Vxworks is tens of thousands of dollars, not tens of dollars. Second, what exactly is the added value of vxworks in this? It is good if you need hard realtime operations, which typically implies a solution with hardware in the loop. If you don't have that (and a flightsim doesn't need it) you can use a non-realtime OS like Linux just fine.

Anyway, how is this news? Where I work we have been writing spacecraft simulators for years on Linux... In the past all that stuff used to run on Sun, but really, what's the point in getting a slow, expensive Sun machine if a cheap Dell box loaded with Suse will do the job faster and cheaper?

Any landing you can walk away from is a success, and the crew survived, didn't they? How would a shuttle deal with this sort of punishment, you think?

If given a choice to travel on either a Soyuz or a shuttle, I'd fly on a Soyuz in a heartbeat. Not that anyone will ever ask me of course...

When corporations do something for themselves it is simply to obtain a service, and the work is done as cheaply as possible.

But when corporations do something for someone else (such as the public), it is a for-profit activity and it will be charged at the usual rates.

Do not mistake the ability of corporations to do something for cheap, for their willingness to do it cheaply for you. Especially on long-term services, where a corporation gets entrenched and other potential bidders face much higher startup costs if they were to take over the contract.

Because everyone is negligent in their own way. You should have looked before crossing the street, you would have seen that car coming. You should not have run 20 miles every day of your life, you knew it would give you bad knees. You should not have visited that hotel, it is well known that large international hotels attract terrorist bombings. It is the ultimate cop-out for insurance companies.

There are some major differences between all those shared resources you list, and those of ISP's though:

1. With ISP's, you pay for different speeds. If you pay for (say) 1000kb/s but it is known in advance that you will only ever receive 333kb/s, that effectively means they have just raised their prices by a factor three.

2. Rather than giving everyone _at least_ one third of their paid-for speed, and then spreading the remainder evenly over the various customers, you are simply capped. In fact I suspect that even that promised one third of the paid-for speed is on an "if available" basis.

3. The phrase "abuse" is thrown around lightly, and there is a clear undertone of "illegal". These are probably the kind of people downloading illegal movies and childpr0n all day long! Cap them, before they do even more harm! Or... Maybe they have subscribed to a legal movie download service? One that competes with UPC's own TV offerings? (UPC is actually a cable TV provider, that also does internet on the side!)

Simple fact: UPC is advertising certain speeds, but not delivering them. And it's not even because of oversubscription (as in the examples you gave), but simply because they don't want to.

That doesn't invalidate his point though. It is a list of steps that are taken in order, not a list of conditions that must all be true at the same time.

If taking out a loan increases the money supply (as argued in a great many documentaries), then paying it off decreases it. Go see "money as debt" or something similar.

If you are trying to deny what he's claiming, you are doing a lousy job. And gold producers as standouts... Could that be because investors are no longer willing to invest in coin?

Indeed, and that may yet save us. Or it could be a difference in counting methods, or it could be that the hammer is yet to fall for many.

You mean, "the people who caused the problem in the first place are telling us everything is fine now in the faint hope that we will believe them and start spending like crazy again. But given that they have no credibility left, no one actually believes them, thus perpetuating the downwards spiral."

Not that that is a bad thing. Restarting the spending spree will just start another bubble, making the problems worse in the long run.

It's a bit like this, then? ;-)

Guys, you are all making the same mistake: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Arianespace and all those others did not invest their own money to build its own launchers, they were all paid for by national agencies. Without that investment we wouldn't have _any_ heavy launchers at this time.

When you say that NASA needs to stop wasting money on launchers, what you are saying is that it needs to stop paying those companies for providing launchers. Because that is the _only_ thing that NASA does: it hands out contracts to industry for developing the capabilities that they need.

Letting industry take over, and stopping all money from NASA, as the original poster suggested, will simply result in those companies shrugging and withdrawing from the launcher market. The end result will not be "cheaper launchers", but rather "no launchers at all".

Delta 4, Atlas 5: paid for by US taxpayers.
Ariane 5: paid for by european taxpayers.
Zenit, Proton: paid for by USSR taxpayers.

It is not commercial development if it is the taxpayer footing the bill. Show me a company that invested its own money.

How can commercial entities, who have so far demonstrated only toy rockets, possibly be closer to achieving space flight than NASA, who demonstrated that capability decades ago and has since done it countless times? If it were so easy for commercial entities to do this, why aren't the skies bustling with commercial space stations and commercial flights?

You are arguing to stop investing _before_ there is a credible alternative. The only result of that will be the total loss of access to space for your country.

So where are Microsoft and SCO? Both have contributed so much knowledge (in the form of patents) and code, yet they remain completely uncredited. I'm deeply disappointed.

(guidelines for modders: this is supposed to be funny. It is not really that funny, so I'd aim for +2 funny or possibly +3 insightful if you want to give me some karma as well. I'll promise to do better next time when aiming for a funny)

I'd keep a page to indicate facts about Star Trek as it relates to the real world: high-level overview of the show, people involved, cultural impact: those are all facts that relate to the real world. "Star Trek" is real (in the sense of "a real TV show"), after all, so it merits an article.

However, I'd move descriptions of fictional starships, characters, plot synopses, and the fake science behind it to a cultural wiki.

Same for Shakespeare: Wikipedia needs a page about the man, his works, and why he matters (i.e. cultural impact). However, the contents of his writings are an expression of culture, and should be described in the cultural wiki.

Note that being in the cultural wiki is not a value judgement: our culture defines who we are, and as such is as valuable as the stuff in the non-fictional wiki. I just feel that mixing them in one system is a bad idea.

Just... Wow. And that's why I will never visit Dubai - not because I'm a drug smuggler or user, but because I might step on a grain of heroine or something while in the airport and lose years of my life to those idiots.

They pretend to be a normal civilized nation, but in the end they are nothing better than the medieval goatfuckers from which they descended.

I have felt for a long time that Wikipedia really needs to be split into two: one dealing with things that are at least nominally real, and one dealing with expressions of culture (which would include all articles that start with "this article is about a fictional ..."). That last one could contain all the Pokemon characters, X-files plot synopses, and Star Trek star ships humanity could think of, while the first could act as an actual encyclopedia.

Mind, I'm not saying to just delete all the fictional stuff, I love being able to look up the dimensions and mileage of the Enterprise-E. Just stop mixing it in with the real knowledge.

Yeah. It's stupid: we already had the perfectly functional phrase "plasmid" to describe those.

Personally I'm holding out for them perfecting the electricity plasmid.

That's a damn good point, actually... So why isn't there a constant stream of arrests in that country, given that they are able to detect absolutely minute traces of drugs on a person? There must be plenty of people travelling through there carrying dollar bills.