Slashdot Mirror
NASA Looking for Bandwidth Sponsorship
Neil Halelamien writes "A news release and MSNBC's Cosmic Log report that NASA has a web sponsorship opportunity for companies in return for providing bandwidth support for the two upcoming Space Shuttle missions of Discovery and Atlantis. The missions, scheduled for this summer, are expected to cause 20 to 30 million web site visits each and up to a half million streaming video feeds. The alternative is for NASA to cap the number of visitors. Sponsorship proposals are being accepted through April 13."
Didn't we once /. one of their servers?
Only on a subdomain, but it still shouldn't be possible.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
It will be a sad day when our corporations get all the money they want and NASA has to publish a sponshorship opportunity to run a website.
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
Why stream it all to a few, instead of using BitTorrent to send the complete files to everyone that wants them?
perl -e'print$_{$_} for sort%_=`lynx -dump svanstrom.com/t`'
Agreed, but shouldn't NASA also acknowledge that fact and let the people know about it? Case in point, recent "crack" which was discussed on slashdot. Yesterday, I read an article, which states that NASA is downplaying it. May be it is nothing but shouldn't their attitude be more realistic?
I think most people know it's dangerous. In fact I've seen no evidence to suggest otherwise.
Two shuttle disasters, numerous rocket failures and a HUGE hit movie whose only focus was a botched space mission have helped drive the point home.
But I could be wrong. I doubt it though, and I plan to ask a few people in passing conversation about the subject. Maybe I give people more credit than they deserve.
Agreed, but shouldn't NASA also acknowledge that fact and let the people know about it? Case in point, recent "crack" which was discussed on slashdot. Yesterday, I read an article, which states that NASA is downplaying it. May be it is nothing but shouldn't their attitude be more realistic?
Do you think you are a fucking rocket scientist!?! Most of them are... you are not smarter than the lowest 5% of people at NASA... why don't you people quit thinking you know everything and leave the worrying up to the people who REALLY know what they are talking about.
As for "and let the people know about it", what does it matter to you? You aren't on the ship and the people on the ship DO know the risks. Am I missing something here? Are you their fucking lawyer or union rep or what?
If NASA needs private sponsorships and advertising to get along, why not let true private enterprise (instead of quasi-private) take over the aspects of spaceflight which it's not prepared to support? I'd much rather see Pizza Hut paying -- voluntarily, and with clearcut goals of their own! -- for spaceflight than me, my landlord, and my neighbors, who are not given any specific choice about it.
;))
(Please don't tell me that "we as a society decided to give money to NASA to do it" unless you believe that every government decision represents societal concensus. Consider this: if U.S. tax return forms had a checkbox for NASA, reading something like "Yes, I'd like to direct a dollar of this tax money or contribute an additional [dollar amount, please fill in] ______, enclosed, to NASA," then *that* would be voluntary -- and a good idea, to boot, sez me. It would sure knock down the whole argument I made in the first graf here
Militarily, there's reason for NASA: among other things, they help launch satellites. Defense is a natural imperative, so I'll assert, not just concede, that part. To a lesser extent, though I think it's mostly a budget- and political carrot rather than near-term reality (Hey, what happened to the Bush plan to put folks again on the moon?), NASA research on practical matters of human life in space is somewhat justifiable.
What about abstract knowledge part of NASA? While I realize this makes me an anti-science troglodyte who hates any advance in human knowledge, I don't think that tax dollars should be paying for edge-of-galaxy explorer probes, or satellite telescopes looking outward at the various nebulae -- fascinating and good as those things are! (Golf carts on Mars is easier to swallow, wrt the Life in Space loophole, and so are satellite views of Earth, which show, among other things, how humans affect the planet.)
Note: I'm not saying no one should be interested in or study abstract, non-practical, just-for-insatiable-curiosity things about space -- far from it. I'm only raising the issue of how they're paid for and justified. The government doesn't spend our money very well, and frequently act with it in ways that decrease the national well-being; my biggest gripe about the way NASA money is spent is that it amounts to a tax subsidy, year after year, for a handful of entrenched companies that are technically private but mostly exist because of their (to mix a metaphor) pole position at the public teat.
Ahem.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
IIRC challenger was not supposed to launch according to its engineers. It was management that overrode the engineering staff about O-ring stability at too low temperatures. So lay off the engineering.
As to destroying stuff, I'd like to see you (even with a bigger budget than NASA) design from scratch a space program as advanced and have fewer failures. Bleeding edge science nearly requires some ammount of failures. The earlier the failure is found the cheaper (in all costs $$ / Time / Human) it is to fix. While it is sad that we've lost people (and equipment), it would be sadder if we lost Kevlar, PyroCeram, and other space program derivitives because we were afraid to do the research. If you were interested PyroCeram plates are awesome! Just don't put them in a microwave oven.
Oh, and on another note: I was one of those kids (6th grade) rooting for the first teacher in space. I (and my class, teachers, and parents) saw it blow up. . . live. My teacher started crying, as did most of us. It was a tough day, but as a result my class did a lot of research and learned a great deal. Something else that would have likely not happened if this desaster did not befall.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
The simplest, easiest, quickest, cheapest answer is for NASA to persuade ISPs to enable multicasting. Then bandwidth ceases to be an issue and nobody has to run any additional servers on anything.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
in fact, everyone who pays taxes is a sponsor ;-)