Lunacy from Brussels

Correction's in'serted. 'Sod the apo'strophe!

Sucker. Support your local pork-barrel.

It is a perfectly ordinary book - perhaps a bit heavy on the academic references, as Will Hutton seems to see his role as popularising academic economic research. I've seen it sold at airports, where any trace of controlled substance in the binding would probably have excited the sniffer dogs no end.

The sort of brain-washed attitude that you are exemplifying isn't built up by teams of armed men in black helicopters, but by years of the sort of steady, small-scale mis-information which leads you to see any effort to raise the educational standards of your low income groups as bleeding heart liberalism, rather than economic development.

Show some self-interested greed, rather than wasting your time repeating right-wing mantras.

------------- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I don't regard educational programs as bleeding heart liberalism - I merely regard the educational system in the United States as politicized, content-scrubbed and religiously bent beyond any hope of repair. No amount of money can fix it.

Examples of things I do regard as bleeding heart liberalism:

• "Equal" opportunity (i.e. handicapping white male heterosexual applicants for jobs, college placement and other benefits).
• Forced desegregation of ethnic groups. Pay to bus these people around, and pay again for their injuries when these desegregated schools become a hotbed of violence?
• Attempting to disarm the populace or otherwise restrict personal freedom of speech and ownership of knowledge or artifacts in any way.
• Any Government-supplied funds for lobby groups such as the gay movement, environmentalists, "war reparations" for real or imagined hurts sixty years ago, collectors of antique butterflies or any other group that should be funded wholly by the private interests that are the sole beneficiaries. This is no comment on the merit of any one of these beliefs or activities. It is the idea that I should pay to further their agenda that is unacceptable.

My life would be much simpler if I was right-wing. The problem is that I align with libertarians - I want government reduced and pulled out of peoples' lives - and neither Democrats nor Republicans would ever do this. Laws are practically never repealed.

To be fair, if a true libertarian ever became President, he wouldn't be able to achieve anything either; playing the system well enough to reach the top would make him part of it.

In essence, I want a Wiccan President - "an it harm none, do as thou wilt". Not very likely, is it?

I think this may be closer, in the circumstances:

The total sum of intelligence on the planet is a constant. The population, however, continues to increase.

Cheers

PeteS

The motives are wrong, but the goal is right. Interplanetary manned flight is, IMO, the _only_ useful piece of science and engineering being performed today.

Because it's the only route for escaping the limitations of tens of thousands of years of cultural baggage on this planet. There's room enough out there - and the problems of day-to-day survival are pressing enough - that clashing cultures need never see each other again. People back on Earth can dig their heads into the dust and pretend the world was created by a god in seven days, or whatever they please.

You're not seriously thinking there is any doubt? Being concentrated in a single area like this is a serious risk for species survival.

It won't happen in my lifetime, but it will happen.

The same factor that makes them easier to conquer (unfortunate choice of word, by the way) makes them vulnerable.

Did I tell you about the time there was a call-in show on CNN (or one of those cable news networks) that was about that $300M Mars lander, with the rovers that are still going? I called in, and I GOT THROUGH! I got my voice on TeeVee!

Anyway, they had spokespeople and scientists and NASA officials, it was a real thrill. I don't remember my exact words (I was ODing on adrenaline), but it was something along the lines of, "If the US government were to refrain from buying, say, one aircraft carrier, or one nuclear-missile-carrying submarine, is it not true that the savings would cover the entire budget for the entire history of NASA?"

The answer turned out to be, "Pretty much, yeah."

Imagine my surprise. :-/

If "we" weren't spending a trillion dollars ($1,000,000,000,000.00) a year on machines that have no other purpose than to kill people, we could have those moon hotels like in "2001", and probably an outpost on Mars by now.

Sigh. Rich

Kinda. Deep-sea colonies would be possible without - CURRENTLY - hitting "ownership" problems. Of course it would require a redefinition of international law. And the poles, with some political changes, could be settled. But it's not enough - the best it could be is practice for the real thing.

It's a pity it's going to be the Chinese, really. They're more likely to keep it a closed club. If it was Russia, now...

That's a laughable comment in both aspects. It's clearly expensive to build mining equipment, oil rigs, aluminum refineries and so on. It's dangerous and costly to install and maintain them. Hunting for the right spot to put them is risky and expensive too. So, we will obviously never build any "meaningful" number of those appliances. How could anyone even contemplate such a ludicrous proposal? Oh, wait... could it be that these devices give us access to huge amounts of resources otherwise unreachable? Gee, who would have thunk it?

It was not "useful" for colonists in the east to trek to California. It was not "useful" for people to travel from the first settlements in Australia across the deserts to the west coast. They were looking for lebensraum and they were looking for answers - and immortality. They wanted to be the first, and they were.

Clearly you personally don't have the right attitude to be an explorer. That's fine; nobody is asking you to put your beer down or get up from the couch in front of your TV set. The pizza delivery man will deliver food right to your couch for a price. But don't make the mistake of believing that this is the non plus ultra of life.

Personally, I would even take a one-way trip to Mars, as long as I had a reasonable chance of landing and spending some time alive on the surface. I'd be happy for my tax burden to double if I knew the excess was going directly to develop technology to get people there safely.

Of course Star Trek is fiction. Real space flight will not resemble [the majority of] science fiction. Fiction is fiction, though in some aspects it can be predictive.

In article , Tim Wescott wrote: [...]

I think the problem is really with the new "no-clean" fluxes. The new stuff will stick to your teeth if you make a hibit of eating the solder.

In article , Dirk Bruere at Neopax wrote: [...]

Unfortunately, the psudo-random sequence space is only finite too. If you put a million spread spectrum devices in one room, the million and oneth is certain not to work.

There should be specifications that all devices conmpress their data streams so that only the useful data is sent. This would lower the amount of RF energy needed a great deal. Some of the cellphone conversations I've overheard would take no bandwidth at all.

In article , wrote: [...]

The US is planning a new mission to the moon for 2018.

In article , Robert Baer wrote: [....]

Who *are* you calling a "nobody" ?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Them's fighting words!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In message , snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org writes

Legislation follows the downhill valley. Gather money by legislation target it at a safety issue to create more jobs for experts and advisors, no one dare object. Pollution is real but corrective action s only applied to the easy targets.

Drinking water from lead pipes and breathing leaded petrol exhaust may be a bad idea for children but seldom do they eat printed circuit boards. Pure tin is a hazardous alternative , I have seen it grow long whiskers within a short time and its behaviour at -50 is interesting. I have seen it said that US MIL specifications will not allow other than tin lead solders for this reason though electro tin and flow can overcome the problem

If they put me in charge, I'd ground the shuttles and splash the space station.

Perhaps we should sell them on ebay.

JFK's trip to the moon was more about proving that the US could hit Russia than hit the moon. Some real science did happen as a result so some good did come of it. This return trip looks like I stepped into a time machine and went back to the 1960s.

That's another way to waste money I guess.

Graham