I see your point, but I have to point out that as of now, the bailouts have never put anything directly into the treasury either - so both NASA and the Bailouts have never put anything into the treasury. While the bailouts may, they also may not.
My chart doesn't really compare NASA to the bailout as much as it illustrates where NASA is prioritized according to other federal spending, and by what margins. The reason I created it is that I get tired of hearing people talk as though cutting the space program (which to them means "NASA") would solve our financial woes. It won't.
NASA in entirety is.5% of the discretionary budget (.15% of total budget). While cutting funds to NASA would make as much of a difference to the budget as cutting funds from any other federal agency, there is a lot less room in NASA's budget for the cuts compared to other agencies which have equally nebulous direct benefit to the taxpayer.
Are $2.4 billion in military aid to Israel or $1.3 billion to Egypt returning any net to the treasury, or a tangible benefit to the US taxpayer, even indirectly?
Look, I understand that not everyone values Science research and space exploration, or believe that they should be done by the government. However, for nearly every tax dollar you can point to NASA spending, there's likely some indirect but tangible and provable positive gain to our country, citizens and economy that have resulted from it. Meanwhile, there are programs of dubious value spending as much or more money than NASA which get a complete pass on the pinata whacking party, and it is very sad to be on the receiving end of the stick, knowing that.
I actually agree with you. NASA has a lot of value to the country that people really do not see! There's lots of factors why, and NASA shares a little bit of the blame in that PR could be done a lot better - but overall it's been a constant problem that people don't see the end product of all their government-sponsored research dollars.
There's some good sites online though, that have lists of NASA Spinoff technology:
Actually, our being flat broke has very little to do with the space program, except that every dollar spent by the government is a dollar it either needs to tax us for, or borrow from someone (to later tax us for with interest).
Here's a chart I threw together a while back when having an argument with a friend of mine about NASA's budget and our general federal budget woes.
Note how, if the NASA budget remained the same every year from now on, it would take approximately 47 years to spend as much as we threw away on the bank bailout this year. Also note how the "Interest on Debt" line is about 40 times NASA's budget.
I understand that we need to cut spending and balance our budget - hell, I DEMAND it of anyone I vote for - but NASA is an awfully popular whipping boy for "government spending" compared to the very small portion of our budget that is actually spent on basic science research, engineering, computing, space exploration, and protecting our planet from potential destruction by rogue asteroids.
(disclaimer: Yes, I DO work for NASA - but I'd feel this way even if I didn't!).
Jafafa: You're probably correct that NASA gets criticism due to its visibility. I think, though, that another major component of the criticism stems from the fact that quite a large number of people probably don't see direct benefits from the research and development done through NASA.
A lot of the criticism I hear is along the lines of "Why should the public pay to fund X?" or "Tax dollars shouldn't fund research - if X was important a business would jump on it in order to profit!". But much of what gets researched through NASA are not things which by themselves would be profitable or even useful to anyone - for example stereoscopic robot vision or automated planning. However the discoveries feed TONS of technologies which actually do eventually become commercialized by someone.
The military it's easy to see direct benefits of; if you're not being invaded this week, it's your defense dollars at work. I think NASA mostly needs to do a better job of conveying to the public just what benefits they're actually reaping!
(disclaimer: This is purely personal opinion and not official NASA opinion, etc).
Coincidentally, I threw together this chart yesterday when arguing with a friend about NASA's budget and how space exploration is "a huge government waste".
Most interestingly to me is that if NASA's budget stayed the same, it would take 47 years to spend as much money as the 2008 wall street bailout - which would be the retirement date for a brand-new, young hire.
Although many of the subcontractors may have drug policies and may do the drug testing, I've been at NASA for 8 years and never submitted to a single drug test.
Granted, I work at a research lab rather than a mission center like MSFC, but generally the policy seems to be "Don't piss off your core scientists and engineers." (pun not intended)
From what I've witnessed, scientists and engineers also tend to be the type of people most offended at the thought that they should have to submit to random pee tests, so they strongly fight against any such measures.
I'm super excited to see NASA's opensource work getting exposure, so don't take my nitpick the wrong way -- just wanted to put the fact out in the open that the NAS (NASA Advanced Supercomputing) is actually at Ames. It has its own tertiary level DNS space as a major resource but the facilities are in the same place.
I also find it amusing as hell that she's a realtor by profession. I realize that a realtor can be helpful in an individual real estate transaction (mine sure was, recently) but AS A WHOLE I find their entire profession to be a leech on society, driving up housing values by 6% and engaging in incredibly anticompetitive behavior to try to keep the "Realtors' monopoly" on real estate transactions.
Her calling SPAM "snake oil" strikes me as vaguely ironic, considering her profession.
If yes, but only if the spammers (spitters?) pay for cell minutes or something, then this is not a problem at all.
If the spammers/spitters pay for the minutes, it's not a problem? Are you sure? I got 1,981 spams last night - about one every 45 seconds (math in head not exact). Do you think you would use a cell phone if it got telemarketed to once every 45 seconds, or just turn it off? And if you just turn it off, how does your family/friend/etc get ahold of you?
That's interesting! I had a similar experience with a pair of "Identical" dell servers.
One of them was the hot-backup for the other and was supposed to be identical. They were ordered at the same time and spec'd out identically.
One day, the RAID controller on the main machine failed, so we swapped both of the RAID 1 drives into the appropriate slots on the secondary machine.
To shorten the story, the RAID controller on the main machine had failed and snorked the data on the RAID, so our "hot swap in case of controller failure" plan didn't cover it.
Fortunately we had the foresight to a) Keep the actual DATA for the DB on a separate Sun T3 RAID (you know, one with a controller that works) and b) Keep a copy of a configured OS image with installed applications handy, and not plugged into the system.
Since that and a lot of other problems we had with Dells, we switched to Sun X21XX/41XX/vXX series machines for the same class. Much better systems, in my opinion.
Steve: To clarify, federal employees (civil servants) are allowed to take part in civil protests. What they are NOT allowed to do is go on strike against the government.
So, taking 8 hours of personal leave to go to SF and join a protest is cool -- going on strike and picketing your place of employment is not. (However you can still quit your job, then picket all you want.)
Rich: These days the Hatch act interpretation, at least at NASA, is a bit more loose. From what I've been told, us peons can do nearly any political activities we want while on our own personal time, but nothing during work hours, or using government equipment. Bumper stickers are still OK on your car. Supervisors are held to a bit more strict of a standard I think, since they could force employees' hands.
We can also still run for and hold local office as long as we're not violating any conflict of interest rules.
Really? The fact that an employee in an org with 50k employees had time to blog says a lot about the efficiency of the entire org?
And "Spending some time on their blog in the years X, Y and Z" is not equivalent to "Spending three years (X+Y+Z) on their blog". The article also never mentioned that the suspension wouldn't affect anyone elses' workflow. If the org did things right, they have backups for every employee with any real responsibility. What if he had to spend 180 days recovering from a bad car wreck?
You know you're posting to Slashdot during work hours, right. I hope you're not posting from work! (yes, I have the day off today.)
That said, I agree that this person should be fired for the violations of the Hatch act. Government positions are not to be used as a political platform.
I'm not sure latency has anything to do with the current situation, but here's one scenario where latency might have a huge deal to do with it.
If the commandset necessary to initialize the b&w pan-cam is one command, it will take 40 mins + $equipmentruntime + $downloadtime to grab a black and white photo.
If the commandset necesary to initialize it into color mode and snap the photo requires an acknowlegement by mission control as an intermediary step, the time becomes (40 mins *2) + $equipmentruntime + $downloadtime.
Now, I'm not familiar with phoenix so I don't know in what order commands can be parsed, equipment powers up, etc -- but I do know that for remote robots on mars, latency is a huge deal and a LOT of work has gone into minimizing the effect on operations.
For example, check out this article (warning: PDF) which discusses some of the challenges involved in implementing automatic obstacle avoidance.
AOA is a discipline devoted to helping unmanned rovers (like MER) pick a path from point A to B and avoid obstacles on the way. With this technology mission control has to only issue one order (go from X to Y) instead of a dozen (Go from A to B, then B to C, then C to D. Stop. Analyze path. Go from D to E. Go from E to F. Stop......)
With AOA you hit your 40 minute latency and then wait for the bots to report "done". With manual avoidance you have to have the mission controllers in the loop, and a 40 minute data round-trip each time they have to make a call themselves.
But back to the original point as I indicated above, I generally point out the latency to people not because it's the specific variable involved, but because getting an idea of the latency the trip incurs is a good way of getting the point across that it's not exactly a DSL link to google; there are bandwidth, data storage, latency, CPU, Memory, Power and all kinds of other constraints involved which might make someone uninformed poke fun (Ha, black and white photos? What is with that!) but which make a LOT of sense in the context of those constraints.
Well it's both latency and bandwidth (About ISDN speed if I recall) but it usually drives the point about bandwidth home better to folks if I mention latency -- a 40 minute round trip makes people really think about how FAR a distance is involved.
In their defense, I would guess that the moment the thing lands they're busy checking the instrumentation to make sure nothing got damaged, setting up instructions for what the lander is to DO now, informing superiors/science groups/engineering teams/etc and basically... doing their jobs.
I'm pretty sure it's not champagne parties for 2 hours before someone says "Hey, lets update the website guys!"
The theory of greatest incompetence isn't that the incompetent people get put into managemtn right off.
It goes like this:
1) You do a good job, you get promoted. 2) You do a good job, you get promoted again. X: Repeat until 3: 3) You are no longer good at the level you've been promoted to. You are neither promoted nor demoted.
At step 3, you've been promoted to your level of incompetence. Demoting you down a level would leave you at your highest competence level (the last place you did well enough to earn a promotion) but that doesn't happen. You're sucking so you don't earn the promotion either -- so you spend a good portion of your job as an incompetent person at that level.
Justin: I agree with you, pretty much; there's no way we can get true transparency in government (And there are plenty of situations where that would be a BAD thing). We also definitely do need to elect some folks who will do much better in regard to privacy.
Like other texts describing "absolute" philosophical standpoints, I take "The transparent society" to be a goal we should be working toward with equal vigor on both sides.
The government should be permitted to surveil the people when necessary (criminal investigation backed by warrants, etc) and should be required to leave citizens alone when unnecessary.
Citizens should be aware that state secrets are necessary -sometimes- but otherwise should demand to be permitted to surveil their government as a mechanism for ensuring that it continues to serve the peoples' interest.
It sounds like you might be misunderstanding David Brins' original point.
He never claimed that society should give up all privacy in order to overload the officials with information. Instead, the central tenet of his book was that the people in power will always have far more ability to watch the "little guy" and there is a power imbalance.
To address the inevitable power imbalance, he posited that society should become COMPLETELY transparent. That is, that we should have as much insight and surveilance of all levels of government, as they have of us.
So in a situation where the FBI had cameras on every street corner to watch the populace, each street corner camera would also have a 12" LCD showing the inside of the monitoring center and what the camera was currently pointed at. Thus, the watched are also the watchers of the watchers, and so on.
Not to say I agree completely (Like the higher levels of government would EVER consent to that) but like many other "ideal" systems the theory is fairly sound, even if we know it'll never occur that way in practice.
FYI I am using an IronKey (4GB Enterprise edition) right now on a Mac OSX box with the key formatted with FAT32.
It works wonderfully on the Mac for basic encryptio/decryption/file access, and I am also mounting it to a WinXP virtual image within VMWare Fusion. The VM XP thing works flawlessly, including auto-mounting, and I initialized the key on the VM prior to using it on the Mac.
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I see your point, but I have to point out that as of now, the bailouts have never put anything directly into the treasury either - so both NASA and the Bailouts have never put anything into the treasury. While the bailouts may, they also may not.
My chart doesn't really compare NASA to the bailout as much as it illustrates where NASA is prioritized according to other federal spending, and by what margins. The reason I created it is that I get tired of hearing people talk as though cutting the space program (which to them means "NASA") would solve our financial woes. It won't.
NASA in entirety is .5% of the discretionary budget (.15% of total budget). While cutting funds to NASA would make as much of a difference to the budget as cutting funds from any other federal agency, there is a lot less room in NASA's budget for the cuts compared to other agencies which have equally nebulous direct benefit to the taxpayer.
Are $2.4 billion in military aid to Israel or $1.3 billion to Egypt returning any net to the treasury, or a tangible benefit to the US taxpayer, even indirectly?
Look, I understand that not everyone values Science research and space exploration, or believe that they should be done by the government. However, for nearly every tax dollar you can point to NASA spending, there's likely some indirect but tangible and provable positive gain to our country, citizens and economy that have resulted from it. Meanwhile, there are programs of dubious value spending as much or more money than NASA which get a complete pass on the pinata whacking party, and it is very sad to be on the receiving end of the stick, knowing that.
I actually agree with you. NASA has a lot of value to the country that people really do not see! There's lots of factors why, and NASA shares a little bit of the blame in that PR could be done a lot better - but overall it's been a constant problem that people don't see the end product of all their government-sponsored research dollars.
There's some good sites online though, that have lists of NASA Spinoff technology:
http://www.thespaceplace.com/nasa/spinoffs.html
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/nasalife/index.html
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=26661
I know I'm starting to sound like a shill at this point, but when you really believe in something, that's a risk you end up taking. :)
Actually, our being flat broke has very little to do with the space program, except that every dollar spent by the government is a dollar it either needs to tax us for, or borrow from someone (to later tax us for with interest).
Here's a chart I threw together a while back when having an argument with a friend of mine about NASA's budget and our general federal budget woes.
http://foofus.com/amuse/public/Fedspending-2008-linechart.jpg
Note how, if the NASA budget remained the same every year from now on, it would take approximately 47 years to spend as much as we threw away on the bank bailout this year. Also note how the "Interest on Debt" line is about 40 times NASA's budget.
I understand that we need to cut spending and balance our budget - hell, I DEMAND it of anyone I vote for - but NASA is an awfully popular whipping boy for "government spending" compared to the very small portion of our budget that is actually spent on basic science research, engineering, computing, space exploration, and protecting our planet from potential destruction by rogue asteroids.
(disclaimer: Yes, I DO work for NASA - but I'd feel this way even if I didn't!).
Jafafa: You're probably correct that NASA gets criticism due to its visibility. I think, though, that another major component of the criticism stems from the fact that quite a large number of people probably don't see direct benefits from the research and development done through NASA.
A lot of the criticism I hear is along the lines of "Why should the public pay to fund X?" or "Tax dollars shouldn't fund research - if X was important a business would jump on it in order to profit!". But much of what gets researched through NASA are not things which by themselves would be profitable or even useful to anyone - for example stereoscopic robot vision or automated planning. However the discoveries feed TONS of technologies which actually do eventually become commercialized by someone.
The military it's easy to see direct benefits of; if you're not being invaded this week, it's your defense dollars at work. I think NASA mostly needs to do a better job of conveying to the public just what benefits they're actually reaping!
(disclaimer: This is purely personal opinion and not official NASA opinion, etc).
Whoops, forgot I'd made a post and was playing with iptables rules.
Reposted here: http://midian.org/~amuse/Fedspending-2008-linechart.jpg
Coincidentally, I threw together this chart yesterday when arguing with a friend about NASA's budget and how space exploration is "a huge government waste".
http://foofus.com/amuse/public/Fedspending-2008-linechart.jpg
(disclaimer: I do work for NASA).
Most interestingly to me is that if NASA's budget stayed the same, it would take 47 years to spend as much money as the 2008 wall street bailout - which would be the retirement date for a brand-new, young hire.
Although many of the subcontractors may have drug policies and may do the drug testing, I've been at NASA for 8 years and never submitted to a single drug test.
Granted, I work at a research lab rather than a mission center like MSFC, but generally the policy seems to be "Don't piss off your core scientists and engineers." (pun not intended)
From what I've witnessed, scientists and engineers also tend to be the type of people most offended at the thought that they should have to submit to random pee tests, so they strongly fight against any such measures.
I'm super excited to see NASA's opensource work getting exposure, so don't take my nitpick the wrong way -- just wanted to put the fact out in the open that the NAS (NASA Advanced Supercomputing) is actually at Ames. It has its own tertiary level DNS space as a major resource but the facilities are in the same place.
I also find it amusing as hell that she's a realtor by profession. I realize that a realtor can be helpful in an individual real estate transaction (mine sure was, recently) but AS A WHOLE I find their entire profession to be a leech on society, driving up housing values by 6% and engaging in incredibly anticompetitive behavior to try to keep the "Realtors' monopoly" on real estate transactions.
Her calling SPAM "snake oil" strikes me as vaguely ironic, considering her profession.
Good point! I do not know where my brain is today...
If yes, but only if the spammers (spitters?) pay for cell minutes or something, then this is not a problem at all.
If the spammers/spitters pay for the minutes, it's not a problem? Are you sure? I got 1,981 spams last night - about one every 45 seconds (math in head not exact). Do you think you would use a cell phone if it got telemarketed to once every 45 seconds, or just turn it off? And if you just turn it off, how does your family/friend/etc get ahold of you?
That's interesting! I had a similar experience with a pair of "Identical" dell servers.
One of them was the hot-backup for the other and was supposed to be identical. They were ordered at the same time and spec'd out identically.
One day, the RAID controller on the main machine failed, so we swapped both of the RAID 1 drives into the appropriate slots on the secondary machine.
To shorten the story, the RAID controller on the main machine had failed and snorked the data on the RAID, so our "hot swap in case of controller failure" plan didn't cover it.
Fortunately we had the foresight to a) Keep the actual DATA for the DB on a separate Sun T3 RAID (you know, one with a controller that works) and b) Keep a copy of a configured OS image with installed applications handy, and not plugged into the system.
Since that and a lot of other problems we had with Dells, we switched to Sun X21XX/41XX/vXX series machines for the same class. Much better systems, in my opinion.
Steve: To clarify, federal employees (civil servants) are allowed to take part in civil protests. What they are NOT allowed to do is go on strike against the government.
So, taking 8 hours of personal leave to go to SF and join a protest is cool -- going on strike and picketing your place of employment is not. (However you can still quit your job, then picket all you want.)
Rich: These days the Hatch act interpretation, at least at NASA, is a bit more loose. From what I've been told, us peons can do nearly any political activities we want while on our own personal time, but nothing during work hours, or using government equipment. Bumper stickers are still OK on your car. Supervisors are held to a bit more strict of a standard I think, since they could force employees' hands.
We can also still run for and hold local office as long as we're not violating any conflict of interest rules.
Really? The fact that an employee in an org with 50k employees had time to blog says a lot about the efficiency of the entire org?
And "Spending some time on their blog in the years X, Y and Z" is not equivalent to "Spending three years (X+Y+Z) on their blog". The article also never mentioned that the suspension wouldn't affect anyone elses' workflow. If the org did things right, they have backups for every employee with any real responsibility. What if he had to spend 180 days recovering from a bad car wreck?
You know you're posting to Slashdot during work hours, right. I hope you're not posting from work! (yes, I have the day off today.)
That said, I agree that this person should be fired for the violations of the Hatch act. Government positions are not to be used as a political platform.
I'm not sure latency has anything to do with the current situation, but here's one scenario where latency might have a huge deal to do with it.
If the commandset necessary to initialize the b&w pan-cam is one command, it will take 40 mins + $equipmentruntime + $downloadtime to grab a black and white photo.
If the commandset necesary to initialize it into color mode and snap the photo requires an acknowlegement by mission control as an intermediary step, the time becomes (40 mins *2) + $equipmentruntime + $downloadtime.
Now, I'm not familiar with phoenix so I don't know in what order commands can be parsed, equipment powers up, etc -- but I do know that for remote robots on mars, latency is a huge deal and a LOT of work has gone into minimizing the effect on operations.
For example, check out this article (warning: PDF) which discusses some of the challenges involved in implementing automatic obstacle avoidance.
AOA is a discipline devoted to helping unmanned rovers (like MER) pick a path from point A to B and avoid obstacles on the way. With this technology mission control has to only issue one order (go from X to Y) instead of a dozen (Go from A to B, then B to C, then C to D. Stop. Analyze path. Go from D to E. Go from E to F. Stop......)
With AOA you hit your 40 minute latency and then wait for the bots to report "done". With manual avoidance you have to have the mission controllers in the loop, and a 40 minute data round-trip each time they have to make a call themselves.
But back to the original point as I indicated above, I generally point out the latency to people not because it's the specific variable involved, but because getting an idea of the latency the trip incurs is a good way of getting the point across that it's not exactly a DSL link to google; there are bandwidth, data storage, latency, CPU, Memory, Power and all kinds of other constraints involved which might make someone uninformed poke fun (Ha, black and white photos? What is with that!) but which make a LOT of sense in the context of those constraints.
Well it's both latency and bandwidth (About ISDN speed if I recall) but it usually drives the point about bandwidth home better to folks if I mention latency -- a 40 minute round trip makes people really think about how FAR a distance is involved.
From the blog: "They're black and white pictures meant primarily to tell whether our deployments successfully occurred."
Color pictures in high-res take a lot longer to download over a very slow radio link (Latency to mars is 20 - 40 minutes).
Black and white photos are the "test" set because you'll get them down quicker.
In their defense, I would guess that the moment the thing lands they're busy checking the instrumentation to make sure nothing got damaged, setting up instructions for what the lander is to DO now, informing superiors/science groups/engineering teams/etc and basically... doing their jobs.
I'm pretty sure it's not champagne parties for 2 hours before someone says "Hey, lets update the website guys!"
The theory of greatest incompetence isn't that the incompetent people get put into managemtn right off.
It goes like this:
1) You do a good job, you get promoted.
2) You do a good job, you get promoted again.
X: Repeat until 3:
3) You are no longer good at the level you've been promoted to. You are neither promoted nor demoted.
At step 3, you've been promoted to your level of incompetence. Demoting you down a level would leave you at your highest competence level (the last place you did well enough to earn a promotion) but that doesn't happen. You're sucking so you don't earn the promotion either -- so you spend a good portion of your job as an incompetent person at that level.
Justin: I agree with you, pretty much; there's no way we can get true transparency in government (And there are plenty of situations where that would be a BAD thing). We also definitely do need to elect some folks who will do much better in regard to privacy.
Like other texts describing "absolute" philosophical standpoints, I take "The transparent society" to be a goal we should be working toward with equal vigor on both sides.
The government should be permitted to surveil the people when necessary (criminal investigation backed by warrants, etc) and should be required to leave citizens alone when unnecessary.
Citizens should be aware that state secrets are necessary -sometimes- but otherwise should demand to be permitted to surveil their government as a mechanism for ensuring that it continues to serve the peoples' interest.
It sounds like you might be misunderstanding David Brins' original point.
He never claimed that society should give up all privacy in order to overload the officials with information. Instead, the central tenet of his book was that the people in power will always have far more ability to watch the "little guy" and there is a power imbalance.
To address the inevitable power imbalance, he posited that society should become COMPLETELY transparent. That is, that we should have as much insight and surveilance of all levels of government, as they have of us.
So in a situation where the FBI had cameras on every street corner to watch the populace, each street corner camera would also have a 12" LCD showing the inside of the monitoring center and what the camera was currently pointed at. Thus, the watched are also the watchers of the watchers, and so on.
Not to say I agree completely (Like the higher levels of government would EVER consent to that) but like many other "ideal" systems the theory is fairly sound, even if we know it'll never occur that way in practice.
Actually, Some Linux Systems are already dealing with RAM on the Terabyte level.
I'm not sure who the quote is from, but it goes: "If you can't say fuck, then you can't say fuck the government!".
FYI I am using an IronKey (4GB Enterprise edition) right now on a Mac OSX box with the key formatted with FAT32.
It works wonderfully on the Mac for basic encryptio/decryption/file access, and I am also mounting it to a WinXP virtual image within VMWare Fusion. The VM XP thing works flawlessly, including auto-mounting, and I initialized the key on the VM prior to using it on the Mac.
The company promises Linux drivers soon.