad, private, commercial presence in LEO.
I work for, and own stock in, a database publishing company. After reading the /. story, I thought I should start making plans for my retirement as Congress was about to shoveling cash into my grubby hands. But after reading the Yahoo article, I don't really see it happening. *sigh*
For those who are having trouble parsing the proposed legislation, consider the following scenario: You get the bright idea to publish a directory of computer consultancies in the Pacific North West, knowing that time-pressed IT geeks would love a fast way to find specialists with a particular skill. So you start a company, spend a year finding and calling individuals & other companies, asking how big they are, what services they offer, what types of projects they tackle, what certifications their staff has, etc.
Finally the big day arrives and you print your directory and mail it to 10000 Seattle-area IT workers. Two weeks later, you're web surfing and find nwcomputerservices.com. And it's got all your data! Same companies, same info, even some of the same mistakes! You're pissed - they've ripped you off. But when you talk to your lawyer, she tells you there's little you can do. It's not illegal for them to copy your data, as long as they didn't duplicate your published (and copyrighted) printed directory.
In practice, US directory publishers work around this situation via license agreements, existing law, etc. So while this law would probably be a good thing (similar laws exist in the EU and probably elsewhere), it's hard to see that it's going to massively transfer cash to directory owners, or make us all slaves to the big corporations, or whatever else michael was worrying about when he posted the article.
Awesome performance, though. Highly recommended for any music fans in the Seattle area.
This is probably the article you were referring to.
It makes perhaps the most damning case against the proposed profiling: it won't catch more terrorists. The crux of the argument is that a terrorist cell can probe security multiple times with multiple people to determine who the system will flag. They then carry out their operation using the people not flagged by CAPPS.
The authors mathematically model this proposition, and conclude that security is best increased by focusing on "administrative measures" that apply to all passengers, such as better metal detectors and El Al-style passenger interviews.
This is always trotted out when NASA's budget needs defending, but it's a really weak argument. Basically it asks you to justify NASA's actions based on their accidental consequences. In other words, "we completely failed at the task of building a cost-effective, reliable, reuasble launch vehicle, but hey, look at the cool stuff we paid for along the way!"
You might ask yourself two questions about spinoffs:
1) If the technology in question has genuine commercial potential, do you really believe its maker won't bring it to market without a NASA subsidy?
2) If you heard this justification in any other field of endeavor ("ok Mr. Customer, we didn't succeed in building your ecommerce site, but we did manage to spin off a very impressive server farm and some really cool animated graphics"), would you consider the money well spent?
Sorry, I don't agree. Resource allocation decisions aren't handed down on stone tables by some Diety. They are made by the corporation's executives! MSFT also had competing priorities in '93 (Win95, Office, NT, Backoffice, the future MSN, etc.), but their mgmt obviously saw the strategic importance of the desktop OS and put the appropriate $$ into development & sales.
If IBM had decided that owning the default desktop OS was a corporate priority, they wouldn't have put "almost zero" resources on it. Had they decided otherwise, they could have dwarfed Microsoft's investment in the area. Although, as you say, they'd have had to take it out of some projects they deemed a lower priority.
I do agree with you that legacy of their antitrust troubles in the 70s & 80s probably held them back. It's hard to be a nimble competitor when your every move is scrutinized by lawyers, the courts and an unfriendly press. It's certainly ironic that Microsoft a decade later finds itself in almost the same position.
In 1993 IBM reported revenues of $62.7B. Microsoft reported $3.8B that year. In other words, IBM was more than 16x Microsoft's size at the time in question. If IBM was serious about competing with them in the OS market, they might have:
The fact is that they chose to do none of these things. This seems more evidence of IBM's incompetence and lack of corporate direction than of Microsoft's monopoly powers at that point in time. It's one thing to say that Microsoft in 1993 could effectively block underfunded startups from entering some software markets. But it's laughable to claim that the largest IT company in the world couldn't compete with them, had they gotten their act together!
While your DNA (and mine too - I'm also a type 1) contains markers that predisposed you to get diabetes, there was also a roll of the dice involved. Some unknown environmental factor - most researchers suspect a virus - triggers the autoimmune attack that actually makes one diabetic.
If you could grow a new pancreas from your own stem cells, it would still contain the markers for diabetes, but it would also contain the same functional, insulin-producing beta cells that you had prior to becoming diabetic. If you never had another autoimmune attack, you'd be non-diabetic for the rest of your life. One quick writeup of this theory can be found in Dr. Bernstein's book.
So far as I've read, a pancreas grown from someone else's cells would face the same tissue rejection issues that you see in today's experimental pancreas transplants.