Re: some here will find this amusing

quoth Guillaume Laurent:

| Why not ? I agree that providing the people with a grand goal to aim
| at will probably get the research and industry running, but wouldn't
| making sure that more people get a better education create more
| researchers and engineers in the first place ?

not because of the great goal but because of the things that derive from 
it. the apollo program produced more in the way of electronics 
development, at lower cost, than anything else could have, and the 
result was more education, more jobs, and so on. it is, really, the 
difference between eating the seed corn right now or planting it and 
getting a much larger crop, enough to feed many, many more, later. 
almost alone among government programs, the space program (the shuttle 
excepted) has consistently done this. it provides returns in a whole 
lot of areas; indeed, the space exploration itself turns out to be a 
small percentage of it. it requires that we find ways of doing the 
impossible.

i dealt with it a little more extensively here:
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/powell200401150834.asp

(i broke the story of the president's plan on december 3. it was 
gratifying when, two days later, the washington post published a lead 
story saying that my story was not true, that the president had no such 
plan. my original story is here: 
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/powell200312030858.asp and, for 
what it's worth, i've been writing about this stuff for a long time; my 
work for the miami herald on the many things wrong with nasa and the 
shuttle is in the three stories here, which i put there because it 
wasn't online elsewhere: 
http://www.linuxandmain.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=318)
-- 
dep

It's remarkable how quickly a problem goes away once the people with
a vested interest in there being a problem go away. -- Mark Steyn

Kde-cafe mailing list - [email protected]
http://ofb.biz/lists/listinfo.cgi/kde-cafe

DISCLAIMER: The views expressed on this mailinglist are the personal
opinions of the author and do not represent OfB.biz: Open for Business, KDE or the author's employer.