DSL lines to the rooms? That doesn't make sense; he should use ethernet
Yeah, John probably told them "I have a DSL internet connection," then later "all the rooms in my house have networked computers, so all of my computers can get onto the internet via my DSL." The reporter assumed that meant each one had a seperate DSL cable. Oh well, reporters aren't known for being techies.
I think it's absolutely a good idea to have a single program that can handle everything on the internet. I'd go nuts if I couldn't follow ftp links on the web, and I bet you would too. Integrating IRC is a good idea too, I think. Likewise, integrating mail is useful for following "contact me" links. Sure, it can be handled by third party plugins just as easily, and I could see people arguing in favor of that, but having a web browser with no ability to handle anything beyond pure http is just ridiculous. If that's what you want, there are projects available for that (Galeon, for example).
The effect they are talking about is just when the electro-magnet is turned on, not as it continues to run. As they say in the article:
Goodwin says the metal objects create the judder effect by inducing a "brief asymmetry in the magnetic field" as it is set up when the magnet is turned on. This initial disturbance of the magnetic field, he says, creates a repulsive force on the magnet and pushes it away.
So it's not quite the same thing as a railgun (especially because they claim the magnet is repelled from, rather than attracted to, the metal).
Unfortunately, you might still be right that it's like trying to pull yourself up by your hair. As Mills says at the end, "It's a definite possibility that any forces arising from Goodwin's concept will only act within the components of the device itself, resulting in no net force. There are a lot of unresolved physics issues to address."
Oh, of course, everybody knows that capitalist democracies are the only government system under which the population can be prosperous.
Yeah, that's right. Name a single prosperous country on earth that is not at least nominally capitalist and democratic.
Sure, much of Europe is pretty socialist, and of course also much of it has double digit unemployment and a failing currency, but there are still major capitalist elements, and it's still moderately prosperous. Anywhere else I can think of that is in the same wealth neighborhood is even more capitalist.
As for the democratic part, again, countries that do not at least elect most of their representatives are not successful. Whether it's a parliament, an American-like congress, or what have you, I can't think of a single industrialized nation that is not governed by elected representatives.
So I didn't mean that they had to establish a libertarian capitalist society governed by a pure, classical Athens style democracy, but they can't be governed by fascist dictators and become sucessful.
Unless we're talking about Iridium based wireless, you still need an enormous network of transmitters and recievers in order to get coverage. It it were easier to make a wireless infrastructure than one with wires, nobody would be investing in fiber-optics. Think of wireless as being like radio transmitters (sure, the details vary from scheme to scheme, but they use some portion of the EM spectrum). A handheld radio simply does not have that much transmitting power. You need lots of recieving stations to pull it off. This is why cell coverage is still so shoddy in rural areas, it's costly and a pain in the ass to put these antennas up everywhere.
Maybe, once these african countries start getting the majority of their population into urban centers, we can talk about the best way to wire them up, but as it stands there's just too damn much area and not enough people packed close enough together. I think you're going about it ass backwards. First they establish stable capitalist democracies, then they start wiring up an expensive information infrastructure. When you've got a country with a GDP per capita below $5,000 (or $10,000 even), you have got much more pressing concerns than obtaining a fast net connection.
Of course, when you use a term like "brief," with no objective meaning, anything can be considered brief depending on what it's compared to. In this case, I don't think it's much of a stretch at all. "More than a year" is a heck of a lot less than the decades that most career VCs put in.
I think what CmdrTaco was saying was that you did some VC work, but you didn't make a career out of it. I mean heck, I've had temp jobs that have lasted for as much as four months, a year really isn't that long a time to spend in a profession.
As for your comment about the story being rejected when you submitted it, I assume you just wrote that because you are frustrated? Depending on who reads the submission, and what else they've read that day, and what their mood is, anything can get accepted or rejected. For that matter, how long ago did you submit? Maybe they'd already decided once to post this story before your submission came through. I had a story wait in limbo for over a week before being posted once, and another time I had a story get rejected less than ten minutes after being submitted. Besides, don't you think it looks a little less like self-promotion if the article is submitted by someone else?
What you are really describing I think is lack of alternatives, not "inertia." Right now, web browsers don't read LaTeX. Hence, people don't write webpages in LaTeX. Given that the only important web browser is IE, and IE has no incentive to support LaTeX, this is likely to remain the case. However, if it were to support LaTeX, for some bizarre unknown reason, then webdesigners would be able to write in whichever pleased them. If LaTeX made things as easy as you claim (I haven't played with it much yet, so I can't really say one way or the other), then new webdesigners would learn LaTeX, and HTML would die out as existing designers retired, changed fields, or decided to get with the times and learn LaTeX for themselves. Inertia doesn't really apply to situations where two standards are perfectly compatible with each other (in the sense that, one web browser will view pages of either type).
The Bush campaign did not ask for the decision to be overturned, they specifically asked for it to be set aside. The Supreme Court decided in favor of Bush, so as requested the Florida decision was set aside.
It seems to me that they're passing up a great opportunity to grab more money. Let's face it, the internet as it stands is not competition for broadcast TV. No one is going to think "hmm, I could turn on my TV and watch the swimming, or I could sit in front of my computer and watch it via 14.4 Real Media!" People will only do this if the event they want to see is not being broadcast, or if they accidentally missed it when it was broadcast.
I'm sure there's still a few dot-coms out there with venture capital to burn, even in today's economy, who would pay good money for the priviledge of broadcasting the Olympics via the web. It would cut down complaints about the way NBC broadcasts the games (or whoever it is in two years), and it would give even more money to the ridiculously corrupt and wealthy Olympic organizers. It seems like a win for everyone, except of course for the dot-com who wasted millions on exclusive rights to crappy jerky video of the Olympic Games.
To the best of my knowledge, without using fission, we're still 2 or 3 orders of magnitudes short of producing the amount of energy to start a fusion reaction, meaning any potential nuclear reactor must include fission reactions, even only to start up the fusion reactions. If there really is a design for a cold fusion reactor though, I'd love to see it. Of course, if we're just talking hot fusion, using a fission reaction to kickstart the fusion as outlined above, then the fission element would mean that it would still have all the drawbacks of a fission plant, though it would probably be more efficient. An improvement, but hardly "the solution."
As for rogue nations getting fission, I agree it's a risk, and I'm hardly proposing that we bankroll their projects. Most likely they would be unable to generate the capital necessary to build nuclear plants, so the problem solves itself. If they were somehow able to aquire the funds, they'd just build the damn bombs, they wouldn't muck around with power plants.
The solution, as far as I'm concerned, is in nuclear fusion
Perhaps you meant nuclear fission? Since no fusion power plant has ever been designed, much less built, I don't see how it can be a solution. Assuming you meant fission, I agree that it's a wonderful alternative, and actually what many people don't realize is that if one were somehow to collect all the radioactive particles expelled from a coal plant over the course of a year, it would be more massive than the amount of radioactive waste produced by a fission plant. Unfortunately, since the fission waste is concentrated, it can't be dealt with quite as easily.
I don't agree, however, that there is only one solution. Solar, hydro, wind, geothermal, fuel cell and even natural gas are all environmentally friendly sources of power, and in the end who knows which will finally have a breakthrough which could make it competitive with fossil fuel? (sooner or later, something WILL become competitive with fossil fuel, if for no other reason than eventually fossil fuels will become scarce enough that prices are driven up naturally, in the same manner that OPEC artificially keeps prices up now)
That bit is actually faithful to the first edition of the novel, but the "weirding modules" were cut for space
Whoa, hold on, what's this? I still think they should have been faithful to the edition the majority of people read, but if there is some kind of alternate version that more resembles the movie, I'm quite curious. Care to elaborate any?
If you read the article, this has only occured since the major nations agreed to cut CFC outputs. Output was cut in the US, Europe and Japan by over 95%.
I agree with your hatred of "political correctness" (I go to an Ivy league school which will go unnamed, except to say that Ralph Nader *shudder* spoke here last night), and I agree that the planet tends to move towards some kind of equilibrium.
Unfortunately, the planet (and of course by "the planet" I am referring to all the myriad species which inhabit it) can only react so fast, and the balance that is eventually reached may or may not bear any resemblance to the equilibrium of 500 years ago, and may or may not be inhabitable to humans. Natural beings are perfectly capable of rendering their habitats uninhabitable, and it is a danger we humans run all the time. Bacteria do it all the time, by killing their hosts. "Natural" does not mean "bullet-proof.":)
What people don't seem to understand is that ANY movie made from a book will not be as good as that book. Compromises will ALWAYS be made.
This is not accurate. The Firm, for example, took a so-so book and made it into an excellent movie. The Godfather movies are among the masterpieces of American cinema. Not often, but sometimes you do get a movie that is even better than the book. Admittedly, Dune is not likely to be one of those, as it is too long, and its plot does not exactly lend itself to movie form, but your broad statement does not really hold up.
Alright, what's good about the movie: Like the book, the movie is absolutely different from any other science fiction out there. It's a totally different reality, it's not just yet another Star Wars rip off.
What's bad about it: First of all, the sound guns really ARE a big deal. As it stands, you may as well just use missiles, since there were only two shields in the entire movie. So why bother with those stupid sound guns when conventional weapons would be far more powerful? Besides, it was explained in the movie that the the sound guns are an Atredies thing, which makes the Fremen look like worthless savages without Paul. The Guild presence went from mysterious in the book to kick you in the crotch obvious. The whispering was hard to hear. Most of Paul's future predicting abilities were not explained, despite the fact that that's really the whole point of the book. Without Paul's abilities Dune is nothing more than a Tom Clancy-esque war novel.
I could go on, but suffice to say that I regard the Dune movie as an example of why Dune could have been a good movie, but in and of itself it was not. There's a reason it was directed by Alan Smithee... (for those who don't know, Alan Smithee is the name directors put on movies they no longer wish to be associated with)
Maybe not. You can have different AIM and AOL passwords. Most people will probably pick the same password, but in theory there's no reason why this is necessarily the case.
I think that most people who own Red Hat are likely to upgrade via the net anyway, even if simply by downloading and burning the isos. I think Red Hat will do whatever they can to make a better distro, and will add atp as soon as they have the opportunity.
The satellite was launched September 8, 1998, but failed and was reported tumbling out of control just two months later
That would mean mid-November of '98 was when the satellite failed. So presumably, unless he didn't bother asking them what the operational status of the satellites was when he bought them, it comes as no surprise:)
Need I remind you that automobiles - which are legal in the USA - kill about 41,000 people per year due to accidents?
No, I know, but in any other case I can think of, someone's responsible. If you hit someone, then you are responsible. Sure, the automobile may have made the situation more dangerous, but there's still someone to hold accountable. And, if you're worried, you don't have to drive. If you walk, and obey all traffic signals, and only cross at the crosswalk, anyone who hits you will likely be charged with manslaughter. If he's not, it's only because there were no witnesses.
On the other hand, with Iridium, if one of those satellites hits someone, it's not Iridium's fault because the government gave them a free pass. So it's the government's fault. Just from a moral perspective that strikes me as bad. From a political perspective, it could be even worse. Say it lands on one of the Chinese. American satellites are killing our citizens!
Yes, this will not kill many people (or, probably, any). But the fact that there's a good chance that it could, and the fact that the person killed likely has no involvement with Iridium, or has ever met anyone who has an involvement with Iridium, or even lives in the country that authorized Iridium, strikes me as being wrong.
Ah, that explains it:) After they had that lame "he's an ambassador to Mimbari now..." excuse to replace the captain at the end of the first season I got pissed and refused to watch it anymore. "As an old Earth president once said..." Gag me.
Seriously though, maybe I will watch it again sometime, my friend only had the first few episodes on hand, and they didn't interest me enough to track down the rest of the series, but maybe it is worth watching. I'm pretty sure the episodes I watched were subbed though, my friend is even more vehemently against dubbing than I am:)
For starters I believe that in most places, you are free to take the matter of your speeding ticket to court if you want to.
But you're already assumed to be guilty. That's my objection. The cop doesn't have to prove that you broke the law, you have to prove that you didn't.
As for "heavy penalties," if it's in the thousands of dollars, for all but the tiniest fraction of people, that's a heavy penalty. It's based on gross income, and you may not have that money available. You could be making millions, but if you just bought a house, you may actually need that money. And anyone who can afford to keep their car gassed up in today's market can afford a $25 fine. That's the price of 3 or 4 pounds of meat, depending on the cut, so even if you had your budget planned out to the last dime it's not going to reduce you to "bread and water for a month," unless your budget was originally "bread and water and four pounds of beef for a month."
This means the overall chance that someone will be hit by an iridium satallite, using the figure of 70 satallites in orbit found on the linked page, (they've ALL gotta come down sooner or later, even assuming no replacements) is 1 in 143. I DON'T like those odds. Sure, it probably won't be ME that gets hit, but the government approved a series of launches knowing that it would have a 1 in 143 chance of killing or critically injuring an innocent bystander, probably not even an American?!? That's criminally irresponsible. It's one thing with the FDA or somesuch, where you have to choose to consume the approved product (I'd be willing to bet that, on average, 1 in 143 FDA approved products kills a single individual), but in this case you didn't try a new medicine, you're just going about your business when *wham* a satallite falls on you.
If I'm wrong, here's the math I used:
1/(1-(0.9999^70)) = 143.35
Chapter 11 doesn't really permit the kind of activity you're describing, by the way. Nearly all Chapter 11 plans have to be approved by the debtors (and if they're not, the judge has to decide that it's an exceptionally fair plan, and the debtors are simply being malicious in refusing to approve), and if they don't approve (and the courts don't force it), then you'll end up under Chapter 7 instead. Chapter 7 is total liquidation. Actually, about 90% of Chapter 11 filings end up under failing to get approval.
I can't find any specific information, but based on certain information (eg, the fact that Iridium, LLC has sold their satellite constellation, without which they have no real business) I conclude they've filed for Chapter 7. The owner of Iridium Satellite, LLC is one Dan Colussy, a former Pan Am president, who to the best of my knowledge was never affiliated with Iridium, LLC in any manner. My guess is that Mr. Colussy wanted to keep the brand name, which is why the companies have such similar names.
Standard disclaimer: IANAL, but I was raised by one, and I've worked with companies going through bankrupcy before.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, John probably told them "I have a DSL internet connection," then later "all the rooms in my house have networked computers, so all of my computers can get onto the internet via my DSL." The reporter assumed that meant each one had a seperate DSL cable. Oh well, reporters aren't known for being techies.
I think it's absolutely a good idea to have a single program that can handle everything on the internet. I'd go nuts if I couldn't follow ftp links on the web, and I bet you would too. Integrating IRC is a good idea too, I think. Likewise, integrating mail is useful for following "contact me" links. Sure, it can be handled by third party plugins just as easily, and I could see people arguing in favor of that, but having a web browser with no ability to handle anything beyond pure http is just ridiculous. If that's what you want, there are projects available for that (Galeon, for example).
Goodwin says the metal objects create the judder effect by inducing a "brief asymmetry in the magnetic field" as it is set up when the magnet is turned on. This initial disturbance of the magnetic field, he says, creates a repulsive force on the magnet and pushes it away.
So it's not quite the same thing as a railgun (especially because they claim the magnet is repelled from, rather than attracted to, the metal).
Unfortunately, you might still be right that it's like trying to pull yourself up by your hair. As Mills says at the end, "It's a definite possibility that any forces arising from Goodwin's concept will only act within the components of the device itself, resulting in no net force. There are a lot of unresolved physics issues to address."
So, it is possible, but they just don't know yet.
Yeah, that's right. Name a single prosperous country on earth that is not at least nominally capitalist and democratic.
Sure, much of Europe is pretty socialist, and of course also much of it has double digit unemployment and a failing currency, but there are still major capitalist elements, and it's still moderately prosperous. Anywhere else I can think of that is in the same wealth neighborhood is even more capitalist.
As for the democratic part, again, countries that do not at least elect most of their representatives are not successful. Whether it's a parliament, an American-like congress, or what have you, I can't think of a single industrialized nation that is not governed by elected representatives.
So I didn't mean that they had to establish a libertarian capitalist society governed by a pure, classical Athens style democracy, but they can't be governed by fascist dictators and become sucessful.
Maybe, once these african countries start getting the majority of their population into urban centers, we can talk about the best way to wire them up, but as it stands there's just too damn much area and not enough people packed close enough together. I think you're going about it ass backwards. First they establish stable capitalist democracies, then they start wiring up an expensive information infrastructure. When you've got a country with a GDP per capita below $5,000 (or $10,000 even), you have got much more pressing concerns than obtaining a fast net connection.
I think what CmdrTaco was saying was that you did some VC work, but you didn't make a career out of it. I mean heck, I've had temp jobs that have lasted for as much as four months, a year really isn't that long a time to spend in a profession.
As for your comment about the story being rejected when you submitted it, I assume you just wrote that because you are frustrated? Depending on who reads the submission, and what else they've read that day, and what their mood is, anything can get accepted or rejected. For that matter, how long ago did you submit? Maybe they'd already decided once to post this story before your submission came through. I had a story wait in limbo for over a week before being posted once, and another time I had a story get rejected less than ten minutes after being submitted. Besides, don't you think it looks a little less like self-promotion if the article is submitted by someone else?
Yeah, sure, I could send this over private email, but posting it on slashdot is so much more fun. It's Kyle, by the way.
What you are really describing I think is lack of alternatives, not "inertia." Right now, web browsers don't read LaTeX. Hence, people don't write webpages in LaTeX. Given that the only important web browser is IE, and IE has no incentive to support LaTeX, this is likely to remain the case. However, if it were to support LaTeX, for some bizarre unknown reason, then webdesigners would be able to write in whichever pleased them. If LaTeX made things as easy as you claim (I haven't played with it much yet, so I can't really say one way or the other), then new webdesigners would learn LaTeX, and HTML would die out as existing designers retired, changed fields, or decided to get with the times and learn LaTeX for themselves. Inertia doesn't really apply to situations where two standards are perfectly compatible with each other (in the sense that, one web browser will view pages of either type).
The Bush campaign did not ask for the decision to be overturned, they specifically asked for it to be set aside. The Supreme Court decided in favor of Bush, so as requested the Florida decision was set aside.
I'm sure there's still a few dot-coms out there with venture capital to burn, even in today's economy, who would pay good money for the priviledge of broadcasting the Olympics via the web. It would cut down complaints about the way NBC broadcasts the games (or whoever it is in two years), and it would give even more money to the ridiculously corrupt and wealthy Olympic organizers. It seems like a win for everyone, except of course for the dot-com who wasted millions on exclusive rights to crappy jerky video of the Olympic Games.
To the best of my knowledge, without using fission, we're still 2 or 3 orders of magnitudes short of producing the amount of energy to start a fusion reaction, meaning any potential nuclear reactor must include fission reactions, even only to start up the fusion reactions. If there really is a design for a cold fusion reactor though, I'd love to see it. Of course, if we're just talking hot fusion, using a fission reaction to kickstart the fusion as outlined above, then the fission element would mean that it would still have all the drawbacks of a fission plant, though it would probably be more efficient. An improvement, but hardly "the solution."
As for rogue nations getting fission, I agree it's a risk, and I'm hardly proposing that we bankroll their projects. Most likely they would be unable to generate the capital necessary to build nuclear plants, so the problem solves itself. If they were somehow able to aquire the funds, they'd just build the damn bombs, they wouldn't muck around with power plants.
Perhaps you meant nuclear fission? Since no fusion power plant has ever been designed, much less built, I don't see how it can be a solution. Assuming you meant fission, I agree that it's a wonderful alternative, and actually what many people don't realize is that if one were somehow to collect all the radioactive particles expelled from a coal plant over the course of a year, it would be more massive than the amount of radioactive waste produced by a fission plant. Unfortunately, since the fission waste is concentrated, it can't be dealt with quite as easily.
I don't agree, however, that there is only one solution. Solar, hydro, wind, geothermal, fuel cell and even natural gas are all environmentally friendly sources of power, and in the end who knows which will finally have a breakthrough which could make it competitive with fossil fuel? (sooner or later, something WILL become competitive with fossil fuel, if for no other reason than eventually fossil fuels will become scarce enough that prices are driven up naturally, in the same manner that OPEC artificially keeps prices up now)
Whoa, hold on, what's this? I still think they should have been faithful to the edition the majority of people read, but if there is some kind of alternate version that more resembles the movie, I'm quite curious. Care to elaborate any?
I agree with your hatred of "political correctness" (I go to an Ivy league school which will go unnamed, except to say that Ralph Nader *shudder* spoke here last night), and I agree that the planet tends to move towards some kind of equilibrium.
Unfortunately, the planet (and of course by "the planet" I am referring to all the myriad species which inhabit it) can only react so fast, and the balance that is eventually reached may or may not bear any resemblance to the equilibrium of 500 years ago, and may or may not be inhabitable to humans. Natural beings are perfectly capable of rendering their habitats uninhabitable, and it is a danger we humans run all the time. Bacteria do it all the time, by killing their hosts. "Natural" does not mean "bullet-proof." :)
This is not accurate. The Firm, for example, took a so-so book and made it into an excellent movie. The Godfather movies are among the masterpieces of American cinema. Not often, but sometimes you do get a movie that is even better than the book. Admittedly, Dune is not likely to be one of those, as it is too long, and its plot does not exactly lend itself to movie form, but your broad statement does not really hold up.
What's bad about it: First of all, the sound guns really ARE a big deal. As it stands, you may as well just use missiles, since there were only two shields in the entire movie. So why bother with those stupid sound guns when conventional weapons would be far more powerful? Besides, it was explained in the movie that the the sound guns are an Atredies thing, which makes the Fremen look like worthless savages without Paul. The Guild presence went from mysterious in the book to kick you in the crotch obvious. The whispering was hard to hear. Most of Paul's future predicting abilities were not explained, despite the fact that that's really the whole point of the book. Without Paul's abilities Dune is nothing more than a Tom Clancy-esque war novel.
I could go on, but suffice to say that I regard the Dune movie as an example of why Dune could have been a good movie, but in and of itself it was not. There's a reason it was directed by Alan Smithee... (for those who don't know, Alan Smithee is the name directors put on movies they no longer wish to be associated with)
Wow, that would explain a few things...
Maybe not. You can have different AIM and AOL passwords. Most people will probably pick the same password, but in theory there's no reason why this is necessarily the case.
I think that most people who own Red Hat are likely to upgrade via the net anyway, even if simply by downloading and burning the isos. I think Red Hat will do whatever they can to make a better distro, and will add atp as soon as they have the opportunity.
That would mean mid-November of '98 was when the satellite failed. So presumably, unless he didn't bother asking them what the operational status of the satellites was when he bought them, it comes as no surprise :)
No, I know, but in any other case I can think of, someone's responsible. If you hit someone, then you are responsible. Sure, the automobile may have made the situation more dangerous, but there's still someone to hold accountable. And, if you're worried, you don't have to drive. If you walk, and obey all traffic signals, and only cross at the crosswalk, anyone who hits you will likely be charged with manslaughter. If he's not, it's only because there were no witnesses.
On the other hand, with Iridium, if one of those satellites hits someone, it's not Iridium's fault because the government gave them a free pass. So it's the government's fault. Just from a moral perspective that strikes me as bad. From a political perspective, it could be even worse. Say it lands on one of the Chinese. American satellites are killing our citizens!
Yes, this will not kill many people (or, probably, any). But the fact that there's a good chance that it could, and the fact that the person killed likely has no involvement with Iridium, or has ever met anyone who has an involvement with Iridium, or even lives in the country that authorized Iridium, strikes me as being wrong.
Ah, that explains it :) After they had that lame "he's an ambassador to Mimbari now..." excuse to replace the captain at the end of the first season I got pissed and refused to watch it anymore. "As an old Earth president once said..." Gag me.
Seriously though, maybe I will watch it again sometime, my friend only had the first few episodes on hand, and they didn't interest me enough to track down the rest of the series, but maybe it is worth watching. I'm pretty sure the episodes I watched were subbed though, my friend is even more vehemently against dubbing than I am :)
But you're already assumed to be guilty. That's my objection. The cop doesn't have to prove that you broke the law, you have to prove that you didn't.
As for "heavy penalties," if it's in the thousands of dollars, for all but the tiniest fraction of people, that's a heavy penalty. It's based on gross income, and you may not have that money available. You could be making millions, but if you just bought a house, you may actually need that money. And anyone who can afford to keep their car gassed up in today's market can afford a $25 fine. That's the price of 3 or 4 pounds of meat, depending on the cut, so even if you had your budget planned out to the last dime it's not going to reduce you to "bread and water for a month," unless your budget was originally "bread and water and four pounds of beef for a month."
If I'm wrong, here's the math I used:
1/(1-(0.9999^70)) = 143.35
Chapter 11 doesn't really permit the kind of activity you're describing, by the way. Nearly all Chapter 11 plans have to be approved by the debtors (and if they're not, the judge has to decide that it's an exceptionally fair plan, and the debtors are simply being malicious in refusing to approve), and if they don't approve (and the courts don't force it), then you'll end up under Chapter 7 instead. Chapter 7 is total liquidation. Actually, about 90% of Chapter 11 filings end up under failing to get approval.
I can't find any specific information, but based on certain information (eg, the fact that Iridium, LLC has sold their satellite constellation, without which they have no real business) I conclude they've filed for Chapter 7. The owner of Iridium Satellite, LLC is one Dan Colussy, a former Pan Am president, who to the best of my knowledge was never affiliated with Iridium, LLC in any manner. My guess is that Mr. Colussy wanted to keep the brand name, which is why the companies have such similar names.
Standard disclaimer: IANAL, but I was raised by one, and I've worked with companies going through bankrupcy before.