NASA's new jobs programme

Bullshit

Hollywood created the film industry. Bollywood came after.



Everything is based on what came before. The Wright brothers were the first to make airplanes work, before which flight (mostly gliders) was just a hobby.


It has nothing to do with "large, established, players". It has everything to do with the growth of government. If you invent a better mousetrap, no one can force you to stop selling it, except the government (I know people here will disagree with me about this - people here are wrong )



The US won that "spending competition" (military spending, that is) because it had enough resources, provided by a (relatively) free market system.




Compassion means giving of yourself to people who need it, not taking of other people's money to absolve yourself of responsibility. There is a wonderful method of taking care of the needy, and that's called charity. And there would be a lot more charity available if the government didn't suppress the free market's ability to generate the resources needed to give that charity.

The idea of having a government that can tell people what to do is as old as humanity, and that's why people have been in such a miserable state for most of history. In fact, it was the Jews who had the first limited government, with checks and balances (we had a civil war over taxes), and it was only until the United States that the rest of the world started basing governments on those ideals. Freedom is based on limited government, not on democracy. Hitler had wide support among the German people, as have other dictators. Democracy simply means that the majority of the people can order the death of the minority, or in our case, order that a minority has to give the majority its money.

NASA has turned around earth for 40 years. I figure they must be sick of it.

Well, according to Wikipedia, 3G was launched in Japan in 2001, while this article talks about the rise of GSM in the US, two years later in 2003. TDMA and AMPS did exist in the US before that, but weren't by far in such widespread use as the GSM networks in Europe and Japan at the time. So yes, I was exaggerating, but I don't think I was really wrong.

I still think you were very, very wrong. I used mobile phones before GSM (NMT) - weren't they mobile phones?

And of course, Apple and Palm, which revolutionized the cellphone and the PDA, are both Japanese companies.

I'd never heard of NMT, but yes, those were mobile phones, and the US had these 1G phones as well. However, the capacity of these (analog) networks was seriously limited, for sure not everyone in Norway had a mobile phone back then as they no doubt do now.

Anyway, it does seem that I underestimated US cell phone penetration; it seems that it was already at 40% in the US in 2001, when Japan introduced 3G. So my statement that most Americans didn't even know what a cell phone was, was incorrect. It took until 2005 for the US to introduce 3G networks, and the US was then still lagging quite a lot in total subscriptions compared to Europe and Asia.