Which turned out to be a failed land deal that the Clintons lost a small fortune in.
Give it up already. The eternal "investigation" ended with absolutely bupkis. The whole thing was yet another radical-right wing attempt to unseat a sitting president at any cost -- and at taxpayers' expense.
On the other hand, dozens of Bush and Reagan people went to the pokey. They actually committed crimes.
But, keep up the lying. If you keep repeating a ball-naked bare-assed lie, it becomes Truth. The last ten years show that the American people will swallow a bowling ball if you maniacally keep calling it a grape.
Companies do not exist as an entities that serves only themself. For the most part, they are corporations.
What are corporations? Legal fictions designed to shield shareholders from personal liability. Most people stop the definition at that point. But they are wrong.
Corporations are LICENSED TO EXIST by the representatives of the people of the United States. They do not have a "right" to exist. They have no "rights" to anything -- they are not people, no matter what Supreme Court idiots have ruled.
It is good and proper that businesses exist to enable a free market of goods and services. But they exist to serve the needs of the people of the United States of America. Period.
Is is a two-way deal. For exemption from personal liability, the fictitious individuals known as corporations are subject to the laws of the USA. They should in general serve the public good of the people of the United States.
This point is crucial. We have been sold the lie that businesses exist only to make a profit, and at that point owe no one anything.
But they seem to think that the US owes them free roads, free forests, free education for their workers, free pensions for their retiress, free medical care for those they fire, evironmental exemptions, free access to the power of the three branches of government.
Businesses exist for the people's benefit, and the people of the US in turn pay for the infrastructure in which business operate.
Business owes goods and services in this bargain. THEY ALSO OWE THE COMMUNITY JOBS IN EXCHANGE FOR ALL THE FREE GOODIES THEY GET. AND FOR THE LICENSE TO EXIST AT ALL.
Here's where the radical right wing screaming starts. They no longer believe they owe jobs, or taxes, or even competition for their goods and services. They owe nothing to anyone. Period.
That is no longer a beneficial arrangement. It is a parasitical one. The wealthiest draining jobs and taxes away from the people who have financed their infrastructure, and granted license for them to exist at all.
Business is NOT AN ALTERNATIVE TO GOVERNMENT. It is not independent of it. It is subject to the will of the people who let them exist at all. And those people believe that they should, at the very least, be employed by the companies which are located in their own country.
The eventual outcome of the present process will be twofold: jobs continually pumped to overpopulated countries around the world, where sheer numbers depress wages to pennies on the dollar paid in the US. Massive economic depression across the US. Wages decreasing. Schools starved for money. Price deflation.
At the same time, ever-growing profits pumped to a small number of executives, and indirectly to the service industries which sell to the very wealthy. At this end, price inflation.
The only safe harbor in the businesses-do-what-they-we-owe-you-shit is to be an executive. Everyone else eventually becomes a peon.
There is no break on the cycle once it starts. The reason why European countries are nightmares of strikes and taxes is that they have cut a deal between what they are, with jobs and wages relatively stable, with the crashing cycle that we have embraced.
Communism. Ah, the old boogieman. It never gets old.
Here: the idea of free markets determining wages and prices works -- if there is no hypergrowing population of people who will work for pennies on our dollars. Massive growth in the number of workers will drag wages down for everyone, everywhere. Wages can't rise. Not without a catastrophic adjustment in human numbers.
Business executives know all this, and they are playing to become robber barons of the 21st and 22nd centuries. They don't give a damn what happens to people lower down than their elevated positions. They are social Darwinists. Economic collapse makes them stronger and wealthier, and more powerful.
The question is, why does the equipment continue to cost so much? Economies of scale should be dropping prices by orders of magnitude, up to a point.
Prices stay high because the telecoms can support those prices, period. The same mechanism which kept medical equipment prices spiralling out of control -- hospitals could raise prices infinitely.
Material objects do cost money, but automation, overseas labor costs for both plant and engineering, and market pressure should be driving the costs down.
But they aren't. Because a free market isn't really free. Monopolies and fake scarcities can be manufactured (Enron). By artificially keeping bandwidth dear, Cisco can charge high because the telecoms are RICH. Without downward pressure on costs, Cisco ain't gonna drop prices.
Amen. If the guvmint had run the fiber rollout the way it regulated power (before dereg nuked us -- CA says thanks!) we'd have fiber to our homes and pay far less per month than we do now or will pay in the future.
The free market cannot, by strict profit motivation, fiber up the nation. Corporate nature will go for maximum profit for minimum rollout costs -- which is why power grids and phone companies are regulated monopolies. And those regulated businesses do just fine, and everyone gets electricity and phone servce.
And yes, high speed and nearly infinite bandwidth is a necessity. It nukes attempts to corner the entertainment industry. It provides cheap telecom. It enables nearly everything.
Bandwidth IS NOT EXPENSIVE. It has been MADE expensive. Growing profit depends on controlling supply for a demand. By artificially making bandwidth dear, we suffer as citizens while rapidly consolidating corporations make out like bandits, and plot to grab even more.
Is a corporation entitled to endlessly growing profit? Let's try: NO.
Corporations are legal fictions that were originally intended to help create a better world for us all by shielding investors from personal liability. Business and corporations exist to serve the common good. When they do not, they have violated their mandate.
I know this be heresy in this radically right wing business era, but it is true. The people, all of us, license corporations to exist for our benefit. We do not exist to serve their interests. One way is a democracy promoting business; the other, neo-feudalism.
I once did an analysis on Slashdot providing calculations on a government-rolled-out telecom network versus the current private rollout. And I found that we have spent an order of magnitude too much money for services that are shoddy and hard-to-get.
The people benefiting from the private sector rollout of "expensive bandwidth" are the rapidly monopolizing telecom companies. We, the people who they allegedy serve, are being squeezed. We are being convinced that they are doing us a favor by providing us with 100kbs pipes -- while they are milking us blind.
There are towns across the US that are rolling their own telecom. Guess what? Fat pipes, low cost, no bullshit. And with new wireless tech coming up, we won't need wires for a lot of it.
Well, I hate to break up your analogy, but I don't have time to make a posting to continue the BTTF comparisons.
Here's the thing:
During the '80's, Saddam/Iraq obtained germ cultures from a firm in Virginia, with the blessings of the Reagan/Bush White House. That's what was removed from the Iraqi declarations lat year before the U.S. in turn handed them over to the U.N. We gave the "bully" his toys.
Wolfowitz et al had no problem with Saddam gassing Iraqis and Kurds in the 80's. There is a famous picture floating around of Wolfy shaking hands with Saddam a couple of months after he knew damned well Saddam had committed mass murder.
In '88, the U.N. attempted to pass a resolution demanding the investigation of Saddam's gas attacks against helpless civilians. The resolution was blocked by -- wait for it.... --- the veto of the U.S. in the Security Council.
Ironic, eh?
Reagan/Bush equipped and gave aid and comfort to Saddam because he was fighting the Iranians. This is fact. The same people are in Bush's White House. Fact. Another fact: they don't want anyone to remember that past. Their hands are covered with the same blood they denounce on Saddam.
We have delusions about our past: the rest of the world does not. The WH press corps has reliquished its responsiblity to question the President in any meaningful way. We do not receive accurate news coverage of our appointed President's actions: the rest of the world does.
When Saddam WAS acting the bully, he was our guy, and we didn't care. When he attacked our oil supply, he became the enemy. But he was always pathetic and helpless against any real enemy. He can't touch us, and has never shown any inclination to commit suicide by doing so.
We have become the world's only superpower. But instead of being a force for sanity and law, we've gone rogue.
We are oppressing and silencing dissent, at all levels, from our inability to wear T-shirts which oppose Bush to Bush himself holding "press conference" at which only selected reporters could ask pre-approved questions, with Carl Rove front and center maintaining a checklist, controlling the event. This is beyong bullying -- this is totalitarianism pretending to be what it used to be -- a democracy.
We have insulted and manipulated our allies into being the fall guys for our failure to make a sane argument for invading a helpless and non-threatening enemy.
We have news coverage tut-tutting "anti-American" protestors in the U.S. and around the world. An incredible, egregious lie: the protestors are anti-Bush, not anti-American. This is memetic bullying. We have bullied away all the incredible solidarity we had after 9-11. All the good will.
We have told the world we will blow up anything and anyone we want to, at any time. We have informed the world we will use nukes if we want to.
We have told the world that we will torture if we want to. That the Geneva convention no longer applies to our prisoners.
We have told the world that they can go to commie hell if they want us to sign environmental treaties.
We have told the world we no longer need the U.N.
We have told the world that we don't need the Brits to invade Iraq. Britons are understandably pissed off that even they who have supported us are crap in the eyes of the radical right.
We have told the world that we don't care what happens to international diplomacy.
We are the U.S., and people who oppose us (Bush/God) are commies, lesbos, godless, old Europeans, environmentalist pro-press whack jobs.
If Turkey won't take a bribe, then we will cut off their aid. I doubt Bush knows we hardly give any foreign aid compared to the rest of the world, and that Turkey won't miss us much. But it is the act of a bully.
We (Bush) have made it known we will punish economically anyone who opposes us. He is seemingly oblivious to the fact that our economy, via the money he borrows from abroad to pay for our tax cuts and mil
Actually, the point that they will all begin to fail at the same time doesn't invalidate the timeline.
Most of the residential structures in place now will have to be demolished and replaced in the next 20-40 years. Modern skyscrapers, to add another level, are only supposed to last about a hundred years.
Houses built today are not designed to last more than 30 years. I live in Chicago near the lakefront. I watch the new 500K $US condos being built. Cheap exposed steel on the inside walls, sheetrock and cheap wallboard, soft pine trim, cheap aluminum windows, plywood floors, no sound insulation, roofs damned to leak. And outside, the walls are made of cinderblock, not concrete! A couple of decades from now, the walls will be crumbling from the absorbed moisture and acid rain.
Could they be built more durable? Yep. Will they? Nope. The contractors and architects and developers are counting on the frequent replacement of these shoddy piles to replenish their money supply.
For the record, I live in 80+ year old apartment buildings and condos. The simply don't break -- unless a developer gets their damned hands on one, and "gut-rehabs" it by tearing out the plaster and lathe walls, and replacing them with steel and cardboard, removing the cool old iron tubs and replacing them with fiberglass junk, tearing out the custom-made wooden windows and *glueing* in replacement aluminum, ripping out old oak wainscotting, pouring cement down the fireplace chimneys and replacing the brick hearthswith little gas-powered "fireplaces" which we used to call "space heaters", and in short, converting the beautiful immortal building into a crumbling copy of the new condos.
Mostly it's because there are no controls on development anymore in this town. Lazy our Faire, and all that is old and strong becomes frequently-replaced junk. And the change in quality comes too slowly for people to take notice - a matter of decades.
And I don't think it's because we don't have poor but honest immigrant craftsman anymore. Beautiful molding is not hard for a robot manufaturing line to make, for instance. We're seeing a "rush to the bottom" based on maximizing short-term profit in this, as well as so many other industries.
On the other hand, you might use a prism to create a 'tap' into the network. Or maybe a 3 port hub.
The cool thing about an optical line-of-sight transmitter: by hauling yourself to the roof with a pair of binoculars, you can look directly down the link and SEE the NSA/FBI/CIA/local cops' prism tap.
With WiFi, you never know if a tap is sitting in a van down the street, or the local 7-11 has an NSA tapping station behind the storeroom.
But optical, ah, you can SEE the buggers listening in on your conversations.
Snicker. Wouldn't it be cool if you could jack the power on the laser, and melt the bastard's tapping opticals? Priceless.
First, user sends the version number of the patch list present on the user's hardware to MS. The version number represents what hardware/MS software is present, and what patches have been previously applied.
A match is found.
A list of patches is generated, and sent to the user.
MS transmits ONLY the patches that the user's version number indicates is necessary.
User patches.
After successful patch, the version number of the patch list is updated on the user's hard drive. Operation complete.
So, a massive transmittal of a list of ALL patches is not necessary: only the version number of the patch list needs to be communicated.
The "so much data needs to be sent" argument for MS's snooping presupposes their method of applying patches to be the only one. A little thinking comes up with an alternative.
1. Any voting system running on proprietary code should be assumed to be rigged.
2. Some of the companies that make such systems (Diebold) are affiliated with far-right wing politicians.
3. Paper audit trails do not exist. Without an audit trail, the only recount available is done by software provided by the manufacturer. Worthless.
4. In at least one state, which one escapes my memory at the moment, it is unlawful for any agency except the manufacturer of the machines to recount votes made on the machines.
5. A far-right wing ex-talk show host, now a congressman, was the primary shareowner of one of the voting machine manufacturers.
6. Exit polls have become unreliable for the first time in history. Election outcomes no longer match exit sampling. Why? Either the voters decided suddenly, en masse, to lie to exit pollsters, or mathematics have ceased to function, OR the vote tallies have been tampered with. I'd go with Occam's Razor: the tallies are being altered, just enough to win; not enough to be ridculously obvious.
7. The Florida mess. I remark on this only in passing, for I saw it mentioned by another poster. There was no mess: there was a close race, and a recount was needed. As the Floridians were proving, a perfect hand recount was easily done. But they were stopped from doing so by a partisan, panicking Supreme Court majority. Not that the thousands of operatives flooding the courts and the media weren't slowing it down to a crawl -- staged riots, lawsuits, arguing extensively over each ballot -- anything necessary to stop - that - recount. The Supremes had no legal precedent to do what they did. Constitutional scholars almost unanimously denounced the decision as BS. But they did the job.
And yes, BS headlines to the contrary, Gore won by actual votes counted. If overvotes ("Gore" written in, and also punched) were to be counted, and they would have been, Gore won handily.
And to my mind more importantly, if the military overseas votes postmarked after 11-07-00 had been disqualified, instead of illegally approved, Bush would have lost. Lieberman should be denied a shot at the crown just for caving on that point. those votes were sent in by Bush supporters after the close election was over, for the sole purpose of tipping the scale. Disgraceful.
But to report this would be to invalidate the Bush support shown in the media in Dec. 2000, and shown Bush to be a manipulator and a sham.
8. Back to point. Automated systems are fine -- but some say: a paper ballot should be printed out whenever a voter uses an automated machine. The ballot should be filed just as the hand-punched ones are today. In case of recount, the paper should be matched to the counts in the automated systems.
But here's the kicker: if the voter never sees the paper backup, how will the voter know the vote was accurately recorded? The software could mark Danny Fatcat on the file and on the printout, and the voter who voted for George Orwell would never know it.
The only way around this would be if the voter could review the printed audit ballot before the vote is committed. What if it doesn't match? What is the recourse?
And what is the use of an automated system if there is a voter review of a printed ballot? Better just to use the paper ballot and run it through a scantron.
* I don't think an automated system can be anything but rigged. The far-right ideologues in the U.S. are far too fanatical not to get involved in the manufacture and operation of these machines. It's a matter of God's will, the defeat of evil, the end of the world itself. If they can shave off a few thousand people from the Florida rolls because they have similar names to lawbreakers in other states, they can do just about anything. This is a war, and they intend to win it.
"Unless someone in power decides to go after you (out of malice or as a mistake.)"
Did you hear? About a week ago? The White House was floating the idea that Iraqi agents were supporting and inspiring the peace movement in the U.S. Google it.
They are ALREADY starting to set up the process to "de-patriate" (!!!) people who protest against their policies. You can see it, if you try to view the world through their mean little piggy eyes. They are going to nail, and I mean crucify, key people who oppose them.
Think of Scott Ritter, the former weapons inspector who for the last year raised the alarm about Bush's manipulation of this "war" for his own political and business reasons.
Ritter was nailed, out of all the millions who have done so, for having "kiddie porn". What are the odds? Exactly 1:1. He was removed from the board and ruined.
Now, the anti-war protestors... whisper whisper whisper did you hear that they are funded by Saddam? whisper whisper... "Today, the Republican-led Congress announced an investigation into the funding of so-called peace movements."... in the dead of night, masked men slam into homes in Seattle and NYC and Chicago, and shocked men and women are hooded and dragged away into police wagons. Ashcroft has declared them traitors and sympathizers, and they are "disappeared". Their families do not hear from them ever again, they get no lawyers, and no reporter is allowed to know where they are... 45% of Americans believe that the traitors brought it on themselves, by opposing the U.S. (read Bush) during wartime.
Fifty years from now, there is no opposition. Thousands have disappeared, but no one cares. Kids grew up saluting Bush and his successor, Cheney, and are busy fighting the War To Save Democracy, now on its 45th country. The Supreme Court firmly agrees that the temporary suspension of liberties must be made permanent, since we will have had our 110th terrorist attack that month, by a band of evil men who call themselves freedom fighters, from a country formerly known as Brazil, now the 15th U.S. Protectorate...
1. The government didn't leak this document. A true patriot did. And that patriot is now the #1 target for Ashcroft to crucify.
2. Bush/Cheney/Ashcroft were going to lob this firecracker in a few weeks, as the attack against the Iraqis goes into full swing. Get it? Standard Operating Procedure. Get the thing into law when no one is looking -- and Bush gets to decide when the distraction occurs.
3. Spread the word. Yell it from the highest chatrooms. Only publicity can kill this thing.
Where exactly are American comics failing? I've been collecting for over twenty years. I trained up as an artist. So I know what I'm talking about when I say that the comics have never been more creative, better written, professionally crafted.
Manga? I just don't get the obsession. The plotlines are derivative of bad pulp sci-fi, pre-Campbell. The artwork is adequate for the most part, just as "American" comics are. The best art is fantastic, the worst abysmal.
The plotlines in the majority of manga and anime are hackneyed, especially painful since they are run through a language and cultural translation.
I realize manga and anime (I have to lump them together) have become a religion amongst geeks and kids, but its not because of quality -- they're cool because they're cool. Literature, they are not. For the most part. Just like comics.
I can't understand why bunny girls or twenty years out of date cybercowboys ripped from Gibson are more interesting than the tortured old man in "The Dark Knight Returns", or the reinvented heroes in "The Watchmen". Love and Rockets. Dork Tower. Men in Black. Liberty Meadows. Silly and sublime, ten cent junk or graphic novels, American comics have grown up in spite of great resistance from the public at large.
One can argue that manga can be capable of interesting stories, but that doesn't make it more successful. Remember, there is a large amount of manga that doesn't make it in the mass market -- misogynistic, violent, xenophobic, and adored by Japanese of all ages, byt not suited for our culture. We only see the tip of the iceberg, sort of comparable to thinking Brit TV is all Masterpiece Theater, when it's mostly bad game shows.
IMO, altho I've seen incredible artwork done by Japanese artists when relieved of the more everyday restrictions of manga, the comics I see daily are dull, unimaginatively drawn, with bad, bad, and I mean BAD writing with insipid plots. Remember Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is shit.
Manga... the characters all look the same. This is not a generalization -- they are intended to look alike. There's something weird about how the eyes are never drawn with epicanthic folds, considering that they are drawn for a Japanese audience. Running through the genre an obsession with young girls that would get you talked about, not to mention tracked by Ashcroft's goons, if you were drawing in the U.S.
I realize young fanboys and fangirls devour manga the way I used to chow down on Marvel, but that doesn't make American comics "bad". Young people like simpler stories. Manga returns to old comic roots by simplifying the artwork on one level yet showing sophistication in execution. American comics have evolved for an older audience now --there's no help for it.
I've listened patiently to plot breakdowns from rabid fans, and had my eyes glaze over. Let's see: a lone hero(ine) starts out from everyday origins to discover their hidden power that can defeat the demon which yadda yadda... essentially old Japanese folk stories rewritten, just as American comics repeat the Rugged Individualist meme from the old west. But cowboy stories have been done to death, and so has the Lone Ronin, whatever blue hair he wears.
"STS-107 was *delayed* for 6 months (original launch date 19 Jul 2003) because of cracks in the propellant feed lines to the 3 main engines. A defect that could have caused catastrophic failure. Did the fix work or not?"
The fuel lines which were repaired have nothing whatsoever with the failure today.
The three main engines are fueled by liquid hydrogen, the propellant, and liquid oxygen (LOX), the oxidizer. The propellent and LOX is provided only during the takeoff of the Shuttle. The fuel and LOX is pumped from the large brown-colored external tank attached to the Shuttle. During the ascent to orbit, the external tank is totally exhausted of LOX and fuel, and is jettisoned by firing explosive bolts which hold the external fuel tank to the Shuttle.
The fuel lines which formerly were cracked are not used in any way after the external tank is jettisoned. Those three main engines you mention are not used at all after the external tank is gone. They can't be. The fuel is gone. And the fuel lines which feed those engines are fuelless as well. They cannot explode by leaking, as there is nothing to leak, and nothing to ignite.
You may want to know that there are two much smaller engines (the two shrouded "bumps" on the rear top of the Shuttle on each side of the horizontal stabilier fin) which are not fuelled by liquid hydrogen. These are the orbital maneuvering engines, used for orbital changes, as well as the all-important de-orbiting burn which slows the Shuttle down enought to start falling back to Earth. The engines, it must be stressed, are not fuelled by the fuel lines which feed the three main "ascent" engines I mentioned earlier.
I would assume, but do not state authoritatively, that the two smaller orbital maneuvering engines are purged of fuel and oxidant after the Shuttle begins its descent to Earth. It would be incomprensible if there was any explosive whatsoever in any of the propulsion systems, because after the Shuttle begins the drop out of orbit, the engines are never used again. The fuel would be dead weight, not to mention a hazard which would serve no purpose.
Remember, the Shuttle is a dead stick glider after it enters the atmosphere. No engine power is possible. The engines are shut down, and never used after the de-orbital burn.
Whatever took the Shuttle apart was not explosive. There was no explosive mix on the Shuttle.
Opinion: Something fell off, unbalanced the craft, and pinwheeled it at 12,500 MPH, at which point it simply tore apart.
Speculations:
- A damaged wing tore off? - The tail tore off? - Somehow, one or more of the cargo bay doors opened? - Somehow, a wheel bay door opened, even partially, and at that speed, flipped the craft? - catastophic skin failure somewhere on the nose or belly of the craft? - one of the engines came loose? Reaching here. - one of the tiny attitude control rockets fired, swing the ship out of true, and slamming into a Mach-speed wind? This seems unlikely - I'd think those hypergolic fuel tanks would be purged before reentry. - control surface(s) on the wing somehow moved, rolling or pitching the Shuttle? - the rudder somehow moved? - the parachute system released the chute, causing enough turbulence to flip the shuttle around? - window failure? - airlock door failure? - (sadly) action of a crew member?
We must keep in mind that the Shuttle is the ultimate experimental aircraft. In a sane world, we would have evolved safer and cheaper craft in the last thirty years. But we were cheap, and cut the program to the bone -- down to the marrow.
The Delta Clipper would have been a smaller, cheaper, reusable single-stage-to-orbit wingless space taxi. We could have developed it on the cheap for a few billion over a period of ten years. But we went for the ultrasophisticated and ultimately unbuildable superspaceplane.
Now we have three X-craft that are proven to fail about every decade.
Developing simpler and safer craft is of maximum importance. The shuttle as it flies is too dangerous -- a compromise for the Air Force and the spooks during the early seventies, built to fly giant spy sats instead of the tiny taxi it was supposed to be. The tiles are impractical. The flight surfaces are unstable and parasitical weight.
We need to spend real money, and NOT just to fund Boeing/Lockheed-Martin. We need to build a real fleet of ships that do what we need them to do. Small passenger craft.
We can't keep trying to reach the stars with a budget that can't even pay for a repainting of NASA HQ. You can't cheap out R&D -- it doesn't work. People die. We must spend what the ENGINEERS say they need to build the next gen of craft, and the gen after that, and after that.
We built the equivalent of a biplane, and froze time. We must build the DC-3. The 707. The tech has to evolve naturally, as engineers learn from past flaws. We do not do this. We have insisted that NASA first build a flying boxcar it didn't deem necessary. Then we wanted this experimental craft to last for forty years or more.
The real miracle is that the NASA engineers have kept this sad can flying since the late seventies.
" 20 or minutes or so " to hit the ground... i have to disagree. nowhere near that long. a minute or so, at most.
sorrow. remorse. anger at the u.s. for not building more modern designs and retiring that overdesigned piece of aerospace contractage.
NASA will get all the blame, but those astronauts today died of terminal cheapness on the U.S.'s part. The Shuttle is a late-60's design, bastardized by Air Force demands into a flying boxcar. the tiles were a good idea 32 years ago, but we should have built a new shuttle from newer alloys, based on what we learned from what is essentially a prototype space vehicle.
but all this for later. i fear the euopean and U.S. manned space program will be killed from this.
"So...the 100s of thousands of potentially violent drug dealers currently in prison should be released and most drug laws reworked? "
Being a drug offender does not make you "potentially violent". Non sequiteur. Or however that's spelled. It does not follow.
And yes, they should be released and the laws rewritten. Stupid laws that have created a massive crime syndicate, poisoned ecosystems, toppled governments, ruined our prison system, tortured our citizens, and annihilated respect for the law and our government.
"Ok,ok, strawman. The arguements are not equal; [hard] drugs are dangerous and the dealers should be locked up. But you can see how a rule like that would not work quite the way you may think."
Hard drugs are dangerous to those using them. They don't kill YOU. The criminals that sell the stuff, and who ARE deadly, exist because of the laws banning the drugs. Prohibition funded the Mafia and made it what it is today: unkillable. We are making new mafias all over the world. THAT is dangerous.
Drugs, hard or soft, can kill an individual in a Darwinistically efficient way. But they can't kill YOU, the non-user. The criminals created by the business opportunity caused by illegality ARE deadly. And would not exist save for the laws. And would not exist at all if the profit created by illegality was eliminated. The biggest opponents of drug decriminalization are the various drug cartels. They'd be ruined.
And remember: the original proponent of the marijuana laws used as his main argument the "fact" that negro hedonists were poisoning white youth with black drugs and evil music. The drug laws were not enacted because of sane argument. They exist because of ignorance and manipulation of predjudice.
"Of course, if there are 270 million US citizens and only 70 million are participating in 'illegal' file sharing, then the law would still stand as 200 million law abiding citizens would keep the balance."
So 70 out of 270 people in the U.S. should be paying millions of dollars in "damages" EACH for "theft", and spend life in prison, if all the terms are added up for each offense, and the other 200 should be free.
This is madness.
In the meantime, we have a national policy to encourage the export and use of our national cash drug crop, tobacco. Hundreds of millions will die in agony from the side effects of using this highly addictive narcotic. But it is not illegal, so that's okay.
See the difference between illegal and wrong, against the law and evil?
The biggest killer drug in this country is alcohol. In the world. But since it is our favorite drug, we don't speak of jailing the "potentially violent" users of the drug (I'm not talking about what people DO under the effects of drugs -- that is actionable, in a sane legal system -- not the drug use itself) for years, refusing them financial aid for college, ruining their careers, taking their houses, cars, and anything the cops might fancy without trial or recourse, etc.
If all "drug users", defined as people who use psychoactive chemicals to alter their behavior, were to be put in prison, then Utah would be the only populated state in the union.
That isn't the point. They are not suing you to win. They are suing you to sue you.
They will sue you, and cost you tens of thousands of dollars just to get to the point where their suit against you is thrown out. At the same time, another agent will sue you. And so forth.
And after you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get out of the preliminary rounds, all of which you won, we'll assume, then you will be sued again. And again.
I watched it happen before -- the Scientologists use this technical extensively. The idea of a lawsuit, according to Hubbard, was not to win, but to harrass, to intimidate, to bankrupt, to exhaust, to ruin. In advanced cases, the broken victim can even be brought on board the attacker's cause, as a requirement for cessation of legal attacks. Oh, and gag clauses for the poor schmuck is standard as well.
Oh, and the attack has the most value as a object lesson for everyone else that the suer wants to harrass or control. The very idea that ruin can come to anyone else the attacker feels like swatting stifles resistance and give the victory to the attacker.
And the attacker gets to keep anything of value they can seize from the victim as well.
It's a very economical attack. One only has to ruin one or two people publicly to stop behavior one doesn't like.
The tools required are money, organization, lawyers, and an utter lack of morality.
I recall a news report a few years back that indicated that the U.S. dumps herbicide galore on marijuana fields in Central and South America.
As a bonus, those plants that do managed to get harvested end up being smoked in the good ol' U.S. -- and the poison ends up in the criminal bodies of the smokers.
Win-win: the War on Some Drugs gets a shot in, the pesticide company makes millions, we humiliate the country we forced the poison into, we poison the water tables of thousands or millions of helpless poor people, and best of all, people who smoke the demon weed get poisoned and ill, maybe even die.
I assume the Drug Warriors go out to their local pubs in D.C. and get stoned on martinis when they celebrate this victory of the Glorious Republic.
"In another 8 - 10 years, are we going to miss the early new millenium when we didn't need a lawyer to click a link on a webpage? "
I don't know the pros or cons of the case, but I think Pete Townsend might be agreeing with you about now.
Guilty or innocent or somewhere in between, he's ruined.
For my part, I've been assuming I'm monitored every time I enter a new webspace. Paranoia, it seems, IS warranted. Cults are monitoring their enemies, the current admin wants to monitor everyone, and lawyers want more vacation homes.
The future you think you're dreaming of is already here. The old web is dead.
Slashdot Mirror
Which turned out to be a failed land deal that the Clintons lost a small fortune in.
Give it up already. The eternal "investigation" ended with absolutely bupkis. The whole thing was yet another radical-right wing attempt to unseat a sitting president at any cost -- and at taxpayers' expense.
On the other hand, dozens of Bush and Reagan people went to the pokey. They actually committed crimes.
But, keep up the lying. If you keep repeating a ball-naked bare-assed lie, it becomes Truth. The last ten years show that the American people will swallow a bowling ball if you maniacally keep calling it a grape.
"Communist"? Plonk.
Companies do not exist as an entities that serves only themself. For the most part, they are corporations.
What are corporations? Legal fictions designed to shield shareholders from personal liability. Most people stop the definition at that point. But they are wrong.
Corporations are LICENSED TO EXIST by the representatives of the people of the United States. They do not have a "right" to exist. They have no "rights" to anything -- they are not people, no matter what Supreme Court idiots have ruled.
It is good and proper that businesses exist to enable a free market of goods and services. But they exist to serve the needs of the people of the United States of America. Period.
Is is a two-way deal. For exemption from personal liability, the fictitious individuals known as corporations are subject to the laws of the USA. They should in general serve the public good of the people of the United States.
This point is crucial. We have been sold the lie that businesses exist only to make a profit, and at that point owe no one anything.
But they seem to think that the US owes them free roads, free forests, free education for their workers, free pensions for their retiress, free medical care for those they fire, evironmental exemptions, free access to the power of the three branches of government.
Businesses exist for the people's benefit, and the people of the US in turn pay for the infrastructure in which business operate.
Business owes goods and services in this bargain. THEY ALSO OWE THE COMMUNITY JOBS IN EXCHANGE FOR ALL THE FREE GOODIES THEY GET. AND FOR THE LICENSE TO EXIST AT ALL.
Here's where the radical right wing screaming starts. They no longer believe they owe jobs, or taxes, or even competition for their goods and services. They owe nothing to anyone. Period.
That is no longer a beneficial arrangement. It is a parasitical one. The wealthiest draining jobs and taxes away from the people who have financed their infrastructure, and granted license for them to exist at all.
Business is NOT AN ALTERNATIVE TO GOVERNMENT. It is not independent of it. It is subject to the will of the people who let them exist at all. And those people believe that they should, at the very least, be employed by the companies which are located in their own country.
The eventual outcome of the present process will be twofold: jobs continually pumped to overpopulated countries around the world, where sheer numbers depress wages to pennies on the dollar paid in the US. Massive economic depression across the US. Wages decreasing. Schools starved for money. Price deflation.
At the same time, ever-growing profits pumped to a small number of executives, and indirectly to the service industries which sell to the very wealthy. At this end, price inflation.
The only safe harbor in the businesses-do-what-they-we-owe-you-shit is to be an executive. Everyone else eventually becomes a peon.
There is no break on the cycle once it starts. The reason why European countries are nightmares of strikes and taxes is that they have cut a deal between what they are, with jobs and wages relatively stable, with the crashing cycle that we have embraced.
Communism. Ah, the old boogieman. It never gets old.
Here: the idea of free markets determining wages and prices works -- if there is no hypergrowing population of people who will work for pennies on our dollars. Massive growth in the number of workers will drag wages down for everyone, everywhere. Wages can't rise. Not without a catastrophic adjustment in human numbers.
Business executives know all this, and they are playing to become robber barons of the 21st and 22nd centuries. They don't give a damn what happens to people lower down than their elevated positions. They are social Darwinists. Economic collapse makes them stronger and wealthier, and more powerful.
The question is, why does the equipment continue to cost so much? Economies of scale should be dropping prices by orders of magnitude, up to a point.
Prices stay high because the telecoms can support those prices, period. The same mechanism which kept medical equipment prices spiralling out of control -- hospitals could raise prices infinitely.
Material objects do cost money, but automation, overseas labor costs for both plant and engineering, and market pressure should be driving the costs down.
But they aren't. Because a free market isn't really free. Monopolies and fake scarcities can be manufactured (Enron). By artificially keeping bandwidth dear, Cisco can charge high because the telecoms are RICH. Without downward pressure on costs, Cisco ain't gonna drop prices.
Amen. If the guvmint had run the fiber rollout the way it regulated power (before dereg nuked us -- CA says thanks!) we'd have fiber to our homes and pay far less per month than we do now or will pay in the future.
The free market cannot, by strict profit motivation, fiber up the nation. Corporate nature will go for maximum profit for minimum rollout costs -- which is why power grids and phone companies are regulated monopolies. And those regulated businesses do just fine, and everyone gets electricity and phone servce.
And yes, high speed and nearly infinite bandwidth is a necessity. It nukes attempts to corner the entertainment industry. It provides cheap telecom. It enables nearly everything.
Bandwidth IS NOT EXPENSIVE. It has been MADE expensive. Growing profit depends on controlling supply for a demand. By artificially making bandwidth dear, we suffer as citizens while rapidly consolidating corporations make out like bandits, and plot to grab even more.
Is a corporation entitled to endlessly growing profit? Let's try: NO.
Corporations are legal fictions that were originally intended to help create a better world for us all by shielding investors from personal liability. Business and corporations exist to serve the common good. When they do not, they have violated their mandate.
I know this be heresy in this radically right wing business era, but it is true. The people, all of us, license corporations to exist for our benefit. We do not exist to serve their interests. One way is a democracy promoting business; the other, neo-feudalism.
I once did an analysis on Slashdot providing calculations on a government-rolled-out telecom network versus the current private rollout. And I found that we have spent an order of magnitude too much money for services that are shoddy and hard-to-get.
The people benefiting from the private sector rollout of "expensive bandwidth" are the rapidly monopolizing telecom companies. We, the people who they allegedy serve, are being squeezed. We are being convinced that they are doing us a favor by providing us with 100kbs pipes -- while they are milking us blind.
There are towns across the US that are rolling their own telecom. Guess what? Fat pipes, low cost, no bullshit. And with new wireless tech coming up, we won't need wires for a lot of it.
Well, I hate to break up your analogy, but I don't have time to make a posting to continue the BTTF comparisons.
Here's the thing:
During the '80's, Saddam/Iraq obtained germ cultures from a firm in Virginia, with the blessings of the Reagan/Bush White House. That's what was removed from the Iraqi declarations lat year before the U.S. in turn handed them over to the U.N. We gave the "bully" his toys.
Wolfowitz et al had no problem with Saddam gassing Iraqis and Kurds in the 80's. There is a famous picture floating around of Wolfy shaking hands with Saddam a couple of months after he knew damned well Saddam had committed mass murder.
In '88, the U.N. attempted to pass a resolution demanding the investigation of Saddam's gas attacks against helpless civilians. The resolution was blocked by -- wait for it.... --- the veto of the U.S. in the Security Council.
Ironic, eh?
Reagan/Bush equipped and gave aid and comfort to Saddam because he was fighting the Iranians. This is fact. The same people are in Bush's White House. Fact. Another fact: they don't want anyone to remember that past. Their hands are covered with the same blood they denounce on Saddam.
We have delusions about our past: the rest of the world does not. The WH press corps has reliquished its responsiblity to question the President in any meaningful way. We do not receive accurate news coverage of our appointed President's actions: the rest of the world does.
When Saddam WAS acting the bully, he was our guy, and we didn't care. When he attacked our oil supply, he became the enemy. But he was always pathetic and helpless against any real enemy. He can't touch us, and has never shown any inclination to commit suicide by doing so.
We have become the world's only superpower. But instead of being a force for sanity and law, we've gone rogue.
We are oppressing and silencing dissent, at all levels, from our inability to wear T-shirts which oppose Bush to Bush himself holding "press conference" at which only selected reporters could ask pre-approved questions, with Carl Rove front and center maintaining a checklist, controlling the event. This is beyong bullying -- this is totalitarianism pretending to be what it used to be -- a democracy.
We have insulted and manipulated our allies into being the fall guys for our failure to make a sane argument for invading a helpless and non-threatening enemy.
We have news coverage tut-tutting "anti-American" protestors in the U.S. and around the world. An incredible, egregious lie: the protestors are anti-Bush, not anti-American. This is memetic bullying. We have bullied away all the incredible solidarity we had after 9-11. All the good will.
We have told the world we will blow up anything and anyone we want to, at any time. We have informed the world we will use nukes if we want to.
We have told the world that we will torture if we want to. That the Geneva convention no longer applies to our prisoners.
We have told the world that they can go to commie hell if they want us to sign environmental treaties.
We have told the world we no longer need the U.N.
We have told the world that we don't need the Brits to invade Iraq. Britons are understandably pissed off that even they who have supported us are crap in the eyes of the radical right.
We have told the world that we don't care what happens to international diplomacy.
We are the U.S., and people who oppose us (Bush/God) are commies, lesbos, godless, old Europeans, environmentalist pro-press whack jobs.
If Turkey won't take a bribe, then we will cut off their aid. I doubt Bush knows we hardly give any foreign aid compared to the rest of the world, and that Turkey won't miss us much. But it is the act of a bully.
We (Bush) have made it known we will punish economically anyone who opposes us. He is seemingly oblivious to the fact that our economy, via the money he borrows from abroad to pay for our tax cuts and mil
Well, look at it this way.
Every disposable home being built today will have to be torn down in 30 years or so.
Can you imagine the size of the garbage landfills? I mean, come on! This is planned obsolescence gone mad!
If we care about our descendants, we shouldn't deed them immense square miles of our pulped junk.
Build beautiful, build to last.
Glass does slowly color over time. It just takes a century or two for the effect to be visible.
Discworld, not Diskworld. I just mention this so he won't come up empty on Google.
Actually, check out www.lspace.org for Pratchetty Discworld goodness.
Actually, the point that they will all begin to fail at the same time doesn't invalidate the timeline.
Most of the residential structures in place now will have to be demolished and replaced in the next 20-40 years. Modern skyscrapers, to add another level, are only supposed to last about a hundred years.
Houses built today are not designed to last more than 30 years. I live in Chicago near the lakefront. I watch the new 500K $US condos being built. Cheap exposed steel on the inside walls, sheetrock and cheap wallboard, soft pine trim, cheap aluminum windows, plywood floors, no sound insulation, roofs damned to leak. And outside, the walls are made of cinderblock, not concrete! A couple of decades from now, the walls will be crumbling from the absorbed moisture and acid rain.
Could they be built more durable? Yep. Will they? Nope. The contractors and architects and developers are counting on the frequent replacement of these shoddy piles to replenish their money supply.
For the record, I live in 80+ year old apartment buildings and condos. The simply don't break -- unless a developer gets their damned hands on one, and "gut-rehabs" it by tearing out the plaster and lathe walls, and replacing them with steel and cardboard, removing the cool old iron tubs and replacing them with fiberglass junk, tearing out the custom-made wooden windows and *glueing* in replacement aluminum, ripping out old oak wainscotting, pouring cement down the fireplace chimneys and replacing the brick hearthswith little gas-powered "fireplaces" which we used to call "space heaters", and in short, converting the beautiful immortal building into a crumbling copy of the new condos.
Mostly it's because there are no controls on development anymore in this town. Lazy our Faire, and all that is old and strong becomes frequently-replaced junk. And the change in quality comes too slowly for people to take notice - a matter of decades.
And I don't think it's because we don't have poor but honest immigrant craftsman anymore. Beautiful molding is not hard for a robot manufaturing line to make, for instance. We're seeing a "rush to the bottom" based on maximizing short-term profit in this, as well as so many other industries.
There are NO laws requiring auto manufacturers to provide replacement parts. None. It's an old myth.
Noooooooo, Firewire is not expensive. It's a cheap chipset on the mobo. It's a cheap chipset anywhere.
On the other hand, you might use a prism to create a 'tap' into the network. Or maybe a 3 port hub.
The cool thing about an optical line-of-sight transmitter: by hauling yourself to the roof with a pair of binoculars, you can look directly down the link and SEE the NSA/FBI/CIA/local cops' prism tap.
With WiFi, you never know if a tap is sitting in a van down the street, or the local 7-11 has an NSA tapping station behind the storeroom.
But optical, ah, you can SEE the buggers listening in on your conversations.
Snicker. Wouldn't it be cool if you could jack the power on the laser, and melt the bastard's tapping opticals? Priceless.
Solution:
First, user sends the version number of the patch list present on the user's hardware to MS. The version number represents what hardware/MS software is present, and what patches have been previously applied.
A match is found.
A list of patches is generated, and sent to the user.
MS transmits ONLY the patches that the user's version number indicates is necessary.
User patches.
After successful patch, the version number of the patch list is updated on the user's hard drive.
Operation complete.
So, a massive transmittal of a list of ALL patches is not necessary: only the version number of the patch list needs to be communicated.
The "so much data needs to be sent" argument for MS's snooping presupposes their method of applying patches to be the only one. A little thinking comes up with an alternative.
They snoop because they want to snoop.
1. Any voting system running on proprietary code should be assumed to be rigged.
2. Some of the companies that make such systems (Diebold) are affiliated with far-right wing politicians.
3. Paper audit trails do not exist. Without an audit trail, the only recount available is done by software provided by the manufacturer. Worthless.
4. In at least one state, which one escapes my memory at the moment, it is unlawful for any agency except the manufacturer of the machines to recount votes made on the machines.
5. A far-right wing ex-talk show host, now a congressman, was the primary shareowner of one of the voting machine manufacturers.
6. Exit polls have become unreliable for the first time in history. Election outcomes no longer match exit sampling. Why? Either the voters decided suddenly, en masse, to lie to exit pollsters, or mathematics have ceased to function, OR the vote tallies have been tampered with. I'd go with Occam's Razor: the tallies are being altered, just enough to win; not enough to be ridculously obvious.
7. The Florida mess. I remark on this only in passing, for I saw it mentioned by another poster. There was no mess: there was a close race, and a recount was needed. As the Floridians were proving, a perfect hand recount was easily done. But they were stopped from doing so by a partisan, panicking Supreme Court majority. Not that the thousands of operatives flooding the courts and the media weren't slowing it down to a crawl -- staged riots, lawsuits, arguing extensively over each ballot -- anything necessary to stop - that - recount. The Supremes had no legal precedent to do what they did. Constitutional scholars almost unanimously denounced the decision as BS. But they did the job.
And yes, BS headlines to the contrary, Gore won by actual votes counted. If overvotes ("Gore" written in, and also punched) were to be counted, and they would have been, Gore won handily.
And to my mind more importantly, if the military overseas votes postmarked after 11-07-00 had been disqualified, instead of illegally approved, Bush would have lost. Lieberman should be denied a shot at the crown just for caving on that point. those votes were sent in by Bush supporters after the close election was over, for the sole purpose of tipping the scale. Disgraceful.
But to report this would be to invalidate the Bush support shown in the media in Dec. 2000, and shown Bush to be a manipulator and a sham.
8. Back to point. Automated systems are fine -- but some say: a paper ballot should be printed out whenever a voter uses an automated machine. The ballot should be filed just as the hand-punched ones are today. In case of recount, the paper should be matched to the counts in the automated systems.
But here's the kicker: if the voter never sees the paper backup, how will the voter know the vote was accurately recorded? The software could mark Danny Fatcat on the file and on the printout, and the voter who voted for George Orwell would never know it.
The only way around this would be if the voter could review the printed audit ballot before the vote is committed. What if it doesn't match? What is the recourse?
And what is the use of an automated system if there is a voter review of a printed ballot? Better just to use the paper ballot and run it through a scantron.
* I don't think an automated system can be anything but rigged. The far-right ideologues in the U.S. are far too fanatical not to get involved in the manufacture and operation of these machines. It's a matter of God's will, the defeat of evil, the end of the world itself. If they can shave off a few thousand people from the Florida rolls because they have similar names to lawbreakers in other states, they can do just about anything. This is a war, and they intend to win it.
"Unless someone in power decides to go after you (out of malice or as a mistake.)"
Did you hear? About a week ago? The White House was floating the idea that Iraqi agents were supporting and inspiring the peace movement in the U.S. Google it.
They are ALREADY starting to set up the process to "de-patriate" (!!!) people who protest against their policies. You can see it, if you try to view the world through their mean little piggy eyes. They are going to nail, and I mean crucify, key people who oppose them.
Think of Scott Ritter, the former weapons inspector who for the last year raised the alarm about Bush's manipulation of this "war" for his own political and business reasons.
Ritter was nailed, out of all the millions who have done so, for having "kiddie porn". What are the odds? Exactly 1:1. He was removed from the board and ruined.
Now, the anti-war protestors... whisper whisper whisper did you hear that they are funded by Saddam? whisper whisper... "Today, the Republican-led Congress announced an investigation into the funding of so-called peace movements."... in the dead of night, masked men slam into homes in Seattle and NYC and Chicago, and shocked men and women are hooded and dragged away into police wagons. Ashcroft has declared them traitors and sympathizers, and they are "disappeared". Their families do not hear from them ever again, they get no lawyers, and no reporter is allowed to know where they are... 45% of Americans believe that the traitors brought it on themselves, by opposing the U.S. (read Bush) during wartime.
Fifty years from now, there is no opposition. Thousands have disappeared, but no one cares. Kids grew up saluting Bush and his successor, Cheney, and are busy fighting the War To Save Democracy, now on its 45th country. The Supreme Court firmly agrees that the temporary suspension of liberties must be made permanent, since we will have had our 110th terrorist attack that month, by a band of evil men who call themselves freedom fighters, from a country formerly known as Brazil, now the 15th U.S. Protectorate...
God, I'm making myself ill.
1. The government didn't leak this document. A true patriot did. And that patriot is now the #1 target for Ashcroft to crucify.
2. Bush/Cheney/Ashcroft were going to lob this firecracker in a few weeks, as the attack against the Iraqis goes into full swing. Get it? Standard Operating Procedure. Get the thing into law when no one is looking -- and Bush gets to decide when the distraction occurs.
3. Spread the word. Yell it from the highest chatrooms. Only publicity can kill this thing.
Where exactly are American comics failing? I've been collecting for over twenty years. I trained up as an artist. So I know what I'm talking about when I say that the comics have never been more creative, better written, professionally crafted.
Manga? I just don't get the obsession. The plotlines are derivative of bad pulp sci-fi, pre-Campbell. The artwork is adequate for the most part, just as "American" comics are. The best art is fantastic, the worst abysmal.
The plotlines in the majority of manga and anime are hackneyed, especially painful since they are run through a language and cultural translation.
I realize manga and anime (I have to lump them together) have become a religion amongst geeks and kids, but its not because of quality -- they're cool because they're cool. Literature, they are not. For the most part. Just like comics.
I can't understand why bunny girls or twenty years out of date cybercowboys ripped from Gibson are more interesting than the tortured old man in "The Dark Knight Returns", or the reinvented heroes in "The Watchmen". Love and Rockets. Dork Tower. Men in Black. Liberty Meadows. Silly and sublime, ten cent junk or graphic novels, American comics have grown up in spite of great resistance from the public at large.
One can argue that manga can be capable of interesting stories, but that doesn't make it more successful. Remember, there is a large amount of manga that doesn't make it in the mass market -- misogynistic, violent, xenophobic, and adored by Japanese of all ages, byt not suited for our culture. We only see the tip of the iceberg, sort of comparable to thinking Brit TV is all Masterpiece Theater, when it's mostly bad game shows.
IMO, altho I've seen incredible artwork done by Japanese artists when relieved of the more everyday restrictions of manga, the comics I see daily are dull, unimaginatively drawn, with bad, bad, and I mean BAD writing with insipid plots. Remember Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is shit.
Manga... the characters all look the same. This is not a generalization -- they are intended to look alike. There's something weird about how the eyes are never drawn with epicanthic folds, considering that they are drawn for a Japanese audience. Running through the genre an obsession with young girls that would get you talked about, not to mention tracked by Ashcroft's goons, if you were drawing in the U.S.
I realize young fanboys and fangirls devour manga the way I used to chow down on Marvel, but that doesn't make American comics "bad". Young people like simpler stories. Manga returns to old comic roots by simplifying the artwork on one level yet showing sophistication in execution. American comics have evolved for an older audience now --there's no help for it.
I've listened patiently to plot breakdowns from rabid fans, and had my eyes glaze over. Let's see: a lone hero(ine) starts out from everyday origins to discover their hidden power that can defeat the demon which yadda yadda... essentially old Japanese folk stories rewritten, just as American comics repeat the Rugged Individualist meme from the old west. But cowboy stories have been done to death, and so has the Lone Ronin, whatever blue hair he wears.
The fuel lines which were repaired have nothing whatsoever with the failure today.
The three main engines are fueled by liquid hydrogen, the propellant, and liquid oxygen (LOX), the oxidizer. The propellent and LOX is provided only during the takeoff of the Shuttle. The fuel and LOX is pumped from the large brown-colored external tank attached to the Shuttle. During the ascent to orbit, the external tank is totally exhausted of LOX and fuel, and is jettisoned by firing explosive bolts which hold the external fuel tank to the Shuttle.
The fuel lines which formerly were cracked are not used in any way after the external tank is jettisoned. Those three main engines you mention are not used at all after the external tank is gone. They can't be. The fuel is gone. And the fuel lines which feed those engines are fuelless as well. They cannot explode by leaking, as there is nothing to leak, and nothing to ignite.
You may want to know that there are two much smaller engines (the two shrouded "bumps" on the rear top of the Shuttle on each side of the horizontal stabilier fin) which are not fuelled by liquid hydrogen. These are the orbital maneuvering engines, used for orbital changes, as well as the all-important de-orbiting burn which slows the Shuttle down enought to start falling back to Earth. The engines, it must be stressed, are not fuelled by the fuel lines which feed the three main "ascent" engines I mentioned earlier.
I would assume, but do not state authoritatively, that the two smaller orbital maneuvering engines are purged of fuel and oxidant after the Shuttle begins its descent to Earth. It would be incomprensible if there was any explosive whatsoever in any of the propulsion systems, because after the Shuttle begins the drop out of orbit, the engines are never used again. The fuel would be dead weight, not to mention a hazard which would serve no purpose.
Remember, the Shuttle is a dead stick glider after it enters the atmosphere. No engine power is possible. The engines are shut down, and never used after the de-orbital burn.
Whatever took the Shuttle apart was not explosive. There was no explosive mix on the Shuttle.
Opinion: Something fell off, unbalanced the craft, and pinwheeled it at 12,500 MPH, at which point it simply tore apart.
Speculations:
- A damaged wing tore off?
- The tail tore off?
- Somehow, one or more of the cargo bay doors opened?
- Somehow, a wheel bay door opened, even partially, and at that speed, flipped the craft?
- catastophic skin failure somewhere on the nose or belly of the craft?
- one of the engines came loose? Reaching here.
- one of the tiny attitude control rockets fired, swing the ship out of true, and slamming into a Mach-speed wind? This seems unlikely - I'd think those hypergolic fuel tanks would be purged before reentry.
- control surface(s) on the wing somehow moved, rolling or pitching the Shuttle?
- the rudder somehow moved?
- the parachute system released the chute, causing enough turbulence to flip the shuttle around?
- window failure?
- airlock door failure?
- (sadly) action of a crew member?
We must keep in mind that the Shuttle is the ultimate experimental aircraft. In a sane world, we would have evolved safer and cheaper craft in the last thirty years. But we were cheap, and cut the program to the bone -- down to the marrow.
The Delta Clipper would have been a smaller, cheaper, reusable single-stage-to-orbit wingless space taxi. We could have developed it on the cheap for a few billion over a period of ten years. But we went for the ultrasophisticated and ultimately unbuildable superspaceplane.
Now we have three X-craft that are proven to fail about every decade.
Developing simpler and safer craft is of maximum importance. The shuttle as it flies is too dangerous -- a compromise for the Air Force and the spooks during the early seventies, built to fly giant spy sats instead of the tiny taxi it was supposed to be. The tiles are impractical. The flight surfaces are unstable and parasitical weight.
We need to spend real money, and NOT just to fund Boeing/Lockheed-Martin. We need to build a real fleet of ships that do what we need them to do. Small passenger craft.
We can't keep trying to reach the stars with a budget that can't even pay for a repainting of NASA HQ. You can't cheap out R&D -- it doesn't work. People die. We must spend what the ENGINEERS say they need to build the next gen of craft, and the gen after that, and after that.
We built the equivalent of a biplane, and froze time. We must build the DC-3. The 707. The tech has to evolve naturally, as engineers learn from past flaws. We do not do this. We have insisted that NASA first build a flying boxcar it didn't deem necessary. Then we wanted this experimental craft to last for forty years or more.
The real miracle is that the NASA engineers have kept this sad can flying since the late seventies.
" 20 or minutes or so " to hit the ground... i have to disagree. nowhere near that long. a minute or so, at most.
sorrow. remorse. anger at the u.s. for not building more modern designs and retiring that overdesigned piece of aerospace contractage.
NASA will get all the blame, but those astronauts today died of terminal cheapness on the U.S.'s part. The Shuttle is a late-60's design, bastardized by Air Force demands into a flying boxcar. the tiles were a good idea 32 years ago, but we should have built a new shuttle from newer alloys, based on what we learned from what is essentially a prototype space vehicle.
but all this for later. i fear the euopean and U.S. manned space program will be killed from this.
rest in peace, people.
Jumping in...
"So...the 100s of thousands of potentially violent drug dealers currently in prison should be released and most drug laws reworked? "
Being a drug offender does not make you "potentially violent". Non sequiteur. Or however that's spelled. It does not follow.
And yes, they should be released and the laws rewritten. Stupid laws that have created a massive crime syndicate, poisoned ecosystems, toppled governments, ruined our prison system, tortured our citizens, and annihilated respect for the law and our government.
"Ok,ok, strawman. The arguements are not equal; [hard] drugs are dangerous and the dealers should be locked up. But you can see how a rule like that would not work quite the way you may think."
Hard drugs are dangerous to those using them. They don't kill YOU. The criminals that sell the stuff, and who ARE deadly, exist because of the laws banning the drugs. Prohibition funded the Mafia and made it what it is today: unkillable. We are making new mafias all over the world. THAT is dangerous.
Drugs, hard or soft, can kill an individual in a Darwinistically efficient way. But they can't kill YOU, the non-user. The criminals created by the business opportunity caused by illegality ARE deadly. And would not exist save for the laws. And would not exist at all if the profit created by illegality was eliminated. The biggest opponents of drug decriminalization are the various drug cartels. They'd be ruined.
And remember: the original proponent of the marijuana laws used as his main argument the "fact" that negro hedonists were poisoning white youth with black drugs and evil music. The drug laws were not enacted because of sane argument. They exist because of ignorance and manipulation of predjudice.
"Of course, if there are 270 million US citizens and only 70 million are participating in 'illegal' file sharing, then the law would still stand as 200 million law abiding citizens would keep the balance."
So 70 out of 270 people in the U.S. should be paying millions of dollars in "damages" EACH for "theft", and spend life in prison, if all the terms are added up for each offense, and the other 200 should be free.
This is madness.
In the meantime, we have a national policy to encourage the export and use of our national cash drug crop, tobacco. Hundreds of millions will die in agony from the side effects of using this highly addictive narcotic. But it is not illegal, so that's okay.
See the difference between illegal and wrong, against the law and evil?
The biggest killer drug in this country is alcohol. In the world. But since it is our favorite drug, we don't speak of jailing the "potentially violent" users of the drug (I'm not talking about what people DO under the effects of drugs -- that is actionable, in a sane legal system -- not the drug use itself) for years, refusing them financial aid for college, ruining their careers, taking their houses, cars, and anything the cops might fancy without trial or recourse, etc.
If all "drug users", defined as people who use psychoactive chemicals to alter their behavior, were to be put in prison, then Utah would be the only populated state in the union.
"The system is unofficial - they cannot sue it."
That isn't the point. They are not suing you to win. They are suing you to sue you.
They will sue you, and cost you tens of thousands of dollars just to get to the point where their suit against you is thrown out. At the same time, another agent will sue you. And so forth.
And after you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get out of the preliminary rounds, all of which you won, we'll assume, then you will be sued again. And again.
I watched it happen before -- the Scientologists use this technical extensively. The idea of a lawsuit, according to Hubbard, was not to win, but to harrass, to intimidate, to bankrupt, to exhaust, to ruin. In advanced cases, the broken victim can even be brought on board the attacker's cause, as a requirement for cessation of legal attacks. Oh, and gag clauses for the poor schmuck is standard as well.
Oh, and the attack has the most value as a object lesson for everyone else that the suer wants to harrass or control. The very idea that ruin can come to anyone else the attacker feels like swatting stifles resistance and give the victory to the attacker.
And the attacker gets to keep anything of value they can seize from the victim as well.
It's a very economical attack. One only has to ruin one or two people publicly to stop behavior one doesn't like.
The tools required are money, organization, lawyers, and an utter lack of morality.
They need the money. Seriously need it.
All the power to them: Moeller's been at this his whole life and he deserves to win one.
And Kevin Smith should buy the freaking flying car!
Don't laugh.
I recall a news report a few years back that indicated that the U.S. dumps herbicide galore on marijuana fields in Central and South America.
As a bonus, those plants that do managed to get harvested end up being smoked in the good ol' U.S. -- and the poison ends up in the criminal bodies of the smokers.
Win-win: the War on Some Drugs gets a shot in, the pesticide company makes millions, we humiliate the country we forced the poison into, we poison the water tables of thousands or millions of helpless poor people, and best of all, people who smoke the demon weed get poisoned and ill, maybe even die.
I assume the Drug Warriors go out to their local pubs in D.C. and get stoned on martinis when they celebrate this victory of the Glorious Republic.
"In another 8 - 10 years, are we going to miss the early new millenium when we didn't need a lawyer to click a link on a webpage? "
I don't know the pros or cons of the case, but I think Pete Townsend might be agreeing with you about now.
Guilty or innocent or somewhere in between, he's ruined.
For my part, I've been assuming I'm monitored every time I enter a new webspace. Paranoia, it seems, IS warranted. Cults are monitoring their enemies, the current admin wants to monitor everyone, and lawyers want more vacation homes.
The future you think you're dreaming of is already here. The old web is dead.
Twenty-five or -six to four is the correct time to say that.