Yet Novell was able to do just the same in the early to mid 1990s, soundly beating Microsoft to that post (NDS, of which Active Directory is a poor ripoff). And for the sharing of network filesystems, this was pegged in open release in 1985 by NFS. Which was on UNIX. Yet again, Windows is late to the game in all aspects, playing catchup with the rest of the world. Apart from Windows compatibility, which, for some older applications, it's currently almost as good as WINE and FreeDOS. Not to knock Windows too much, it does what it was originally intended to do pretty well (i.e. be a desktop that people sit at and do work).
Over here in the UK, you can still choose the hospital and consultant, if you really want. Yep, it's pretty new, and loads still haven't heard of it, but the details are at: Choose and Book. All in all, I'd rather have the NHS look after me than have my healthcare dependant on working for some company that wields that power as a beating stick.
Cricket and Baseball have similarities in that they're both highly statistics based games.
In Cricket, the scores are most definitely public domain. I used to work for a company called Cricinfo as one of their admins in it's earlier days, and it's stats database (statsguru) is arguably the most complete source of statistics for cricket in the last few decades.
It was started by a group of fans into an ongoing company, simply because the stats on cricket were public domain. And it's raised a good sum of money in sponsorship for cricket along the way, and been a focal point for fans around the world.
Now, if the statistics for Cricket were deemed to be in the public domain, as it was quite possible for people to watch the match, tell someone else, and they could discuss it anywhere at any time, what makes Baseball different (apart from the fact that the organisers are trying to gouge money on everything they possibly can)?
Same here. I've been into computing since '79 (so, 27 years and counting).
Keep refresh rates over 75 on your monitor, and text a comfortable size.
One of the useful things you can do if you sit by the computer is exercise your eyes (as explained at this place).
It's no replacement for getting out and looking at distant objects, then near, in rapid succession, but it all helps.
I've still got 20/20 vision after all this time, and I've spend a goodly portion of those years behind a console. The earlier behind an old TV set, as that's what the early home computers here used.
Astounding. Absolutely astounding. First, the second biggest examples of racism in Europe are the Neo Nazi movement, and of course the highly nationalistic political parties (BNP in the UK for example). The football league is just a marketing ploy to give the masses something to be tribal about while making shed loads of money. And, like it or not, human nature is tribal in nature (which is why you have cliques of friends you like, and masses of people who don't interest you).
The first biggest example of racism in Europe? The Anti-Racism laws, and the new Inquisition that comprises the various Anti Racism committees.
Guess I'll have to watch out for that (working there).. That being said, I've driven around there for weeks with no tax, and nothing came of it. Wouldn't do that with no MOT, as that's a pretty serious black mark on your license. Plust it invalidates your insurance.
What an odd thing to say. The Walkman is a personal portable stereo player. Sony invented nothing there, they merely created a personal stereo, and branded it as a "Walkman".
The playstation wasn't invented under the same argument, as it was a subset of a 'game console'.. Not sure who came up with that idea (atari was the first I remember).
You know what the GP poster was trying to say. Nothing to do with homophilia, racism or anything else like that. Face it, being black with a bandana and a gun is actually promoted by the music industry as being the "new rebel" in much the same way as Mods, Punks, Rockers and so on have always been pushed as the "must be" trend that marketers like. Something defined that they can say you have to be, to be glamorous.
Black, white, male, female, whatever. As long as they keep pushing the two main streams ("Gangsta" and that insipid plastic doll model for the 'cleaner' sanitized segment that everyone's supposed to conform to), they'll be on a downward spiral. All that really started back in the mid 80's. I remember it all coming in, and hating it then. But my peer group loved it, as it was the 'rebellion against all that had come before'.. Most of my peer group are now settled with kids.. And lo and behold, those kids are starting to rebel against the repetetive, formulaic offering that's been shaped by marketers for a couple of decades.
Personally, I don't think this post needed to be made, as it was all implicit in the GP post, but I thought I'd clarify it a little.
Nice to see they noted that the unintended effect of pandering to an industrial lobbyist in creating legislation to protect them created a slowdown in progress, and lost opportunity in industry at large because of it. What with all the legislative scrum that the world's become, I think that's something that should be pointed out to the powers that be everytime they prop up a failing business model with the latest bought law.
*Cough* Uhh.. All the agencies had lots of legal means to obtain the information. Just like us Brits had lots of legal ways to obtain information about the IRA, and the bombings still continued. You basically make the choice: You don't care how many innocent suffer, as long as a guilty is found, or, you make all efforts to protect the innocent, which may mean the guilty get away now and then.
In a world where you judge every person as incapable of action independantly, you chose the former, and all rights and responsibilities of the individual are assumed by the state (totalitarian state). In a world where you treat people as being able to be responsible in their own right, you grant the power to the people to act.. Which is, I believe, the reason you have gun ownership written into your basic rights.
No, it just means that the Intelligence services are going to have to do their job, and not rely on being able to wiretap and snoop anybody they feel like by bandying the phrase "They might be a terrorist" around.
Just as in the UK, the Government will probably be paying for it. And as the government's expenses have just risen, and it's workload increased, there will:
a) Be a tax hike to cover the cost that is given to the ISPs to retain the data. b) Be a tax hike to cover the salaries of the extra bureaucrats required to fill in the paperwork to support the new directive. c) Be a tax hike to cover the cost of the consultants to work out a way of actually sifting the signal from the noise (or pay for extra M.O.D. staff to do the work).
Part of that tax hike may be applied to the ISPs, so they'll end up paying more, so to recoup costs, they'll have to raise prices. All of which comes back to bite the basic guy in the street right in the ass.
Lots of cost, no appreciable gain. One day, the governments will learn that just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. They'll end up with so much noise, they just can't pick out the signal.
Or maybe they could be making a stand. Everybody knows that MS has enough cash in the warchest to force litigation against an opponent in all but the most clear cut cases. When someone else now has a patent that can catch MS out, perhaps they're now making the stand to say "We can live without patents you bring against us. We will not pay you. You can sink your money into litigation to say we can pay you or change our product, and we will change our product. Nobody makes money out of Microsoft unless we say so." Something like this may make other companies think twice about trying to force MS into compliance, knowing that it's going to cost them to obtain it, and with no big licensing payback.
that everything's connected. If the ISPs were deemed to not be classed as common carriers, and liable for every action of their users, the restrictions on people signing up to ISPs would be unworkable (if the ISP was to remain viable). Also, they could then be liable for actions of businesses against businesses. This would set up being as ISP as a very dangerous business. So much so, that it would likely stifle network activity. If that's stifled, then businesses don't communicate as effectively. Nor do people. Which would seriously limit the participation and movement of his discussion and debate forums mentioned in his proper biography. So, by getting his own way, he'd eventually end up shooting himself in the foot.. How foresighted.
I'd have to disagree with that. Society in general (and still in a goodly many places outside the 'western' world that's so into making a fast buck off everything, and screw it if it's not profitable) has held that the young need to be trained and led. This isn't contempt; its maybe contrary to what the young person wants to do, but if they're going to be functional in the wider scope of society, they need to understand how to fit into it (and no, this isn't just a "perpetuate the current system in stagnation" post; if you know the system, and can work it, you can change it. If you rail against it in ignorance, you haven't a hope in hell). The old have been held in high regard as sources of knowledge and wisdom. After all, they had to live a whole lot of life to reach where they got to.
Sadly, the system is now highly skewed (discipline a kid to behave, and you'll have the CPA called on you). The young have the rights and politicians, in an attempt to grab the slice of the demographic as it is developing, pander to their every whim. The old are pretty much ignored, as they're not going to be a changing vote, and you're not going to make more of a profit off them now. The store of whatever knowledge and wisdom they have is deemed irrelevant, as it has no monetary value.
So, it's really only contemporary, western society that has the issues, and they're not exactly as you couched it.
Actually, I think the average person is just fine working things out for themselves. What they need is a carefully maintained framework in which to operate effectively. That's what Government is meant to provide. Social and economic framework in which people can get on with what they think needs to be done.
From the earlier posts, I got the impression that the execs were the business people (who know money) with a little knowledge of what the engineers are trying to do. If the engineers come up with concepts of what is feasible, and where the trends of technology are heading, or have an idea of a next great technology (which takes the tech background), and then table that to the execs, it's up to the execs (before the development time gets allocated) to work out if it's something that can actually make money (or be used as a stepping stone to a product/service that can make money). That's what should be happening. Each group of education leveraging it's speciality, with a few people in the middle who are reasonably trained in both subjects who are able to communicate the finer points to both specialist groups.
The fact that a portion of your execs are also professors isn't necessarily a boon. It's that old difference between theory and practice. In theory, practice and theory are the same, in practice, they aren't.. I don't necessarily think that the behaviour patterns gained from working extensively in academia translate well to the world at large.
True though, what you need is the visionaries. But those visionaries are (in the tech world) almost exclusively the technically educated. What they need is people clued in enough to support them, and enlighten them sometimes as to why their ideas aren't just ready for the limelight yet. And perhaps have that spark up another idea, which can be passed back as suggestion (perhaps to spark another idea) until something really great happens.
Actually, the article seems to point to this kind of behaviour existing in the US. Not the EU. Still, that's neither here nor there, as I'm sure it exists in other countries also. Change the US and EU around in your statements and you can see exactly why the rest of the world is nervous about leaving the DNS in the hands of an organisation which is on a short leash to a governmental trade department. However, that's a whole other story, done to death in other threads.. Do quite agree with ye though that the SBC quote seems a little heavy handed....
One flaw in your argument: You base it on the population of the US, rather than the amount of investigations. Also, you believe bad things don't matter, as long as it's to a small portion of the population. A completely over the top example would be to say that there were 200 cases in one year where a small group of people broke into houses and slaughtered families. The rest of the time this group were perfectly normal, helpful group. So, you calculate the 'contribution' to statistics that each family contributes, and say it's some extremely small percentage, so it's nothign to worry about, and doesn't matter.
The point is, that the Governmental Agency tasked with making the country a better place is, in fact, not doing so, and abusing new powers (which people said would happen, and is) to do it, and justify it. The idea is to hold the Agencies accountable. If they abuse power, then remove the abused power (or at least the individuals that do abuse it). If it's widely abused by loopholes, fix the law so it doesn't have the loopholes. If that doesn't work, strip the law away and do something that does work, as by that point, it would be demonstrated as patently unworkable.
It means lots of things. 1) We need more resources, as the earthbound ones are not finite. 2) We need colonies off planet if we're going to more easily survive an extinction event (meteor, huge volcanic activity, so on, so forth). 3) The race as a whole needs space to expand in. That's why colonisation of the world was such a bloody affair, and may well become so again unless we have anew frontier to race for.
You remind me a whole lot of some of the texts that were appearing in the 1300s, and 1400s when explorers were heading out to discover new parts of the globe (or at least parts the Europeans didn't know about, and hadn't been). There were a lot of people saying "What do we need that for. No gain. Nothing out there interesting.". Oddly, America was one of those "unintersting" discoveries, which to my eyes, refutes the naysayers of the time. If we go out there, we at least get the mineral wealth of asteriods easily in reach, and cost effective, perhaps kickstarting research in propulsion leading to a solar system wide civilisation (or more). If we don't, it'll be easy to keep saying "No point, don't bother..", but you'll never know. Until Earth, as happens from time to time, has a large asteroid impact and/or huge volcano erruption sending life back to the stone age. At which point it's not a question that'll be asked for a long time. If ever.
Ok, from the article: There's said to be ice on the moon's south pole (water ice). This means you can have a self sustaining colony much easier. This gives hydrogen, and oxygen that are excellent propellants. There are also likely other volatiles such as frozen methane lurking around. This will enable you to launch intra system vehicles much more efficiently than trying to escape Earth's gravity well, without the pollution associated with that Earth launch. This outpost will make it far more feasible to launch prospecting missions to the near asteroids, and possibly eventually provide a far better drop off point for raw materials gleaned from those asteroids. Near term, it's simply easier for those intra system flights to mars. Long term, it's an excellent trading post from possible asteroid mining ventures. And the asteroids have a mineral wealth that makes all the resources of the earth look positively frugal.
Getting off this planet is pretty much an essential point for the growth of humanity as a whole. The moon makes an excellent kindergarten for our further expansion.
Perhaps this may be one of the aspects that beat them in the derriere.
There's a groundswell building that's looking more and more at Dolby Digital Live as an essential (for a media PC, you can't beat DDL as an output).
A few companies have put out DDL cards now (HDA Digital X-Mystique 7.1 GOLD and the Turtle Beach Montego DDL) alongside the SoundStorm chipset from NVidia (which rumour has it will be making a reappearance at some time in the future, possibly piggy backed onto their graphics cards). I use both the montego DDL and the SoundStorm. The sound quality on DDL with digital out is superb. EAX isn't too well handled (thank you Creative Patent Portfolio), but it's handled well enough for me (EAX2 supported) and my gaming habit.
Creative won't get my money, unless they have a vastly superior card, with DDL. And it's the DDL that drives my purchase. I don't want the extra cables, I don't want to have to use analogue stages between card and amp.
I honestly don't understand Creative saying it's a DRM issue. They have the sound tappable from their analogue streams when they leave the card. If they're saying it sounds just as good as digital, then the copy will be indistinguishable either by DDL copy or their analogue stream.
If it's not, then they're deliberately crippling their cards in quality to maintain a protection scheme for the content industries.
Yeah, I'd say Creative are officially evil these days. I don't buy from them. Although that is made a hell of a lot easier to follow because they don't offer what I want.
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Yet Novell was able to do just the same in the early to mid 1990s, soundly beating Microsoft to that post (NDS, of which Active Directory is a poor ripoff).
And for the sharing of network filesystems, this was pegged in open release in 1985 by NFS. Which was on UNIX.
Yet again, Windows is late to the game in all aspects, playing catchup with the rest of the world.
Apart from Windows compatibility, which, for some older applications, it's currently almost as good as WINE and FreeDOS.
Not to knock Windows too much, it does what it was originally intended to do pretty well (i.e. be a desktop that people sit at and do work).
Over here in the UK, you can still choose the hospital and consultant, if you really want. Yep, it's pretty new, and loads still haven't heard of it, but the details are at: Choose and Book.
All in all, I'd rather have the NHS look after me than have my healthcare dependant on working for some company that wields that power as a beating stick.
Cricket and Baseball have similarities in that they're both highly statistics based games.
In Cricket, the scores are most definitely public domain. I used to work for a company called Cricinfo as one of their admins in it's earlier days, and it's stats database (statsguru) is arguably the most complete source of statistics for cricket in the last few decades.
It was started by a group of fans into an ongoing company, simply because the stats on cricket were public domain. And it's raised a good sum of money in sponsorship for cricket along the way, and been a focal point for fans around the world.
Now, if the statistics for Cricket were deemed to be in the public domain, as it was quite possible for people to watch the match, tell someone else, and they could discuss it anywhere at any time, what makes Baseball different (apart from the fact that the organisers are trying to gouge money on everything they possibly can)?
Same here. I've been into computing since '79 (so, 27 years and counting). Keep refresh rates over 75 on your monitor, and text a comfortable size.
One of the useful things you can do if you sit by the computer is exercise your eyes (as explained at this place). It's no replacement for getting out and looking at distant objects, then near, in rapid succession, but it all helps. I've still got 20/20 vision after all this time, and I've spend a goodly portion of those years behind a console. The earlier behind an old TV set, as that's what the early home computers here used.
Drinking, singing and loyalty without the beatings up is Rugby.
Astounding. Absolutely astounding.
First, the second biggest examples of racism in Europe are the Neo Nazi movement, and of course the highly nationalistic political parties (BNP in the UK for example).
The football league is just a marketing ploy to give the masses something to be tribal about while making shed loads of money.
And, like it or not, human nature is tribal in nature (which is why you have cliques of friends you like, and masses of people who don't interest you).
The first biggest example of racism in Europe? The Anti-Racism laws, and the new Inquisition that comprises the various Anti Racism committees.
Yeah, it's just a bunch of Arsenic Selenide (ArSe).
Guess I'll have to watch out for that (working there).. That being said, I've driven around there for weeks with no tax, and nothing came of it.
Wouldn't do that with no MOT, as that's a pretty serious black mark on your license. Plust it invalidates your insurance.
What an odd thing to say. The Walkman is a personal portable stereo player. Sony invented nothing there, they merely created a personal stereo, and branded it as a "Walkman".
The playstation wasn't invented under the same argument, as it was a subset of a 'game console'.. Not sure who came up with that idea (atari was the first I remember).
You know what the GP poster was trying to say. Nothing to do with homophilia, racism or anything else like that.
Face it, being black with a bandana and a gun is actually promoted by the music industry as being the "new rebel" in much the same way as Mods, Punks, Rockers and so on have always been pushed as the "must be" trend that marketers like.
Something defined that they can say you have to be, to be glamorous.
Black, white, male, female, whatever. As long as they keep pushing the two main streams ("Gangsta" and that insipid plastic doll model for the 'cleaner' sanitized segment that everyone's supposed to conform to), they'll be on a downward spiral.
All that really started back in the mid 80's. I remember it all coming in, and hating it then. But my peer group loved it, as it was the 'rebellion against all that had come before'..
Most of my peer group are now settled with kids.. And lo and behold, those kids are starting to rebel against the repetetive, formulaic offering that's been shaped by marketers for a couple of decades.
Personally, I don't think this post needed to be made, as it was all implicit in the GP post, but I thought I'd clarify it a little.
Nice to see they noted that the unintended effect of pandering to an industrial lobbyist in creating legislation to protect them created a slowdown in progress, and lost opportunity in industry at large because of it. What with all the legislative scrum that the world's become, I think that's something that should be pointed out to the powers that be everytime they prop up a failing business model with the latest bought law.
*Cough* Uhh.. All the agencies had lots of legal means to obtain the information.
Just like us Brits had lots of legal ways to obtain information about the IRA, and the bombings still continued.
You basically make the choice: You don't care how many innocent suffer, as long as a guilty is found, or, you make all efforts to protect the innocent, which may mean the guilty get away now and then.
In a world where you judge every person as incapable of action independantly, you chose the former, and all rights and responsibilities of the individual are assumed by the state (totalitarian state).
In a world where you treat people as being able to be responsible in their own right, you grant the power to the people to act.. Which is, I believe, the reason you have gun ownership written into your basic rights.
No, it just means that the Intelligence services are going to have to do their job, and not rely on being able to wiretap and snoop anybody they feel like by bandying the phrase "They might be a terrorist" around.
Just as in the UK, the Government will probably be paying for it.
And as the government's expenses have just risen, and it's workload increased, there will:
a) Be a tax hike to cover the cost that is given to the ISPs to retain the data.
b) Be a tax hike to cover the salaries of the extra bureaucrats required to fill in the paperwork to support the new directive.
c) Be a tax hike to cover the cost of the consultants to work out a way of actually sifting the signal from the noise (or pay for extra M.O.D. staff to do the work).
Part of that tax hike may be applied to the ISPs, so they'll end up paying more, so to recoup costs, they'll have to raise prices.
All of which comes back to bite the basic guy in the street right in the ass.
Lots of cost, no appreciable gain.
One day, the governments will learn that just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. They'll end up with so much noise, they just can't pick out the signal.
Or maybe they could be making a stand.
Everybody knows that MS has enough cash in the warchest to force litigation against an opponent in all but the most clear cut cases.
When someone else now has a patent that can catch MS out, perhaps they're now making the stand to say "We can live without patents you bring against us. We will not pay you. You can sink your money into litigation to say we can pay you or change our product, and we will change our product. Nobody makes money out of Microsoft unless we say so."
Something like this may make other companies think twice about trying to force MS into compliance, knowing that it's going to cost them to obtain it, and with no big licensing payback.
that everything's connected.
If the ISPs were deemed to not be classed as common carriers, and liable for every action of their users, the restrictions on people signing up to ISPs would be unworkable (if the ISP was to remain viable).
Also, they could then be liable for actions of businesses against businesses.
This would set up being as ISP as a very dangerous business. So much so, that it would likely stifle network activity.
If that's stifled, then businesses don't communicate as effectively.
Nor do people.
Which would seriously limit the participation and movement of his discussion and debate forums mentioned in his proper biography.
So, by getting his own way, he'd eventually end up shooting himself in the foot..
How foresighted.
I'd have to disagree with that.
Society in general (and still in a goodly many places outside the 'western' world that's so into making a fast buck off everything, and screw it if it's not profitable) has held that the young need to be trained and led. This isn't contempt; its maybe contrary to what the young person wants to do, but if they're going to be functional in the wider scope of society, they need to understand how to fit into it (and no, this isn't just a "perpetuate the current system in stagnation" post; if you know the system, and can work it, you can change it. If you rail against it in ignorance, you haven't a hope in hell).
The old have been held in high regard as sources of knowledge and wisdom. After all, they had to live a whole lot of life to reach where they got to.
Sadly, the system is now highly skewed (discipline a kid to behave, and you'll have the CPA called on you). The young have the rights and politicians, in an attempt to grab the slice of the demographic as it is developing, pander to their every whim.
The old are pretty much ignored, as they're not going to be a changing vote, and you're not going to make more of a profit off them now. The store of whatever knowledge and wisdom they have is deemed irrelevant, as it has no monetary value.
So, it's really only contemporary, western society that has the issues, and they're not exactly as you couched it.
Not your ears you need to worry about if you play loud stuff in the car:
Keeping breathing could be more of an issue than hearing.
Actually, I think the average person is just fine working things out for themselves.
What they need is a carefully maintained framework in which to operate effectively.
That's what Government is meant to provide. Social and economic framework in which people can get on with what they think needs to be done.
From the earlier posts, I got the impression that the execs were the business people (who know money) with a little knowledge of what the engineers are trying to do.
If the engineers come up with concepts of what is feasible, and where the trends of technology are heading, or have an idea of a next great technology (which takes the tech background), and then table that to the execs, it's up to the execs (before the development time gets allocated) to work out if it's something that can actually make money (or be used as a stepping stone to a product/service that can make money).
That's what should be happening. Each group of education leveraging it's speciality, with a few people in the middle who are reasonably trained in both subjects who are able to communicate the finer points to both specialist groups.
The fact that a portion of your execs are also professors isn't necessarily a boon. It's that old difference between theory and practice. In theory, practice and theory are the same, in practice, they aren't..
I don't necessarily think that the behaviour patterns gained from working extensively in academia translate well to the world at large.
True though, what you need is the visionaries. But those visionaries are (in the tech world) almost exclusively the technically educated.
What they need is people clued in enough to support them, and enlighten them sometimes as to why their ideas aren't just ready for the limelight yet. And perhaps have that spark up another idea, which can be passed back as suggestion (perhaps to spark another idea) until something really great happens.
Actually, the article seems to point to this kind of behaviour existing in the US. Not the EU. Still, that's neither here nor there, as I'm sure it exists in other countries also.
Change the US and EU around in your statements and you can see exactly why the rest of the world is nervous about leaving the DNS in the hands of an organisation which is on a short leash to a governmental trade department.
However, that's a whole other story, done to death in other threads..
Do quite agree with ye though that the SBC quote seems a little heavy handed....
One flaw in your argument: You base it on the population of the US, rather than the amount of investigations.
Also, you believe bad things don't matter, as long as it's to a small portion of the population.
A completely over the top example would be to say that there were 200 cases in one year where a small group of people broke into houses and slaughtered families. The rest of the time this group were perfectly normal, helpful group.
So, you calculate the 'contribution' to statistics that each family contributes, and say it's some extremely small percentage, so it's nothign to worry about, and doesn't matter.
The point is, that the Governmental Agency tasked with making the country a better place is, in fact, not doing so, and abusing new powers (which people said would happen, and is) to do it, and justify it.
The idea is to hold the Agencies accountable. If they abuse power, then remove the abused power (or at least the individuals that do abuse it). If it's widely abused by loopholes, fix the law so it doesn't have the loopholes.
If that doesn't work, strip the law away and do something that does work, as by that point, it would be demonstrated as patently unworkable.
It means lots of things.
1) We need more resources, as the earthbound ones are not finite.
2) We need colonies off planet if we're going to more easily survive an extinction event (meteor, huge volcanic activity, so on, so forth).
3) The race as a whole needs space to expand in. That's why colonisation of the world was such a bloody affair, and may well become so again unless we have anew frontier to race for.
You remind me a whole lot of some of the texts that were appearing in the 1300s, and 1400s when explorers were heading out to discover new parts of the globe (or at least parts the Europeans didn't know about, and hadn't been).
There were a lot of people saying "What do we need that for. No gain. Nothing out there interesting.".
Oddly, America was one of those "unintersting" discoveries, which to my eyes, refutes the naysayers of the time.
If we go out there, we at least get the mineral wealth of asteriods easily in reach, and cost effective, perhaps kickstarting research in propulsion leading to a solar system wide civilisation (or more).
If we don't, it'll be easy to keep saying "No point, don't bother..", but you'll never know. Until Earth, as happens from time to time, has a large asteroid impact and/or huge volcano erruption sending life back to the stone age.
At which point it's not a question that'll be asked for a long time. If ever.
Ok, from the article:
There's said to be ice on the moon's south pole (water ice). This means you can have a self sustaining colony much easier.
This gives hydrogen, and oxygen that are excellent propellants.
There are also likely other volatiles such as frozen methane lurking around. This will enable you to launch intra system vehicles much more efficiently than trying to escape Earth's gravity well, without the pollution associated with that Earth launch.
This outpost will make it far more feasible to launch prospecting missions to the near asteroids, and possibly eventually provide a far better drop off point for raw materials gleaned from those asteroids.
Near term, it's simply easier for those intra system flights to mars. Long term, it's an excellent trading post from possible asteroid mining ventures.
And the asteroids have a mineral wealth that makes all the resources of the earth look positively frugal.
Getting off this planet is pretty much an essential point for the growth of humanity as a whole. The moon makes an excellent kindergarten for our further expansion.
Perhaps this may be one of the aspects that beat them in the derriere. There's a groundswell building that's looking more and more at Dolby Digital Live as an essential (for a media PC, you can't beat DDL as an output).
A few companies have put out DDL cards now (HDA Digital X-Mystique 7.1 GOLD and the Turtle Beach Montego DDL) alongside the SoundStorm chipset from NVidia (which rumour has it will be making a reappearance at some time in the future, possibly piggy backed onto their graphics cards). I use both the montego DDL and the SoundStorm. The sound quality on DDL with digital out is superb. EAX isn't too well handled (thank you Creative Patent Portfolio), but it's handled well enough for me (EAX2 supported) and my gaming habit.
Creative won't get my money, unless they have a vastly superior card, with DDL. And it's the DDL that drives my purchase. I don't want the extra cables, I don't want to have to use analogue stages between card and amp.
I honestly don't understand Creative saying it's a DRM issue. They have the sound tappable from their analogue streams when they leave the card. If they're saying it sounds just as good as digital, then the copy will be indistinguishable either by DDL copy or their analogue stream.
If it's not, then they're deliberately crippling their cards in quality to maintain a protection scheme for the content industries.
Yeah, I'd say Creative are officially evil these days.
I don't buy from them. Although that is made a hell of a lot easier to follow because they don't offer what I want.