Disclaimer: This is an opinion piece. All thoughts contained are that of my own. If you have an opinion about my opinion, please use the comment box at the bottom.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA for short. It’s been in the news regarding it’s new budget from President Obama.

This got me thinking…

Why is it even in the budget? It’s the Space Age, and yet, we’ve only made our way to our Moon with our own men. While this is a huge leap from what had been done before, it’s still only so far in the grand scheme of things.

Sure, we’re traveling into space via our machines, and a lot has been done in the last 40 years in these respects…

But imagine a world where we didn’t limit our space exploration, due to an invention of our own: money.

Imagine if all those advancements, if all the discoveries, all the missions had of happened years before. We’d be that much further ahead.

One of the biggest reasons is that our current system, at least in this area of the world, is capitalism: money runs everything. It’s what we know, it’s what we do.

But that’s not to say things can’t change. Things have changed in the past, and they will change in the future, but it’s a matter of when. So why not now?

Space exploration should be on the top of our list. Not only are many of the technologies developed by NASA in use in today’s gadgets and utilities, but NASA are also changing the world every day, by developing even more for their use. These will eventually find their way to consumer use as well.

These technologies create jobs, and most important push us even further towards space, and all that it has to offer.

Which brings me back to my point. Why are we holding them back?

Why are we telling them, “you can do this much, but that’s it for now, maybe more later”.

Why is it even an option to not push the limits of what we know and what we can do, at all times, and as far as they can?

So, how do we thwart this capitalism to give this wonderful cause some structure? My only idea would be an “International Initiative”.

One of the big issues of giving something unlimited money, would be dealing with the inflation that that causes against the people giving. So why not make it everyone’s responsibility?

We as a world community allow this to happen. We allow them to keep on developing past any boundaries that are laid out by “budgets”.

We might just find ourselves those years ahead, and in places where we never thought of even reaching.

These are the places we should be.

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Technorati Tags: budget, Community, funding, Life, Money, NASA, Society

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I stumbled across this site which offers side-to-side comparisons of songs which sound similar.

It’s amazing how many there are already, with more likely to come. The similarities are sometimes a little too similar (and admitted by certain artists).

Some of these raise very complicated copyright issues:

• Was the similarity intentional?
• Is the similarity close enough to demand credit/royalties?
• How close is too close?

(more…)

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Technorati Tags: Education, information, Licenses, Money, Music, Music Industry

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