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The 20th Century: Loser Style
Ant wrote to us with Wired's depressing end of the century list. Reasoning that all of these "best of the eons" lists need to have an ugly relative, they commisioned the folks at Ig Nobel to come up with a list of notable failures.
Haha. You didn't get it.
i thought it was quite interesting, cheers. at least it was well thought out & researched, not like most lists people compile (greatest musician of the millennium ... uh paul mccartney, yeah right (BBC)). also, they gave you enough information to explain about the thing but not too much to bore you. and it was split well over three pages. and more interesting than sendmail 8.153beta released, definitely.
Aaarrrggghhhh!
OK, what if we decide to call metric "SI" or something . . . that way we might be able to avoid an army of Republicans whining about President Carter . . .
Our measurement systems sucks ass! I can't believe that the average person still uses it, when practically everything else in the universe uses metric. All scientific study uses metric. The majority of engineering uses metric. Metric metric metric!
(yeah, so this is a pet peeve of mine, sue me)
Heh. I won't feel so bad next time I type 'killall' on a Solaris box now.
Um, because they now found something which appears to be a tenth planet?! Don't you read space and science news? This story is a couple months old now.
Did anyone else notice that the page headers above the title read: "Sponsored by Qwest. The bandwidth to change everything."
In the midst all the death, destruction, and failure, the slogan takes on all kinds of meanings.
Gee, how witty and original. Little web page boy.
*yawn*
I saw something on the Discovery channel or PBS that suggested that the Tu-144 was shot down by a French fighter plane at the airshow. Unfortunately, it crashed into a village outside of Paris killing quite a few people.
It crashed after it met a french jet fighter during a demo routine. We can only guess who paid for getting the fighter there...
Some place to make a political statement...
they should actually have put both wars on there together...excellent arguments have been made that the first war never really ended-it just went into remission for a while until it picked up again in the late 1930s.
I agree...we should go metric every inch of the way! JondZ
That might explain why all the most impoverished countries seem to make the best vodka: Poland (Belvedere); Russia ... nevermind.
:)
(Stolichnaya); Finland (Finlandia). I seem to know a little too much about vodka
Ummm.. I wouln't call Finland one of the most impoverished countries.. they have more internet users per capita than the US. (could be because it's so cold there that there's very little to do besides sit in a sauna and drink vodka..
Dang, I guess I just missed it. (I read the whole article, but didn't remember seeing it.) :(
Thank you! Thank you! Finally someone somewhere brings this up. The "millennium" concept is so arbitrary. Sure, coloquially it has come to mean "1000 years from the beginning of AD (or CE if you're being politically correct). But, that's not really its origin. Besides, the basis for definition 2 listed above is based 1000 year intervals starting at Christ's birth, which, last I heard, has been historically established to be NOT in 0AD or 1AD. So the whole 2000 = millennium versus 2001 = millennium is a moot point. For a great (I would say definitive) read on this, check out "Questioning the Millennium: A Rationalists' Guide to a Precisely Arbitrary Countdown" by Stephen Jay Gould. Sorry, I just had to vent...bye bye.
Unfortunately, there is a time-to-market lesson in the Comet, too. They lost time in fixing the problems, giving the 707 time to succeed, which it did, and the Comets lost out because the economics of the Boeing and Douglas planes were better. But more than 50 Comets were delivered after the major airframe failures, and they were flown commercially into the 1970's, so the Wired story is not 100% fact compatible.
At least Chamberlain's "Appeasement" should have been on the list ... he and the rest of Europe was giving in to Hitler SEVERAL TIMES when he broke the Versailles or other Treaties (buildup of german army, unification with austria etc etc) ... ... how many people died in WW2 in europe ?
in the hope that Hitler would finally stop his demands
How big the misunderstanding of the situation was is really scary
My understanding is that doing the date-storage job right the first time would have cost more than hacking it with two digits and patching it later, when software development resources were cheaper and less exotic.
FWIW.
I would rather nominate the apparent productivity of our law schools and the number of lawyers as the greatest technological failure of all time.
parts of the maginot line were used by both sides in the battle of the buldge and it proved to be an excellent fortification.
You may be interested to know that Arthur C. Clarke beleives in cold fusion (I'm personally not convinced). Read his prediction for 2002 here.
uhhhh......powdered aluminum is not thermite. powdered aluminum and iron oxide(rust) is thermite. and even if that were on the hindenburg, thermite does not spontaneously combust. anything with enough heat to overcome the high initiation energy of thermite wouldve ignited the hydrogen anyway, sorry better luck next time.
the amige is still widely used, and I can run dos apps on my emelator faster then they run in windo$s. And my multimedia throughput is still better then anything in a 'cutting edge' pc.
Star Wars: The Phantom Menace
I beleive the dog WAS rescued before the bridge collapsed.
People die. It happens. We might as well derive enjoyment from it. This reminds me of the "Columbine Massacre Deathbowl Party" me and my friends threw during the live newscast.
Nothing is so serious you can't laugh at it.
--Electric Barbarella
posted anonymously to spare my karma
Don't count on the law to prevent anything, even when it tries. We need a law against stupid laws and another one against loopholes.
didn't you see that tiny picture of him with his sniper rifle on the lower left hand corner of the original photo of the Hindenburg as it was landing?
(Not the doctored one you misinformed Americans saw, but the real one I found on http://hindenburg.konspiracytheories.org before the NSA, CIA, FBI and NBA shut my site down)
Moral: Don't count on the Homer Simpson's of the world to save your butt, even above-average guys couldn't do it, and no above average guy wants to sit at one of those consoles until his teeth fall out.
I'd would much rather have had us invade Japan, lose more millions of our own troops, and kill tens of millions of their people. I'd much rather the Japanese have been left open to simultaneous invasions by Russia, and perhaps even also by China.
Note: If either one of those nations would have landed their troops on Japanese soil, you would have had a higher casualty count than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Per day.
In other words, if we hadn't used the atomic bomb to force Japan to surrender, maybe my grandfather - or hell, your grandfather - would have died fighting in Japan, and one of us - or maybe even both of us - wouldn't have been born, and this wouldn't be getting discussed. Not by you or I, at least.
Oh, I forgot. You're not American. You're safe and snug in nice, warm Iceland. You didn't have to worry about losing a whole family tree fighting the Japanese. You'd have a different view if the Rising Sun was going supernova in your FACE.
religion, politics. not much of a difference, imo.
A better (and true) Auto Industry conspiricy was the dismantling of America's streetcar systems in the 50s and 60s. Investment, bribery, and corruption was used by General Motors, Firestone Tires, and others to get the mass transit companies to sell their rail systems for scrap and replace the systems with expensive gasoline busses.
Within 10-15 years most of the transit systems were bankrupt, and the government had to pick up the maintenence on the bus fleets.
Congratulations for ignoring his remarks about the human tragedy and the lessons we learned from it! You went straight to the relevant issue of whether or not it is inaccurate to say McAuliffe made it into space. Bravo, dude, bravo. (/sarcasm)
That message was more offtopic than many other posts attatched to this article that have been moderated down as offtopic, and was frankly one big troll. Not even a semi-funny troll, at that.
Though I certianly agree on point 2.
aaaaaand......how exactly did you do spectral analysis on BLACK AND WHITE FILM FOOTAGE?
ROTFL - That one's great! If you are right on time with "xxx of the 1900s/1990s" you ARE right on time with "xxx of the century". Its the same point.
It's not a bug; it's a feature. :-)
There are a couple of facts you are forgetting.
1. The airliner's transponder was apparently removed and replaced with an F-14 unit because it responded to the ship's IFF interrogator with F-14 codes. This caused the ship's systems to identify it as a non-friendly F-14.
2. The airliner was flying extremely low and fast like in an attack pattern. After the incident, Iran claimed that their commercial airliners often flew similar flight profiles. Further investigation showed that Iranian airliners had previously flown the same route, but at more traditional altitudes and airspeeds.
3. The airliner was hailed multiple times and failed to respond. Ordinarily, the ship's crew might assume this was due to a failed radio and scramble some fighters to make visual contact with the aircraft. However, in this case the low altitude of the airliner prevented it from being detected by the ship's radar until it was too late to try making a visual ID.
4. As someone else in this thread pointed out, autopsies indicated called into question the time and cause of death.
Money going back into the economy doesn't help - money will always go back into the economy. When a brick is thrown through a window, value is lost, it doesn't matter that someone else sells replacement windows. The point is, society could have two windows or one, and now it has one. We could have made real software (I think INTERCAL still needs a string library ;) ) with those man hours, but unfortunately we spent them rewriting COBOL. Even money hoarded in the bank is at least available for someone else's loan.
Either there are no successful experimenters, the successful experimenters are keeping quiet (no problem, as they'd soon make stuff appear in the market for us all to use), or else all the successfull experimenters are blowing themselves up with relatively minor explosions.
Thats enough.
you. are. amazing. wow. now, do you call yourself "da trollmasta" or just "icancount boy"?
have you seen the video of the tacoma narrows bridge breaking up? in physics lessons we always tried to get the teacher to show us that one, and the one called "testing" (where they blow up custard powder). they were cool. i like the way someone had also left their car on the bridge.
Formed in 1919 by the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I (the war to end all wars), the League of Nations had no true military power to enforce their edicts, and the United States never really joined. Japan and Italy withdrew from the League, and the USSR was kicked out in 1939 over their invasion of Finland. The League of Nations was abandoned in 1945, as...
...the charter for the United Nations (b. Oct 24, 1945; d. ?) was drafted in San Francisco, from April to June of 1945, which was ultimately refined, then signed, by 50 countries, on June 26, 1945. The League was merged - meaning, its Council became the Security Council of the UN, consisting of the five victors of World War II (the US, USSR, China, France, and the UK).
The burning wick that may lead to the UN's demise (though it will surely fail to prove to be a loser any time within the '20th' century):
1) The hard rule that any one of the above mentioned 5 nations have veto power, which means any one of those old boys can stop the UN dead in its tracks. This was taken advantage of by the USSR, in a series of vetoes that made GI generation Americans highly familiar with the term "Nyet".
2) The UN is very selective and fickle about where they enforce the peace. While they are waging war on Milosevich in Bosnia, slave trading is rampant among Africans, and there was no UN action in Rwanda, where 1 million Africans died. (Perspective: more Rwandans died in that war, than all blacks in the US who died from racist or random black on black violence, since the 1940's. Maybe in this whole century.)
3) The UN is attempting to breach national sovereignty (telling the US to curb its death penalty laws, for instance). This is going to make enforcement almost impossible without the excessive use of military force. (In fact, this runs against their own declared statement of intent: The UN may not interfere in the domestic affairs of any country.
Fickleness, the Old Boy crony system, and the wavering of the UN with regards to the sovereignty of individual nations, may doom it to become a 20th century boondoggle, even if it takes well into the 21st century for it to fall over.
The resonance theory of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge has come into some disrepute. A quick search provides the following link:
t ml
http://www.me.utexas.edu/~uer/papers/paper_jk.h
I'm sure others can be found. Not that it detracts from its inclusion on the list. I love that video.
There was an interesting article about cold fusion a while back on http://www.sfgate.com by Hal Plotnick that really questions how "stupid" cold fusion was. I was unable to find a link in their archives, but the bottom line is that research is still going on (not just by P&F) and getting some interesting results. Cold fusion may not be dead yet, but it may also not be fusion.
P&F certainly earned disdain for their "peer review".
bmetzler wrote:
Ah, but how much would it have cost if they'd done it right to begin with? I don't have any documentation to link to but I read that it may have cost more to be "Y2K" compliant right away then to leave it to be fixed later.
That would be an interesting study, if not down fully already. What was the savings for leaving a problem to be fixed later?
Certainly being Y2K Compliant in the 50's and 60's, and perhaps even in the early 70's would have been very expensive, to the point where some projects would have just become unfeasible. However, there was no excuse for anything to not be Y2K compliant once IC's became widely used for processors and memory. Anything designed since that point, unless it was specifically supporting a legacy system, should have been written with Y2K in mind.
----
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Open mind, insert foot.
According to this link, the use of hydrogen wasn't the cause of it burning up - the coating was!
http://engineer.ea.ucla.edu/releases/blimp.htm
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
- Robin
How about the elusive 9th planet? Pluto is technically no more than a comet, and there's a concerted effort right now to get it de-certified as a planet. Of course the American astronomers aren't in favour of it because - who was it, Hubble? not sure - an American found the blasted thing. Really we're an 8-planet system with a whole bunch of smaller rocks and bits of ice orbiting too.
Well during the First World War the Germans used Zeppelins to bomb England and France. Plus Blimps are pretty good platforms for spotting U-Boats.
Since the US had a monopoly on He. we doled it out to the English and French (whom also had Zeppelin programs - based off of German technology taken after the First World War) we decided to be bastards and not give the Nazis any.
Now...I saw a thing on Discovery Channel about some retired NASA propulsion engineers that went over the negatives of the Hindenberg disaster and decided that it was the fabric doping (some aluminum compound) that caused the fire. Not the Hydrogen, if it would have been a Hydrogen induced fire the first flames would have been clear.
I'm sure someone else can shed more light on this.
There was an hour long thing on the History Channel about this.
They did know about harmonics at the time. It was a real FUBAR by the engineers that designed the bridge.
How about the Davy Crocket?
A 155mm or 120mm recoiless rocket with a 20 to 250 ton warhead. They were either tripod or jeep mounted. They had a tested range of 1.77 miles.
They were removed from service because the Army didn't want to trust a nuke to a mear Sargent.
That and it's a real bad idea to have a nuke that only fires 1.77 miles.
The only Tu-144 flying today is sponsered by NASA.
Thats what that NASA page is about. All the other Tu-144s are no longer flying.
http://www.bird.ch/Russians/Tu144/TU144P02.html
"Status - Several aircraft preserved, one aircraft used as testbed."
If I remeber right...they were used in the late 70s-early 80s on one route in Russia. Moscow to Omsk or Rostov I think.
I have a photo here in Volume 13 of World Airpower Journal of three Tu-144s sitting at Zhukhovsky in the grass.
He didn't build the plant. It was given to him by the US Government after WW2. They did that to a lot of people.
From what I know of the story it was vast Auto Industry consperacy to keep him down.
I think it was static electricity.
Why didn't they mention that? Totally pointless suffering of millions, just to test the newest toy! Hypocrites, I say.
J.
This actually happens fairly frequently. Look up the etymologies of "bork," "quisling," and "spoonerism," to name a few.
The true loser decision was made by the Ford executive who was on the witness stand, happily explaining this reasoning to the judge. The judge got fairly angry.
It goes to prove Mitch Radcliffe's contention that:
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Motorola not getting the deal for supplying the CPU for the IBM PC.
:P
Rather than having a nice 68000 based system, with flat memory model from the start, we end up with a segmented, "640k should be enough for anybody" pile of crap 8086 cpu from intel, which stifles development for years
hrm...
smash
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
There is a backstory behind the Hindenberg crash, the thing was desinged to run on Helium, but after the Nazi's stared re-arming Germany the US Gov banned Helium exports to Germany, and the only source of it at that time was in the US.
Can't say I feal any sympathy for Nazi Germany.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
Your post is full of misinformation about Vincennes and the Airbus tragedy.
1. There was no F-14 in the air at the time. It's considered doubtful that Iran had any F-14s capable of flying at that time.
2. The Airbus was in a civillian air corridor - Vincennes the the air corridors plotted wrong.
3. The "separate warnings" all identifed the aircraft they were "warning" based on relative position from the ship. A civillian aircraft doesn't have any way to know where the ship is, and isn't about to respond to calls make to "Iranian F-14 30 nautical miles north of my position and diving" when it's an Airbus, it's climbing, and it doesn't know where "my position" is.
4. Vincennes picked up no Mode 3 squawks from Iranian airspace.
5. Vincennes disobeyed a direct order and left it's patrol area in order to put itself in that "danger" that Captain Rogers thought he was in.
6. Rogers flagrantly disobeyed the rules of engagement many times during this incident, including when he ordered the firing of two Standard Missiles against this improperly identified target.
7. Rogers had been cited several times for disobeying the rules of engagement in the past, and Vincennes was known in the fleet as "Robocruiser" because of it.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
The O-rings were near the top of (IIRC) a 20-item list of critical problems--i.e. "never fly again until these are fixed." They were redesigned twice. In each case, the redesign was worse, so they returned to the original (flawed) design.
Actually, the Maginot Line can be accounted for as leftover WWI stupidity.
--
An esoteric scratched itch:
Homeworld Map Maker Tool
Quite a few inaccuracies I've noticed with their reporting. Check outj 1
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/8.75.html#sub
for a more technical overview...
(no html tags. fooey.)
So instead he said that he was flying to California, with CAA's permission, and then after take-off he just flew to Ireland.
Afterwards, to keep the CAA off his back he said "oops, I made a mistake"...
...richie - It is a good day to code.
"Scientific socialism"
>>esr>>
This accident, which occurred at Tenerife in the Canary Islands on March 27, 1977 is truly a tragedy. Both 747s were fully fueled, and the fireball that ensued when the KLM plane crashed into the PanAm plane was huge. A total of 583 people from both planes were killed, including everyone on the KLM plane. I saw a fascinating series on The Learning Channel on air disaters, and they interviewed the pilot and a flight attendant from the PanAm plane. Their descriptions were terrifying. The investigations were complicated by KLM's refusal to admit that their chief training pilot could have made such an error.
Okay... KAL flight whatever got shot down by either A. Soviet Pilot Error or B. Soveit Pilot Boredom. In the USS Vincennes deal, the Airliner had two identifer boxes, one for making it an F-16.
And the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.. I'm not sure anyone knew about harmonics then. I know it inspired research into the effect.
Well, the jury is still out on this one. Worst case, the era of treatable bacterial infections is just a flash in the pan. With no further feasible avenues of antibiotic research, we're back in the 19th century, when people could die of a scratch. A setback, but less than catastrophic -- we'll have to be extra-careful about antisepsis and care of the human immune system, and we might be able to attack the problem in that way. Better case: we learn more about what makes the antibiotic drugs lethal to parasitic bacteria. We crack their DNA, and the development of antibtiotics becomes a two-way hacker game whereby humanity is always competing against the nearly-infinite possibilities of blind and random evolution. And most of the people who would do the research very likely would not have been here without someone using penicillin.
teleny, friend of cats.
Tucker.
Moderate up please.
"Think of it as evolution in action."
...also failed to call for yours?
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
"Pedantic is too small a word for it. It is... LIQUID OBLIQUITY. Crow wrong-headedness: FIT IT in your slashdot." (Prays that some English reader will recognise this, and find it at least mildly amusing.)
But maybe you might spare a tiny pinch of sympathy for the people who died in the crash? They weren't "Nazi Germany". And what military applications did He have in those days?
For the programmers among you, here's a simple flowchart-type thingie which explains the whole process. (Isn't it wonderful how you can find just about anything on the Web these days?). For those of you who can't wait to click on each link (why the guy didn't just do a diagram as in the original, I'll never know), here's my pathetic pure-text rendering. If the indentation doesn't look right on your browser, what can I tell you? Life is hell. For best results, buy the book: P.J. O'Rourke, "Age and Guile" -- worth the money for this alone.
Sorry, but the eggshell thinning stuff is not at all airtight. See the eggshell thinning section of the junkscience.com DDT FAQ for relevant references.
I play Nerd-Folk!
More information is available at http://www.junkscience.com. Scroll down to the January 1 entry for the DDT commentary, or go directly to the DDT FAQ page.
I play Nerd-Folk!
Wired did a pretty good story about the current state of cold fusion not long ago. Interesting stuff here:
What if Cold Fusion is Real?
I play Nerd-Folk!
(Sure, it's not a gas, but it's still flammable)
Sure, but you still have these big ol' wing-shaped balloons full of explosives.
Its purpose doesn't matter. The fact that it's there does. I'm just trying to say that it's not just ANY ol' balloon, there were (at least some) safety precautions, just like there are safety precautions on a 747.
There were all kinds of design screwups on the Hindenburg, but having a bag of explosive stuff on board isn't necessarily a stupid idea.
It's not.
It was a metal frame with all kinds of compartments that held the gas, kind of like, oh, the wing of a 747. And you're still arguing over purpose. It doesn't matter if the gas/fuel is there to make the thing float or to generate propulsion, what matters is that it's there. Would you feel better if you died in a plane crash as opposed to a Hindenburg crash knowing that the burning fuel was there for a 'better' reason?
(Yes I know this is getting waaaay offtopic)
Okay, different approach:
- The gas in the zeppelin is there to make the thing fly.
- The fuel in the 747 is there to make the thing fly.
Tell you what, the zeppelin is more fuel efficient! Guess the 747 must be a bad design then.(Okay I'll shut up now...)
Boojum
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
- Ring-like segments of the booster rockets are joined together much as you would expect, with and overlap and a rubber seal
- In fact, there are two rubber O-rings that go around the entire rocket at the (each?) join
- As the rockets burn, the sudden change in temperature and/or pressure causes the sections of the boosters to bulge.
- This means that the rubber O-rings have to expand quickly to stop any fuel or gas from escaping through the join
- The escaping gas is very corrosive and if the rings can't seal the gap they will quickly fail, completely.
- The day of the launch was one of the coldest that the shuttle was ever launched on. The cold temperatures meant that the rubber reacted slower than "normal". They failed, obviously.
The lowly engineers wanted to stop the launch. Management wanted it to go ahead (for money reasons no doubt). The head engineer in the middle caved in on the side of management.Boom.
The windows popping out of the Hancock tower were NOT due to the movement of the building, if I remember correctly. They were caused by a MUCH more subtle cause -- a design flaw in the double-paned construction of the windows.
Check out the following link:
http://www.sgh.com/hancock.htm
...for a report on the failure. A summary of this appeared in the Boston Globe a few years back. I would have thought that the IgNobel people (at MIT no less) would have known abou this.
I believe it is true, however, that the sway dampener in the Hancock was put in after its construction -- but I could be wrong, and can't find verification on the web.
Another significant difference is that gasoline is liquid at "normal" temperatures, thus easier to handle. IIRC, liquid gasoline doesn't burn, the vapours do: but it vapourises very, very easily. :-)
The real real tragedy of the Hindenburg was that airships as a technology was practically abandoned until the 1980s or so.
(However, had it not exploded, its propaganda value for Hitler would have been much higher, too, which might have swayed the "neutral" USA in the opposite direction...)
AFAIK, that's a product from Sweden's alcohol monopoly Systembolaget; IIRC, it was launched when the movie "Absolute Beginners" opened in Japan. Lately, it has become best known for the ads in various magazines, made by renowned artists, all having a variant of the rather peculiar flask.
But it does taste good, especially the blackcurrant version...
Um, because they now found something which appears to be a tenth planet?! Don't you read space and science news? This story is a couple months old now.
That would be the first of I think serveral objects discovered where the Kupier Belt is predicted to be. These are comet-like bodies, if I understand correctly; they don't have anywhere close to enough mass to exert gravitational influence on the gas giants.
The original "Planet X" predictions weren't a screwup so much as an illustration of the scientific method in action. Early, low-precision measurements of the orbit of Neptune suggested that its orbit was being perturbed by another gas giant farther out. This was a well-known phenomenon; Uranus and Neptune were found that way, if I remember correctly. A great search effort was undertaken, and further measurements were made of the gas giants' orbits. Pluto happened to be in one of the areas scanned, and was added as a ninth planet; however, it didn't have enough mass to appreciably affect the orbit of Neptune. The search continued without much luck, and fairly recently analysis of better-quality information on gas giant positions over a longer period of time indicated that the original perturbations were just measurement errors.
Measurements were taken, suggesting a hypothesis. The hypothesis was tested, and further measurements were taken, and the hypothesis was found to be false. Perfectly normal.
While we don't have any evidence for a "planet X" gas giant out there, it's still interesting to look out at the far reaches of the solar system; the Kupier belt and the Oort cloud should be out there, as well as the heliopause (boundary between the Sun's magnetic field and the galaxy's, though this isn't something you can look at with a telescope). We just aren't likely to see a tenth planet.
[Disclaimer: I'm in the "experimental error or outright fraud" camp. But, this argument is relevant too.]
Cold fusion requires palladium as a catalyst. This is an *extremely* rare metal. It's only _relatively_ cheap (as in very-precious-metal cheap) because demand for it is limited mostly to research, if I understand correctly. Give every house a demand for a palladium-catalyzed reactor, and cost will go through the roof, if demand can be satisfied at all.
Hot fusion isn't limited by materials or fuel. Neither is solar. Neither is fission, for the next few hundred years.
Wings. Not. Balloons.
they are NOT there to serve as bladders to put things into that will make the plane lighter than air.
Michel's point still stands. In both cases, having the flammable substance explode would be a good way of taking the craft out of the air.
Having a craft carry hydrogen isn't a design flaw. The design flaw would be if the craft was not built with adequate safety precautions to keep the hydrogen from being ignited.
Remember when Ford actually decided that the design flaw in the Ford Pinto's gas tank would cost them more to repair if they issued recall notices than they expected to pay in lawsuits to families whose members would die due to the flaw? Talk about a loser decision ...
Actually, there is no way to avoid making this kind of decision on any project where the product can kill someone. You can always make a car or a building safer, no matter how safe or unsafe it already is. You have to make a decision on where to draw the line. This decision is partly dictated by law, which sets minimum safety standards, and partly dictated by cost/benefit analysis.
Yes, you can assign a cost to a human life. Depending on what kind of calculation you're doing, this might be the total cost that your customers are willing to pay to make the product safer that on average one fewer person dies, or the average cost/liability to you per death, or what-have-you. When the cost of making the product safer exceeds the actual cost of the lives saved as measured above, you stop making the product safer.
Anyone who drives a car makes this decision. You'd have to take a hit in either pay or quality of life to work at a place within walking distance (or live within walking distance of work), so you drive a car. However, there is a chance that you or another person will die as a result of your driving or as a result of mechanical failure in your car. You are exposing yourself and your other potential victins to this risk when you get behind the wheel, willingly, rather than accept the cost of not driving.
Is this a valid choice to make? Sure. But in making the choice, you still place bounds on how much a life is worth, which makes it possible to assign a "cost" to lives for purposes of doing risk calculations. In a myriad of ways, our own actions - personally - prove that we do not consider lives to be infinitely valuable (indeed, it is impractical for any of us act as if they were).
The key issue here is setting the "cost" of life high enough that nobody can fault you for the decisions you make based on that "cost". The key issues in the Ford case were that: 1) the car that started it all was struct by a van going 50 miles/hour (the target car was stationary IIRC). Explosion under those conditions is pretty likely no matter what, and 2) the Ford engineers, who had seen this risk analysis and knew of the design flaws, still considered the car safe enough that they were using it to drive themselves and their families.
This doesn't mean that Ford was blameless; they could, for instance, have offered the _option_ of either of a couple of possible upgrade devices to customers who wanted them, at a reasonable cost, and let the customers make the decision. However, there are mitigating points, as mentioned above.
The Ford Pinto was one of the case studies used in an Engineering Ethics course I took.
The nuclear bomb is the biggest failure of all. Einstein foresaw what could come of his theories and passed a grave warning about the Nazis potential use of it to the US government. They took his theory and created the worst weapon ever built. He fought for the rest of his life to abolish nuclear weapons.
I'm skeptical of this argument, for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, the principles of the fission bomb (and of more advanced nuclear weapons) follow directly from basic physics. You can make a pretty good argument for its development being inevitable - look at all the things we'd have to *not* know about to not be able to build one or figure out how to build one. The question then becomes, "was its development and management handled in the least disastrous possible way". It would have eventually shown up no matter what.
Secondly, nuclear weapons are one reason why there *hasn't* yet been a World War III. The consequences of a nuclear war are great enough that, while we may be crazy enough to have one, we're certainly more reluctant to have a nuclear war than a conventional war. As an all-out war would be fought with nuclear weapons, we are reluctant to press nations with nuclear capability to the point where they will _use_ these weapons.
This made the US reluctant to start a war with the USSR, but made the USSR reluctant to start a war with the US. Or even have too big a skirmish.
In summary, while it was a tightrope walk, I think that the inevitable development of nuclear weapons was handled adequately by the world. It certainly could have come out much worse - and there's no way short of abolishing basic science research that it could have been avoided.
IBM had a 68000 based computer, I think it was from the laboratory systems division. Sort of an early attempt at a technical workstation.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
At least the interrupts and DMA channels worked. My company had major problems with Apple IIs that were being used for data acquisition. Our I/O cards used interrupts and we found that interrupts didn't work properly in many of the computers. It appeared that Apple didn't test all of the features on their boards during manufacture, just the one that were commonly used.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Well actually it's Vin & Sprit that makes Absolut. Vin & Sprit isn't a monopoly ( anymore).
It's called new wave but it's just the same.
Here's another version I heard some place: IBM was designing a PC/workstation based on the 68K and running a version of Unix (Xenix?).
However, they became convinced that they had to move very quickly before Apple had a lock on the market. So they planned get a commodity-style 8080 + CP/M box on the market and introduce the "real" 68K PC later. (In the design phase they switched to the 8088 and MS-DOS.)
Of course the 8088 PC was such a hit that they began planning the 286-based AT and either cancelled or moved the 68K machine up-market (can't remember which.)
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Funny thing about Pons & Fleichmann-type Cold Fusion. The Cold Fusion cells themselves can be put together for a few thousand dollars--affordable for any University or even a sufficiently motivated individual. Unfortunately, the calorimetry is hard, and that's one of the critical areas in which the two screwed up.
An interesting side note: Japan only recently (1997) ended its goverment funded $20 million Cold Fusion project--over 8 years after the first P&F-type Cold Fusion announcement, and long after government funded research ended in the US.
Ah, but how much would it have cost if they'd done it right to begin with? I don't have any documentation to link to but I read that it may have cost more to be "Y2K" compliant right away then to leave it to be fixed later.
That would be an interesting study, if not down fully already. What was the savings for leaving a problem to be fixed later?
-BrentIn fact, there are two rubber O-rings that go around the entire rocket at the (each?) join
Now there are two o-rings at least on the outside part. Before the accident there was one. If I remember correctly (my dad isn't here to ask who works at Thiokol) they also added some sort of heating element around each joint.
The day of the launch was one of the coldest that the shuttle was ever launched on. The cold temperatures meant that the rubber reacted slower than "normal". They failed, obviously.
Yes you are correct on this one also. IIRC there was ice on the SRB's!
Karrots
The really notable thing about the Hindenberg is that it was the first "disaster" reported live on the radio by a hysterical, babbling reporter. Mass media was new in those days, it didn't take much to get people going (e.g. the "War of the Worlds" fiasco).
And the real tragedy of the Hindenberg, in my opinion, is that whenever you suggest using hydrogen powered vehicles of any kind, people look at you like you're crazy. "My god man, don't you know that hydrogen is *dangerous*?" Sure: it's explosive. Just like gasoline, except that when you burn it you just get water vapor.
Now that's surprising. --
god n. : the Supreme Being, indistinguishable from a good random number generator.
And there doesn't seem to be a single programming language anywhere that decently supports units! Unit analysis is one of the basic checking principles in science classes. (Now what is it that has the dimensionality g/lb?).
I suppose that in C++ or Ada95 one could go in and item by item define each unit type as a separate class, and then overload the operators so that, e.g., (xMiles / yHours) gives a result in class speed, or perhaps velocity -- one is signed, the other isn't. But it's so much work to do this an any language that I know of that it never gets done!
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The Finlandia House in Helsinki is covered with big bricks made of Italian Carrara marble. It is a beautiful building, a masterpiece by Alvar Aalto.
However, over the years the bricks started bending and falling because the marble couldn't take the weather and air pollution. As the building is the most important congress center of Finland, the problem had to be solved and so the city started searching for a better material that would last. Lots of money was used and they found a few materials that would solve the problem. This only took many years, lots of meetings and money. But finally it was time to choose and solve the problem.
The City Council chose the same Italian Carrara marble again.
ARRRRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. It is millennium!!! NNOTICE THE TWO NNs! Double-n! Not single! If you're going to be a jerk about the beginning of the new millennium, get the word right! And the calculate those days we lost in September of 1752, a total of 11, and then reconfigure based on the error of the monk discovering Jesus's birth, and celebrate the milleNNium on December 20th, 1995!!!!!!!!!!! bleh.
http://www.bombcar.com It's where it is at.
Fellowship 9/11
They should have included the confusion over whether the century and millineum are zero- or one-origin.
I know I'm pedantic, but I find all these xxx of the century/milleneum lists to be a year early. However, xxx of the 1900s/1990s lists are right on time. Maybe everyone will agree with me once they recover from this weekend's parties.
My nomination would go to the Army and it's testing of infantry men's durability against neuclear blasts. This can be seen elegantly in the film Atomic Cafe where hundreds of men are in fox holes and trenches while a blast is set off. Most of them spent their time just trying to keep their hats on against the resulting shockwave.
I don't know if the blunder here goes to the military for doing stupid testing or to the men who were either unwilling or unable to stand up and speak out against something so obviously WRONG.
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"War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left"
"War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left"
Steven Wright
Yes, but would you willingly go in to that trench right now?
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"War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left"
"War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left"
Steven Wright
"Fox turned into a hardcode porn channel so gradually, I never even noticed..." - Marge
"Slashdot.org turned into a hardcore porn site so fast, I sure as hell liked it!" - Rob Malda
:-)
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
DDT is still in widespread use outside the US. The magazine Invention & Technology has a great article about this in its latest issue. Malaria is no longer a real threat in this country, but in countries where it is, they have resisted all appeals to do away with it.
A friend of mine still uses DDT. When he heard that it was going to be taken off the market, he bought mass quantities.
The IBM-PC was a whole bunch of disasters rolled into one, from the interrupt scheme we're still suffering from (PCI helps, some, but not enough), to the Digital Research fiasco (Digital Research had a multitasking version of CP/M when Microsoft was still looking for someone's OS to license to fill IBM's order).
One of the problems with the availability of cheap PCs for the masses is that the 'masses' are now programmers. I don't want to sound like I'm against a computer in every pot, (I'm actually in favor of it) but now people that aren't formally trained to be programmers are now writing business apps for work because they can't wait for the IS department to write it for them. They start by copying example code from Microsoft Press books and presto! instant programmer. As long as it works for a couple of test cases they are happy and pass it along to their co-workers. Very few programming books stress such 'unnecessary' details such as error trapping, input validation or date functions. Some people actually become good programmers this way (it takes a genuine interest and a variety of sources) but the vast majority either don't take the time to think it out completely or just don't care as long as it gets today's job done. Remember, most of the trained programmers spent the late 80s and early 90s building doomed client-server apps. The mainframes and little workgroup apps were supposed to be gone by now.
Do this don't do that Can't you redesign.
WWI was chosen for the debut of the tank, airplane and submarine in combat. WWII just refined them.
Do this don't do that Can't you redesign.
For example, the Chernobyl reactor didn't "melt down", it caught fire. (It was a graphite-moderated design, it got hot enough for the graphite to catch fire. Nasty.)
And the Hindenberg "disaster" wasn't that bad -- most aboard actually survived, and zeppelins had been flying for years without incident before that. It just happened that there was a reporter present (and we know how often the news media get it right). There were numerous other air disasters they could have mentioned (like the DC-10 incident where an engine fell off, destroying hydraulic lines in the process. Turned out they'd been using a fork-lift to remove/replace the engine for servicing, messing up the mounting bolts).
And, Windows aside, perhaps the biggest computer-related screw up was the messed up deal between IBM and Motorola that ended up with IBM using the Intel 8088 instead of the Moto 68008 chip in IBM's first PC. (Accounts differ, one version has it that Moto refused to license the design to a second source, which IBM wanted.)
-- Alastair
The man would be Tucker, the car would be the Tucker Torpedo.
Way ahead of its time in many ways, at least in initial design. Reports vary about how well the final product matched the initial design (mostly due to lack of start-up funds). The movie paints the established auto industry as the bad guys in this, they didn't want the competition. How accurate that is I don't know.
(That movie and story always reminds me of Gary Hudson and his repeated attempts (Phoenix, Roton, etc) at bringing a small reusable spaceship to market.)
-- Alastair
Actually, the scare over DDT has now been discredited. Contaminants in the manure used in "organic" farming is actually more harmful to the crop consumers than DDT, and DDT has no significant impact on the environment outside what it is intended to do (get rid of crop pests).
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Rather than flaming you, I will merely suggest that you continue reading to page 2 of the article.
--
Do I look like I speak for my employer?
The story about the guy who typed 'buy' ...
... boss ... I have some bad news for you ..."
instead of 'sell' and lost half a percent
of Chile's GNP is hysterical
"Uh
*grin*
Changing road signs is simple. It gets complicated and dangerous when you look at switching to metric for sea and air navigation. This isn't just an American problem.
While the Army and AEC deserve some blame for the sloppy way in which the tests were conducted, it isn't inherently dangerous to be near a nuclear explosion. A good slit trench will protect you from the prompt effects (radiation, thermal, blast) of the weapon. The real danger is radioactive fallout, you don't want to be downwind from the test site. If you are on the upwind side, there isn't much to worry about.
Yes, if I had confidence that I was not in the projected fallout footprint.
Sorry, I have to call you out on the Strangelove reference. Accoring to Jack Ripper, fourinated drinking water is at the heart of a communist consipacy. Communists never drink water, only vodka, thus polluting their bolily fluids. To keep his bodily fluids pure, he drinks only grain alcohol and rain water. He explains this right before stating that he does not deny women, he merely denies them his essence, which is my favorite line in the movie. I once went on a rant about how sodium benzoate is in *everything* and that it is surely polluting our bolidly fluids. I had ingested a pretty large ammount of exstasy right before this, but I think I was on to something. Think about it.
-ODB Jr.
I thought that many pesticides were estrogenic, not just DDT. I read somewhere, (good source there, I know) that the average human sperm count has been plummeting over the last 50 years, almost entirely due to pesticide runoff in drinking water. The statistic that I remember wa that sperm counts are about half what they were before WWII. Can someone with more info and maybe a real source back this up?
-Barry
They didn't mention favorite failure, at least as a physics student: the Tacoma Narrows bridge, 1940. The video of that thing vibrating in the wind, has created laughs and amazement for a long time. This failure also increased awareness of the need to give aerodynamic testing as part of procedure in testing suspension bridges. Here are some pictures if anyone is interested.
------ 24.5% slashdot pure
Okay this might be a product of me watching to many X-Files and just generally being a skeptical guy, but does anyone else here think that the suppression of cold fusion is some sort of government plot? I know I'm probably rehashing this from somewhere else but think about it. If cold fusion were (allowed) to exist think of the changes that would go on. Power companies wouldn't be needed as much because every house/building would have its own mini-fusion generator to keep the power on. That leads to less oil and coal use. Which leads to trade deficts and all that blah-blah. Not to mention the complete distruction of lots of huge mega-corporations (Mobile-Exxon anyone?). I'm sure there are other reasons but I've got to get to work.
I'm actually surprised that Fleichmann & Pons are still alive and haven't died in some sketchy "Hunting accident" or something
Pete
The sole purpose of the Internet is to get porn and bomb making plans into the hands of children.
Remember that some of the "Y2K updates" have actually been just updates to the latest version of software. Some companies simply decided now to update to the current version of software after ignoring updates for several years.
#ifdef HUMOR
But think of all the resources saved by leaving off those two digits for all these years! Memory and disk ain't cheap ya know!
#endif
The article on the de Havalind Comet is also inacurrate. True the initial model did crash due to metal fatigue, but by redesigning the shape of the passenger windows the Comet 4 was a successful design. In fact the RAF's Nimrod was based upon rebuilt Comet 4s and should be in service for many more years to come.
Bhopal - no you are wrong. This is not due to those silly 'wog' incompetent rag-head's. This was a tragic safety failure. If the same thing had happened in the Europe or US, people would have had their heads handed to them.
As for UC having to pay a fine, I cry no tears for them. Six thousand dead should be a heavy weight on someones soul. Since corporations have no soul, they have to pay in valuta, money.
Cold Fusion - Please supply links or citations to all these marvelous validations of cold fusion. I would love for cold fusion to be true, but I don't believe it. And I've never heard from anyone credible anything to support pons and fleischman.
That might explain why all the most impoverished countries seem to make the best vodka: Poland (Belvedere); Russia ... nevermind.
:)
(Stolichnaya); Finland (Finlandia). I seem to know a little too much about vodka
Ummm.. I wouln't call Finland one of the most impoverished countries.. they have more internet users per capita than the US. (could be because it's so cold there that there's not much to do besides sit in a sauna and drink vodka..
Oh yes, and they also make Absolut vodka. They *were* a part of Russia until World War I, so no surprise that they like vodka..
Well, under the powdered iron was doped fabric. The hydrogen would have burned with a relatively cool flame, and would have released vertically. Not to mention the fact that spectral analysis of the flames indicate that they were from the burning fabric.
In short, the same thing would have happened, had the Hindenburg's bouyancy been provided by helium.
Jeff
The nuclear hand grenade?
1. Pull Pin
2. Throw twenty-five miles
3. Duck and Cover.
Check for a 'view for printing' or similarly-named link. In this case, it leads to:
http://www.wired.com/news/prin t/0,1294,32916,00.html
which is all on one page so you don't need to keep flipping.
A really really out there, ahead of it's time, fabulously cool car with more useful features than you can shake a stick at... 3 headlights, one in the middle. Standard seatbelts at a time when some manufacturers didn't install seatbelts at all. Headlights that track with the steering. Automatic tranny. Beautiful styling. 0 to 60 in 10 seconds, which doesn't sound like much today, but for a family sedan from 1948... (just remember, some of today's family sedans can out-accelerate many factory stock sports cars from 30 years ago, so a car from '48 keeping even with cars more than 50 years newer is pretty slick). A big flat 6 in the back, designed as an air cooled helicopter engine but hacked into a liquid cooled engine for use in the Tucker Torpedo.
itachi
Supreme Troller Overlord
At least for this story anyway...
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
... the Maginot Line?
Garg
Alumnus, Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters
Also DDT is an estrogenic drug - it can mimic the effects of female sex hormones in males. Estrogenics cause many problems, including falling sperm counts in humans.
Oh yes, I wasn't trying to imply that DDT was the only estrogenic compound, just that it was one of them.
Al Gore claiming to have invented the internet
AOL failing to upgrade their modem banks after moving to flat rate pricing
Windows (although it _did_ popularize the PC)
If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law;
Microsoft Bob? Hello?
"Nah...last year was our Y2K stuff...now you need to buy our real millenial issues"
Modify that to "Young Country" and you've got a deal.
Anyone who calls Mearle Haggard soulless just don't know soul.
--"You can lead a man to knowledge, but you can't make him think."
Lots of information on Bhopal, as well as a number of other technological safety disasters - such as Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and the Therac-25 - can be found in the excellent book Safeware by Nancy Leveson. Have a look here at the software safety research unit at MIT.
Here are some excerpts from Appendix C.4 of Safeware;
An awful lot was wrong, from UC's organizational culture right through the plant design to the workers. There is no one "cause" as such.If I recall correctly the History Channel show I saw on the Tu-144, there is no proof that its failure had any relationship to unstable design. To this day a number of engineers from around the world maintain to this day that its design (though stolen from the Anglo-French group) was improved upon to the point that it was superior to Concorde. The cause of the accident seems to be disputed, but it seems to be a tossup between pilot error (the pilot putting the plane in a position no commercial airliner would ever hold up to [the 144 made it further in than the rest would've]) or the interference of a mirage fighter put in the air by France. Tu-144s are still flown today, admittedly not widely (but neither are Concordes) in Russia, with a flawless safety record.
More info on the Tu-144 "Konkordsky":
The 144LL Initiative
More 144LL
Tu 144 specs
A guide to Russian Airplanes
Q:Doctor, how many autopsies have you performed on dead people?
A:All my autopsies have been performed on dead peop
Ah, that's good to know. I'll have to tackle my programming prof if I ever see him again; he never mentioned which mission suffered because of the FORTRAN stupidity.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
This has nothing to do with the English/metric thing; I just felt that this should go in the space-probe-thread rather than start a new one.
/completely different/ blocks of code, both legal.
:-)
IIRC, the punctuation mistake they're talking about was an instance of the now-infamous DO LOOP constructs in FORTRAN. You can alternate between a period and a comma, and the result is two
With the comma, you actually get a loop. With the period, you get a funky-looking initialization statement and some useless labels. When I was a freshman in college, my introductory CS professor showed us this piece of code, explained the screwup, and added, "We lost a rocket in the 60's because of this."
(I've never formally studied FORTRAN. If I've messed up the explanation above, oh well, mea culpa.)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Another factor that leads to the stereotype of Russians swilling vodka like water is that, in Moscow, you can't drink the water unless you boil it, and even then it tastes pretty poor. Since vodka is considerably cheaper that fruit juice or soft drinks (and is alcoholic as a bonus), it's the drink of choice in Russia when you don't want to taste foul boiled water.
(note: IANAR (I am not a Russian). This is second-hand from my Russian language teacher, who recounted having to take someone to the hospital after he drank half a cup of Moscow tap water. Yum.)
>
> It had a power surge due to being operated incorrectly, leading to a steam explosion.
> The steam explosion put graphite moderator in contact with white-hot naked fuel pellets
> (as well as removing [ Emphasis mine ] the lid on the reactor), and that led to the fire.
I wholly agree with your description of what happened, but damn, you have a gift for understatement :-)
A representative post as to "why this ought to count as one of the more colossal blunders of the century":
Follow-up: Unlike the "maybe the experimenter got careless with his math and used the wrong shape of vessel" theory espoused by this post, ISTR that it was eventually determined that the root cause was an in-duh-vidual adding thirty-five pounds of uranium to the acid solution, rather than the 5ish-pounds he was supposed to use.
That's beyond "carelessly bad math" (which in this situation still would qualify it as a Fuckup of Pretty Big Proportions) and well into the realm of "A Fuckup of Such Grand Proportion That Deming, the Man Who Taught Total Quality Management and Process Engineering to the Japanese, Is Probably Still Rolling In His Grave Three Months Later".
Edlin is in Win2K, in response to ch-chuck's question.
What about fluorinated drinking water?
Clearly a communist plot. Have you ever seen a communist drink fluorinated water? No, they drink grain alcohol and rainwater.
Peace on Earth through Purity of Essence.
Do anal-retentive people hyphenate 'anal retentive'?
The Slashdot Purchase (1999): Andover.net buys out slashdot.org, and while Rob swears that nothing will change, slashdot.org gradually transforms into a hardcore porn site.
..
"We must move forward, not backward, upward not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom."
Bitchslapped? Give Rob a bitchslap from bitchslapped.com.
It was my understanding that the project was scrapped. Thank you for setting me straight.
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This is not my sandwich.
My other nomination is the Honest John, a short range missile developed for the U.S. military in the 1950s. Although a very capable weapon when carrying a conventional warhead, in 1954 the Pentagon insisted on deploying a nuclear-tipped version with a warhead of over 100 kiloton yield. Unfortunately, with a warhead that size, the blast radius of the missile exceeded its range.
So, any other nominations?
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This is not my sandwich.
Those clever German designs simply did not exist, though. The Germans themselves had lots of trouble trying to develop long range bombers with adequate protection, Heinkel He-177 and Focke-Wulf Fw-200 Condor were just two of their relatively unsuccessful events to come up with a German equivalent of the B-17, B-24 or Lancaster. Therefore it only makes sense that they chose to copy the American B-29, with its remote controlled gun turrets and pressurized cockpit, had many innovations for its time.
--
BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming in January 2000.
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Tu-144 was not a hastily assembled "Concordski" by any stretch of imagination, and reflected considerable Soviet experties on building experimental high-speed strategic bombers and huge fighter aircraft in the sixties, like the Sukhoi S-100 and Tupolev Tu-128. Accidents can happen in aviation at any time. Tu-144 went on to fly in Aeroflot service in the 1970s.
The fact that Tu-144 was a sound design has been recently verified by NASA's use of the Tu-144 as a testbed for 21st century US supersonic transport aircraft. The link is here. The Tu-144LL is flying today for NASA service, and $350 millions of taxpayer money is used for this project.
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BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming in January 2000.
Zigbee Central: A Zigbee weblog
This rumor is complete bullshit. Iranians never had the F-16, although the US had made the blunder of selling them 80 F-14 Tomcats during the Shah era, 6 or 8 of them equipped with the ultra-powerful AN/AWG-9 radar that comes standard with the US Tomcats. During the Iran-Iraq war, the Iranians used these aircraft as fast and agile AWACS aircraft, figuring out that using the radar's long range capabilities will be much more useful and safer than sending it into direct combat. Even after almost 20 years of US embargoes, several F-14s still fly with the Iranian Air Force, despite US intelligence officers' claims every year "that existing F-14s have been cannibalized to provide spares to the flyable ones over the years, and none can fly as of today". Actually the Iranians get their kicks by flying them over Tehran every year in anniversary celebrations in front of US reporters and camera crews. They apparently can build some spare parts and expendables for F-14s, but mostly the aircraft are kept flyable by cannibalizing the others.
This blunder has been haunting the US military for a long time. Not wanting to miss the chance of shooting down an F-14 and get a nice, shiny medal, a trigger-happy commander on USS Vincennes shot down the Iranian airliner with a Standard missile, killing 290 people. One of my friends, an Iranian grad student here in the US, happens to be a distant relative of someone killed aboard the plane.
Loading an aircraft full of dead people and let it be shot down? Give me a break.
--
BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming in January 2000.
Zigbee Central: A Zigbee weblog
The objective behind the Tu-4 project was not to "increase their egos", rather, to kick-start Soviet large bomber design and production process. Your post reflects some shallow comments made by some authors in the aviation history literature, but from many points, the Tu-4 Bull project was immensely successful.The Russians, even though they once pioneered the heavy bomber concept with the early "Ilya Muromets", never had long range, heavy bombers during World Word II; and they suffered because of this. The USAAF and RAF had four-engined, heavy bombers throughout the war and used them effectively; but the Russians had to make do with Ilyushin Il-2 Shturmovik and a host of other light attack aircraft, and some slightly larger designs like the Petlyakov Pe-2. Several attempts at producing larger momber designs flopped miserably.
Some clever industrialist (probably not Stalin himself) saw that the best starting point would probably be duplicating a successful long range bomber design, and the Soviets duplicated the B-29, as you correctly pointed out, to the smallest screw. Rumor has it that a hole in the tail section, caused by a flak hit, was exactly duplicated by the Soviets in hundreds of Tu-4s produced.
Now you might argue that the B-29 and hence Tu-4 was outdated by 1947, but the very valuable expertise gained by Tu-4 project allowed the Russians to design and built very capable bomber aircraft that scared the US military throughout the Cold War. After the Tu-4, Soviet aircraft industry produced many very good designs that held up very successfully against their Western counterparts.
Note to nitpickers: Yes, I know Ilya Muromets has been designed by Sikorsky, who later immigrated to the US. It's a Russian design nevertheless.
--
BluetoothCentral.com
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming in January 2000.
Zigbee Central: A Zigbee weblog
... of bueaucracies. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Cold weather did not made the O rings brittle, it made them less malleable. And the O rings were fine until the boosters starting to flex during launch. Check out What Do You Care What Other People Think?, by Richard Feynman, which contains (among other things) Dr. Feynman's account of his experience on the NASA comittee charged with finding out why Challenger exploded.
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for slashdot.sig (129323052 bytes).
The Bhopal tragedy was not caused by failure to follow safety regulations.
The main problem was that the systems as well as the backups failed simultaneously. A failed storage tank, failed backup tank, failed cooler occurred simultneously.
Worse was that the company management tried to claim that the company was *not* responsible for what happened.
Also the company has not paid a major portion of the damages yet, nor has it provided for the rehabilitation of the victims, as required by the court judgement.
Note: The only unconfirmed point is regarding the damages.
PS, I'm in Chem Engg in India and we have to study this disaster, so take a smaller pinch of salt.
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
How about the elusive 10th Planet?
I remember hearing about this theory about ten years ago the first time. And then didn't Slashdot have a story not so long ago about it?
Whether or not the bug results in disruptions in service anywhere in the world, the process of fixing the bug and guaranteeing compliance has cost the world economy billions of dollars.
It has cost over a trillion dollars in the US alone. All in one-time expenditures... pretty incredible.
Well, if you put it in roman numerals it doesn't really look right for 2001 being the start of the next millennium. (Even though I believe it is, so I'm not flaming or anything, just pointing something that I see out.)
If you turned Roman numerals into something like this:
C = century
M = millennium
When 1999 = MCMXCIX
and 2000 = MM
and 2001 = MMI which looks like just another year
in the millennium
Doesn't it look like MM = millennium * 2, or as in second millennium? (Of course, it would be the beginning of the *third* millennium) So... you can't really use Roman numerals to say that, because it doesn't look right. It seems like it's gonna be impossible to convince those non-believers that it starts on 2001. Sorry, Arthur.
The reason for all of that it is a lawyer-repellant. Any company that gets caught with a Y2K bug that causes a loss of service is going to have a liability problem. And even if they don't, there is going to be an issue of comparison with similar products. Think of Y2K-compliance as a bullet item on glossy ads for a product. By a couple of months from now, all that is going to matter is that you avoided not having it. The companies that blew it are going to get beaten up pretty badly. Microsoft is taking a bit of a ribbing on Wired for getting the dates wrong on some documents. Arguably, those dates don't matter much. But it looks bad.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
I have a theory that relates to this; Back in the early days of settling North America, it was common for the Europeans to import and sell cheap spirits to the Native Americans. It kept them happy, docile, and drunk. I think the Communists rediscovered the fact that a drunk citizenry is easier to control, and thus provided mass quantities of vodka, etc, at dirt-cheap prices.
.sig: Now legally binding!
Shortly after the Vincennes shot down that Iranian airliner, I heard a wierd rumor that the thing had been staged by by Iran to embarass the United States and draw attention from their (losing) war with Iraq. Supposedly, the airliner's 290 passengers were really dead bodies from a recent battle during the Persian Gulf War. The Iranians supposedly loaded them on that plane and ordered its pilots to fly close to American fleet which was on maneuvers in the Persian Gulf at the time. They did just that and the Vincennes shot the plane down. Seriously wierd stuff.
Does this
To too many Americans, Systeme Internationale is one of those Frog things. Look, those people eat blue moldy goat cheese, would you want to buy a measurement system from them? ;-)
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
IIRC, transport aircraft now have indicators to flag these failures to the flight crew.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Oh, yeah, even though none of the accusations of the deterious affect of DDT on the Bald Eagle (does it strike anyone as odd that it ONLY affect the eggs of the bald eagle?), we outlawed THE most effect and SAFE pesticide ever known.
Questions:
- How many people have died from malaria since DDT went out of production?
- How many people have died in accidents with the poisons we are forced to use now? The new pesticides don't just kill insects, they kill everything!
- Whatever happened to sound science?
Don't you think it's time to start communicating?
Bhopal:
Union Carbide plamed for India's poorly educated workers refusing to follow safety proceedures and guidelines. UC paid dearly and mostly kept thier mouths shut.
Challenger:
Several Engineers had tried to stop the use of the material in the O-rings. Several Engineers had tried to stop the launch that morning. Some NASA bearucrat pushed the launch through for internal political reasons.
Another Shoot Down:
All of the bodies recovered from the water had been dead for more than 24 hours. Very little blood was present in the water. Suspected to be a ploy by the Iranian goverment to turn up the international Heat on the US. The approach of the "Irianian Jetliner" was wavetop and full throttle -- very un-jetliner behavior. It also failed repeatedly to respond to hails.
Cold Fussion:
To date, the results of Fleischmann and Pons have been replicated by 20-30 researchers -- Including Chemists at Texas A&M and Arizona State. There's something else going on here.
Y2K Bug:
I agree with the previous post about the cost of the Y2K bug.
Don't you think it's time to start communicating?
How many more of these friggin' "of the decade/century/millenium" articles are we going to have to endure for the next week?
Call me picky, but as we all know, though many prefer to deny it, is that the decade/century/millenium doesn't start until MMI -- when you see it in roman numerals, it makes a whole lot more sense, doesn't it?
Besides, all of these "of the millenium" and "of the century lists are horribly weighted on the last 25% of the period in question...
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E2 IN2 IE?
Yeah, I agree.
Another similiar issue is room temperature super conductor. In 1989 the progress of critical temperature for super conductor was made daily, with headlines after headlines. Someone even claimed they found the room temperature super conductor material. But in the end the practical material is around liquid nitrogen level. Not bad, but still leave people with more wanting.
--- You make things foolproof, and they'll find you a damn fool.
Union Carbide is responsible for the action or inaction of its staff. If a company chooses to hire "poorly educated workers" as you put it, that does not shift the blame. 6,000 people died - Union Carbide is NOT the victim in this case.
Mmmm.. Donuts
India lost a space rocket to a similar error in the late '80s or early '90s. The situation in this case was a sensor reading an external value and the software taking corrective action based upon that value. The value was supposed to be 0. However, they only reserved 3 digits for it and when the value read went below -99 to -100, it just got rid of the -ve sign and represented it as 100. Of course, the corrective action taken was the opposite of what should have been taken and the rocket crashed.
Mmmm.. Donuts
How about the Cuban Missile Crisis? The closest the world ever came to World War III, all because of the worst political screwups and misconceptions:
Kennedy didn't know there were actually missiles already in Cuba when he made his statement, "We will allow NO missiles in Cuba." Had he known, he would have said, "Will not allow any MORE missiles in Cuba." The resulting crisis was Kennedy trying ot save face.
And while we're at it, the Bay of Pigs was pretty dumb, too.
Kennedy's advisors were all willing to go to war. Had any of them been president, it is like there would have been at least a local thermonuclear war.
Castro was more than willing to use the nuclear missiles -- the Soviets were the ones holding him back.
The US invasion plans for Cuba _woefully_ underestimated the number of Soviet and Cuban troops they would be facing. Had they invaded, the US would have been outnumbered nearly two to one.
During the crisis, the US went to Defcon 3, which meant arming planes with nuclear warheads. Despite this, several test flights in various airfields were still performed.
The incoming nuclear warning system faced northeast. It was repositioned to face Cuba, in the southeast -- however, it was blocked by Cape Canaveral, and any launch from there would be read as an incoming nuclear strike from Cuba.
Remember Nick Leeson who bankrupted the Barings bank? Talk about a loser management...
The N-ray (1903) - "Blondlot Industries proudly presents (drum roll)... the one-test-is-more-then-enough-N-Ray!"
The Titanic (1912) - "We Gurantee It!"
World War I (1914-18) - "Flame-Throwers and Poison-Gas, new shipments have arrived! (check local morgue for details)
The Hindenburg (1937) - "Are you sure Hydrogen-filled ballons and lightnings mix?"
"Wrong Way" Corrigan (1938) - "I told you its upside-down!"
Tacoma Narrows Bridge (1940) - "Lets just make sure those frequencies match, so that the humming sounds would be just perfect."
Antibiotics (1940) - "Got a headache? just take 2 every hour!"
The de Havilland Comet (1952) - "Not a single crash in 7 days!"
The Great Leap Forward (1958-62) - "Oh yeah, we forgot to mention that by Leap Forward we actually meant Stumble Backwords..."
Mariner 1 (1962) - I told you not to swap my G and S on my K/B!
"if (SetRoute(xOffDirection)==TRUE) printf "I'm Logt...\n";
Hancock Tower (1970s) - "Sure, SuperGlue is enough."
Bhopal (1984) - "Dont worry, it's a part of the A/C..."
Challenger (1986) - Blame it on Mr. Finemann.(sp?)
Chernobyl (1986) - Nothing cement cant cover up.
Cold fusion (1989) - "Energy To All!"
Expensive finger slip (1994) - Too bad there was'nt an Undo button...
Y2K bug (2000) - Soon we'll know...
To the fool, he who speaks wisdom will sound foolish. ---Euripides
I spent all those years since high school training in martial arts, lifting weights and learning how to use every weapon you can imagine. And I've been waiting for you. >;-)
That might explain why all the most impoverished countries seem to make the best vodka: Poland (Belvedere); Russia (Stolichnaya); Finland (Finlandia). I seem to know a little too much about vodka ... nevermind.
Remember when Ford actually decided that the design flaw in the Ford Pinto's gas tank would cost them more to repair if they issued recall notices than they expected to pay in lawsuits to families whose members would die due to the flaw? Talk about a loser decision ...
BTW I ain't so sure about that "part of Russia" thing, but I know Finland's house of government has been likened to a stage where the elected are actors and the Kremlin is the stage whisperer.
I thought I should put a stop to this needless posting... Number 8 is mine!
I served four years in the USN as an operations specialist. And at one point was responsible for tracking a very active air picture in the Persian Gulf. The area is known as the aluminum cloud due to the high volume of aircraft flying in a very small area. We were briefed about the Vincennes tragedy upon entering the theatre of operations. As I understood it and this is probably the most reliable information on the subject you will get. The tragedy was not necessarily the fault of the captain of the USS Vincennes. The tragedy was caused by several factors not the least of which being that the Iranians fly there military aircraft out of their civilian airports. In other words they don't have air force bases per se. Every civilian airport may share it runways with military aircraft. So you may have two aircraft taking off in a short period of time one an Iranian F-14 and one an Airbus. A Navy Operations Specialist can tell the difference based on which modes of IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) the plane is squawking. A civilian plane squawks two modes of IFF one that reports its altitude (mode charley I believe) and one that reports its flight number (mode one if I remember correctly) (in most cases). NATO aircraft like the F-14s we gave to the Shah can squawk up to two more modes 3 and 4. Mode 4 is US only and encrypted this is how we tell they are US. Mode 3 is NATO for interoperating with our allies. Now you have two planes coming off the runway one squawking modes 1 and Charley and one squawking modes 1,3 and Charley. You know the one squawking 3 is an F-14. By the way air warfare happens so fast these days that a computer does the actual tracking with a human operator double-checking it. A human is pretty much incapable of manually tracking the complex air picture over the gulf. So with these aircraft coming off the same runway it's a simple matter for the computer to mix up their IFF squawks as the two contacts radar blips separate. One of the tools you use in the gulf to keep things straight is a superimposed map of the civilian air corridors over your radar display. The planes in those corridors are usually civilian and not a threat. What we had in this case was a plane that looked like it was squawking a military code (due to computer human error) heading straight for the Vincennes in a fairly volatile environment (remember the USS Stark that got split in half by an Iraqi Exocet). It was also not any where near a civilian air corridor. And did not respond to three separate warnings on several different international frequencies. The captain of the Vincennes in this case was following the rules of engagement for the gulf when he pulled the trigger. They really thought they were in danger he had to make a decision. And something like this would never have happened had the Iranians not had a propensity for hit and run attacks on American ships in the gulf at the time. And also not have been flying F-14s out of a civilian airport. Even today if this where to happen again it might result in the same outcome. It perhaps shows a weakness in Military ID technology. Things like Doppler shift ID might improve this a bit in the future or may have already (I have been out of this line of work for a while now things change). Anyway that's how it went down.
how about B.A.S.I.C ... all of them.
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You're a cartoon of rebel! You're all like exaggerated version of yourself! - Gerard Jones
WebTV....nuff said
*tap tap tap* this thing on?
I'm surprised World War 2 isn't on the list. It may be repetitive to have both WW1 and WW2 on the list - but it shows that people never learn.
The probe that just royally screwed up (was it the Mars Polar Lander?) because some tech didn't convert from English to metric units should've been listed, if only to underscore the point that it's long past high time for this country to pick a system of units and STICK WITH IT. (Non-'merkins need not feel slighted, the rest of the world does it right!)
We can believe in you for 3 minutes, but beyond that, even the King of All Cosmos can't be expected to wait.
Please moderate this up to funny.
SoftMaker Office for Windows|Linux|Android
I seem to remeber an Author C Clarke Article with his predictions posted on slashdot which made predictions for the coming 1000 years, on the list was Pons-Flieshman prefect cold fusion and recieve nobel prize. Many think this field of study is not dead.
"There is a holy mistaken zeal in politics and religion, by convincing others we convince ourselves" -Junius
Wasn't it DeLorean or some such?
While there are definitely some deserving entries on that list, they missed the Exxon Valdez, Three Mile Island, Divx, Beta, and a slew of others. Not that they were really trying to be comprehensive, but they managed to include "Wrong Way" Corrigan and not the Exxon Valdez? Something is wrong with this list. Also, since they included antibiotics then they should also have included the invention of the assembly line automobile as that particular invention is statistically the leading cause of death for the age group of 1 to 45 years (according to 1996 data obtained here). I'd say that's a pretty significant loser in anyone's book.
I was listening to a local college station the other night, and recived a five minute explination why we still have one year left in this century, decade, and millenium. The monotone man on the radio essentially said " There is no year zero. " When the Gregorian calendar was invented, there was no mathematical concept of zero, therefore it would be foolish to think that there is a year zero. The sequence went 3BC, 2BC, 1BC, 1AD, 2AD ... notice the lack of a zero. Therefore, the first day of the first decade/millenium/century was 01/01/0001. Now, a millenium is defined as 1000 years, making 01/01/1001 the first day in the second millenium, also making Jan 1, 2001 the first day of the third millenium (NOT Jan 1 2000). So as far as I am concerned, we all have another full year in the 20'th century. When the real millenuim comes, I'll be the first to celebrate.
ADRocK
gabe@adrock.org
Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.
The Challenger got caught in a very big fireball (aka an EXPLOSION!!) which killed seven crew members. Technically the Challenger was enveloped in a "massive, almost explosive, burning of the hydrogen streaming from the failed tank bottom and liquid oxygen breach in the area of the intertank." The blast was also called, in this report, an explosive burn.
The issue of whether or not this was an explosion, pretty much means nothing to all the crew who died:
Francis R. "Dick" Scobee, Spacecraft Commander
Michael J. Smith, Pilot
Judith A. Resnik, specialist
Ronald E. McNair, specialist
Ellison S. Onizuka, specialist
Gregory B. Jarvis, a payload specialist
Sharon Christa McAuliffe, the first teacher to fly in space
I know this is about 'inaccuracies' but this is a very petty 'inaccuracy'. It does nothing to eclipse the magnitude and total avoidability of this tragedy, or its effects upon the kids glued to the TV set at school to see a teacher go into space, only to instead see a shuttle explode - or burn up - or however you wanna describe it.
It still sucked.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
There's an article of related interest in this month's Harper's Index.
I am not a lawyer.
IMHO, it seems like the good things of the "eon/decade/year/millenium" were fairly superficial. I can't even remember the names of some of the people nominated "man of the year" or "whatever of the millenium" or "Wookiee of the Month" or whatever...
But seriously...to label the Challenger, the Hindenburg, world wars, and the like simply "screwups" like WinCE and DIVX just kinda leaves a bad taste in my mouth. These were catastrophes. People died, their loved ones grieved.
Wired--come on. I think we can call the N-rays and cold fusion true flops, and "Wrong-way Corrigan" and Juan Pablo Davila were just kind of funny...but everything else were tragedies, and to call them mere foul-ups is, IMNSHO, a disgrace.
Just my $.02. Fire away.
Angry IT woman in big clompy boots. And talking lint!.
Microsoft WINDOWS. All of them.
I am 31337 or something.
Let's clarify some things about the Hindenburg tragedy.
1. The Hindenburg was *designed* for helium gas (lower lifting capacity than hydrogen per unit volume). The difference is significant, you can't just retrofit a hydrogen airship for helium use. It won't fly!
2. At the time, the US was the only country with the means to produce sufficient stockpiles of helium gas for use by large airships, but for whatever political/military reasons did not sell to the Germans.
The tragedy is that if helium had been used as the design specified, no disaster would have occurred. This was a classic case of politics/posturing getting in the way of good engineering design and common sense.
is having your post cause a string of Dr. Strangelove references.
"You can't fight in here! This is the War Room!"
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
This was supposed to save all our crops, AND protect us against disease! Some folks were even advocating adding it to drinking water, IIRC.
This one was so bad, it almost single-handedly started the environmental movement, as its evils were rooted out in Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring".
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
Shortly after WWII Stalin got bored and ordered Tuplev to also duplicate Boeing B-29 superfortress, as it was the plane which dropped The Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Several B-29's landed in 1944 on Russian soil, because they couldn't make it back to Guam (Ewojima wasn't taken yet), due to FLAK damage, and as Russia was not in war with Japan yet, they were interned. So Tupolev (who was held in prison at the time), was also forced to duplicate the plane, which was obsolete even in 1945 due to it's piston engines, slow speed, large size and a large crew needed to operate it. So in 1947 they rolled their own B-29's (Tupolev TU-4, NATO codename BULL), onto may day parade, while Americans already had jet bombers such as B-47, and B-46, with mid-air refueling capability and speed to match the "Migs". Yet another example of a large government, spending mine and time on producing objects which only act to increase their egos.
Granted, some of that money goes to employees, who then recycle it back into the economy, but most of it is in the form of lost productivity and revenue, which isn't recoverable. The Y2K bug has already taken its toll, and definitely should have been on the list (under "1970s", perhaps?).
Powers&8^]
It seems they forgot linux...
(if you moderate this down, this will be the ultimate proof that moderation simply doesn't work..)
please refer to:
http://slashdot.org/comme nts.pl?sid=99/12/29/1119254&cid=10
Pitty... But that's a good example of how fundamental it is to have good management tied to cutting-edge technology.
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"People ask FAQs all the time". - David Allen
I think the most complete story about this probe lost due to a computer bug can be found in the alt.folklore.computers FAQ.
The problem with the Hindenburg wasn't that it was filled with hydrogen, the problem is that to increase reflectivity to keep the insides from getting too warm, they coated it with powdered aluminum.
In other words, the thing was covered with thermite.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Accounts differ, one version has it that Moto refused to license the design to a second source, which IBM wanted.
The word I've heard here at work (from someone who used to work for Moto) was that Moto refused to commit to have the 68K ready on the date that IBM wanted, but Intel was happy to commit to that date. Well, the 68K was ready before that date anyhow, but by then it was already too late.
And a related screwup is the 80286. Nice idea to have all those protection ring thingies, but it had two problems:
1) it enforced the 64K segment size limit of the 8086 when it was clear that linear address spaces larger than 64K were needed and 8086 (real-mode) code was doing arithmetic on segment registers to do this, and
2) there was no way to get back from protected mode (where you could access extended memory) to real mode (where you could run DOS programs) without resetting the CPU. Every 286 BIOS had to have code to set a CMOS flag, reset the CPU, then the reset code would check the CMOS flag to see if it should return to a caller.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
1:invention of chatrooms 2:me getting karma 3: mr.gates 4:everything having to do with computers
1) The friggin Ford Escort... man what a piece of unadulterated crap. Ford outta be ashamed of themselves
2) big baggie droopy drawers... for christ sake, just pull em up, you look like a damn idiot. PULL YOUR FUCKING PANTS UP YOU FOOLS
3) Packard Bell computers... heh...I don't even have to expound on this one
4) RITA - (Regional income tax authority) I know, this one is personal, but these fuckers have their heads so far up my ass it's pathetic.
5) Country music - Christ on a moped, It's so far beyond me how anyone can listen to this pathetic souless crap. Get a life you losers.
A genius writes code an idiot can understand, while an idiot writes code the compiler can't understand.
Incidentally, being born in Texas does not preclude a person from being Irish. Heres a crummy attempt at a Venn diagram to explain how this complex phenomenon is possible. ______ _________ / \ / \ | Irish x Born \ | { } in Texas | \ x / \_____/ \________/
New Coke!
Never play chicken with a passive aggressive.
The Chinese Embassy bombing.... "er....gee sir...the maps just didn't reflect current realities"
Never play chicken with a passive aggressive.