Fair enough. Your concerns are what they are, and I won't presume to dispute them. Indeed, I'm certain there is more than we're hearing (both good and bad), and that we'll definitely hear more bad as the project continues.
I don't, however, agree that we're not getting anything significantly new. Since the end of the Apollo Program, we absolutely haven't had this kind of capability. Instead we've had the Shuttle, which is something else entirely. And in the intervening period between Apollo and the start of Orion, a lot has changed. While Orion uses the same basic mission design as Apollo, it's using new materials, new manufacturing techniques, greater capacities, and a different long-term mission plan. Where Apollo was focused almost entirely on Moon shots (with some potential conversion to other missions envisioned later on), Orion has been conceived as a general-purpose backbone system.
It is, in very real ways, something entirely new. Far from regretting the similarities to Apollo, I'm quite glad NASA has been able to apply any Apollo lessons at all to Orion. But it is, fundamentally, a new thing. NASA is an aerospace R&D stimulator. It encourages private industry to make aerospace breakthroughs by setting technological challenges and offering to fund the necessary R&D. Those with the winning bids get a head start on the new technologies, while risking less of their own capital on R&D than otherwise. And in the long term we all benefit from the progress they make and the profits they enjoy.
If you want to see "a craft that doesn't introduce a lot of new capabilities past from what we'd already had", look to the Delta-IV Heavy of the United Launch Alliance. There's big business in space launch capability, and private industry profits every day from mature technologies that started out decades ago as NASA-funded R&D challenges.
I think it's a mistake to classify Orion as "Apollo 1.5", or demand system reliability and project efficiency on par with Atlas/Delta commercial launch programs. It's a cutting-edge aerospace R&D program.
As to the dissenters within NASA, they don't concern me too much. Werner Von Braun, the head of the Saturn launch vehicle team, vehemently favored a direct-ascent design, rather than a lunar-orbit rendezvous. There's always going to be more than one way to solve these problems. But there's also always going to be budget, time, and focus constraints, and there's always going to be a point at which someone, somewhere, is going to have to say "your idea looks great, too, but we're going to commit to this one". Personally I'm glad there's more ideas on the books.
Finally, I just can't seem to get my panties in a bunch over this "manned space flight gap". I rejoice in the fact that other nations have manned space flight capability, reliability, and capacity, to fill that gap, and that the current state of our relationships with these nations is such that we can enjoy a productive partnership with them in this area. Why embark on an even costlier, even riskier crash program, when we have friends to work with? The overall manned space flight capability of the human race is greater now than ever before, and growing all the time, and we're a part of it. And, in time, Orion will add even greater capabilities that the Russians, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Europeans, the Indians, the Brazilians... who knows--even the Iranians will make great use of.
And what I'm saying is that you seem to be overlooking the possibility that the kind of thing described here is a normal part of the aerospace R&D process. That there are always going to be significant gaps between the design and the implementation, and that these reports of "problems" are simply the normal process of discovering and closing those gaps.
You should see the contortions Grumman had to go through, to get the Lunar Module under the mission weight budget, well into the Apollo Program.
I figure the only thing that's changed between now and then is the Internet makes it much easier for the lay public to form entirely the wrong impression about highly complex and technical works-in-progress.
In addition to what other commenters have pointed out, there's also the matter of mass budgets. An over-engineered urine disposal system would add unnecessary mass and volume to the spacecraft, a system where ounces matter.
So McCain's campaign's savvy was only "clever" if it wasn't cheating (by ignoring robots.txt).
It's clever either way.
And I think it's perfectly ethical to ignore robots.txt in a case like this. Politicians need to be watched closely. Changing their positions during a campaign shouldn't be something they can get away with, just because it's "cheating" to not pretend you can't track their changes.
Or are you going to tell me it's "cheating" when people read MS document revision histories, or the "redacted" parts of PDFs?
Let's be honest: If a politician made a policy blunder, and then tried to hide it behind robots.txt, he'd be a laughingstock.
Ah, the typical whining of someone who thinks their extremist minority opinion should have the same chance at ruling his fellow citizens as the more centrist, moderate majority opinion... which chance it would have, if he actually went to the trouble of convincing a majority of his fellow citizens to support it, instead of demanding that they accept it even though they don't support it.
Take the Greens, for example: If the Greens were able to convince a majority of the electorates in even as few as six or seven states, they'd be well on their way to achieving the Presidency.
As it is, the Greens have yet to convince the majority of the electorate in even one state. So why should they get any play at all on the national stage? Wake me up when one of your other parties has a strong faction in their state legislature, a Congressman or two, and maybe a Senator. Then we'll talk.
By this logic, melting ice is good for polar bears, because it eliminates the weak and stupid bears, freeing up more resources for the stronger, more adaptable bears.
Trust me, if you had the military start to invade Small Town USA, you'd probably have plenty of people in the surrounding area exercising their right to keep and bear arms.
I'm pretty sure that if the military started to invade Small Town USA, any alleged "right" to keep and bear arms would be totally irrelevant. People would start keeping and bearing arms in self defense whether the constitution granted that right or not, and whether the government recognized that right or not (but probably not; there's no point in invading Small Town USA if you're not going to abolish private gun ownership at the same time). And, of course, it'd be irrelevant for the other reason that keeping and bearing small arms against a fully industrialized information-age army which had no compunction about engaging openly in total war against a civilian population would be entirely pointless.
Sputnik didn't need a maneuvering engine; its rocket was able to put it into the "sweet spot" just fine. Anyway, an engine is an engine is an engine. Ballistics are ballistics. The Tsiolkovsky equations are what they are. Once you've begun to perpetrate rocket science, the second stage of your launch vehicle is just as good a maneuvering engine as is a third stage bolted to the payload itself.
Wouldn't it be nice if all Americans had the access to officials that only lobbyists get?
All Americans do have that access.
But officials are a limited resource. Obviously the Americans that work harder to get some of that resource will be the ones who benefit the most from those resources.
What you're really asking is "wouldn't it be nice if nobody was allowed to put any more effort into influencing officials than the effort I put into it today?"
And no, that wouldn't be nice at all. It's a free country: Everybody is free to specialize in accessing and influencing officials if they want to, and free to sell the benefits of their specialization to the highest bidder. And free to specialize in something else, and thereby generate enough personal wealth to retain the services of a lobbying specialist. And free to form an association with any number of other like-minded citizens, and pool their wealth for the purpose of accessing and influencing officials either directly, or through the services of a specialist. And free to do none of the above, and whine about it on the Internet instead.
You were specifically complaining that I called this scenario (ISPs blocking Child Porn) a matter of life and death.
In fact, the argument I was making rests on the assumption that this scenario is not a matter of life and death.
I agree with you that it is not a matter of life and death. I never claimed it was a matter of life and death. Your entire impassioned rant against my judgement and character, allegedly because I thought this scenario was a matter of life and death, was in fact based on a profound misunderstanding on your part.
All the points you have since raised are very interesting, and it's true that you and I do not agree on many (most? All?) of them. But none of them are the point about matters of life and death that you raised originally, and about which you and I agree.
Not plebs at all: Citizens participating in a constitutionally-governed representative republic. Which constitution, incidentally, specifies that the political opinions of the citizenry are mediated, checked, and balanced by three bodies of representatives, who each constitute ultimate and co-equal authorities on all things constitutional.
The policies of the Executive aren't unconstitutional because the GP says so: They're unconstitutional because the Supreme Court says so. If you don't like that system, feel free to change it.
Scott McClellan's book also says he knew all along that they were lying... Which forces us to conclude that he only grew a conscience when it came time to cash in on a tell-all memoir.
And uphold it he has, until the Supreme Court says otherwise. And even then, so long as he desists from any policy the Supreme Court has deemed unconstitutional. Or would you rather we just accept you as our self-appointed arbiter of all things Constitutional?
Given the amount of damage the American war machine could do if somebody really wanted to use it that way, I'm forced to conclude that Bush doesn't even want to be a mass murderer. Of course, that kind of undermines my whole Bush-hatred theory...
I'm not defending an accusation of a crime. I'm rebutting the claim that Bush has killed more innocent people than any mass murderer. Stalin has killed more innocent people.
Unless they've got a darn good reason not to move along with this, they've got to deal with it...before anything else, it seems, but I'm not lawyer-shaped.
Well, I suppose they could drop everything else long enough to vote against proceeding with an impeachment...
Ironically, you missed my point even while making it for me.
Please re-read my post. I think that if you give it careful consideration, you will realize that I agree with you, and that the only knee jerking here is yours.
... your point gets kind of weak when you take it to it's logical conclusion.
Not at all. States sometimes execute innocent people. Soldiers sometimes kill civilians. Patients sometimes die on the operating table. But we don't argue that justice is an undesireable goal, or that war is not sometimes a necessary evil, or that surgery is not generally a good service to provide to those that need it.
There may be good reasons why ISPs blocking child pornography is a bad idea, but "they won't do it perfectly" isn't one of those good reasons.
Nice try, but no. My concern over the application of the slippery slope argument here is that it's generally a bad argument, and that the premise "it's not a perfect solution!" is not a strong argument against that solution. We use imperfect solutions where people's lives are at stake--what makes this situation so special that imperfect solutions are unacceptable?
Yes, and law enforcement sometimes apprehends innocent people. And judicial systems sometimes convict innocent people. The perfect is the enemy of the good. Just because something only has a 99% success rate, that doesn't automatically mean we're on a slippery slope to a 1% success rate, or even an 80% success rate.
Thompson was a sensationalist. O'Rourke is an opinion writer. If you like crazy narratives, the former is excellent. If you agree with a certain kind of worldview, the latter is likewise excellent. But don't confuse either for the facts on the ground. And don't confuse either with Naomi Klein.
Slashdot Mirror
Fair enough. Your concerns are what they are, and I won't presume to dispute them. Indeed, I'm certain there is more than we're hearing (both good and bad), and that we'll definitely hear more bad as the project continues.
I don't, however, agree that we're not getting anything significantly new. Since the end of the Apollo Program, we absolutely haven't had this kind of capability. Instead we've had the Shuttle, which is something else entirely. And in the intervening period between Apollo and the start of Orion, a lot has changed. While Orion uses the same basic mission design as Apollo, it's using new materials, new manufacturing techniques, greater capacities, and a different long-term mission plan. Where Apollo was focused almost entirely on Moon shots (with some potential conversion to other missions envisioned later on), Orion has been conceived as a general-purpose backbone system.
It is, in very real ways, something entirely new. Far from regretting the similarities to Apollo, I'm quite glad NASA has been able to apply any Apollo lessons at all to Orion. But it is, fundamentally, a new thing. NASA is an aerospace R&D stimulator. It encourages private industry to make aerospace breakthroughs by setting technological challenges and offering to fund the necessary R&D. Those with the winning bids get a head start on the new technologies, while risking less of their own capital on R&D than otherwise. And in the long term we all benefit from the progress they make and the profits they enjoy.
If you want to see "a craft that doesn't introduce a lot of new capabilities past from what we'd already had", look to the Delta-IV Heavy of the United Launch Alliance. There's big business in space launch capability, and private industry profits every day from mature technologies that started out decades ago as NASA-funded R&D challenges.
I think it's a mistake to classify Orion as "Apollo 1.5", or demand system reliability and project efficiency on par with Atlas/Delta commercial launch programs. It's a cutting-edge aerospace R&D program.
As to the dissenters within NASA, they don't concern me too much. Werner Von Braun, the head of the Saturn launch vehicle team, vehemently favored a direct-ascent design, rather than a lunar-orbit rendezvous. There's always going to be more than one way to solve these problems. But there's also always going to be budget, time, and focus constraints, and there's always going to be a point at which someone, somewhere, is going to have to say "your idea looks great, too, but we're going to commit to this one". Personally I'm glad there's more ideas on the books.
Finally, I just can't seem to get my panties in a bunch over this "manned space flight gap". I rejoice in the fact that other nations have manned space flight capability, reliability, and capacity, to fill that gap, and that the current state of our relationships with these nations is such that we can enjoy a productive partnership with them in this area. Why embark on an even costlier, even riskier crash program, when we have friends to work with? The overall manned space flight capability of the human race is greater now than ever before, and growing all the time, and we're a part of it. And, in time, Orion will add even greater capabilities that the Russians, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Europeans, the Indians, the Brazilians... who knows--even the Iranians will make great use of.
And what I'm saying is that you seem to be overlooking the possibility that the kind of thing described here is a normal part of the aerospace R&D process. That there are always going to be significant gaps between the design and the implementation, and that these reports of "problems" are simply the normal process of discovering and closing those gaps.
You should see the contortions Grumman had to go through, to get the Lunar Module under the mission weight budget, well into the Apollo Program.
I figure the only thing that's changed between now and then is the Internet makes it much easier for the lay public to form entirely the wrong impression about highly complex and technical works-in-progress.
In addition to what other commenters have pointed out, there's also the matter of mass budgets. An over-engineered urine disposal system would add unnecessary mass and volume to the spacecraft, a system where ounces matter.
It's clever either way.
And I think it's perfectly ethical to ignore robots.txt in a case like this. Politicians need to be watched closely. Changing their positions during a campaign shouldn't be something they can get away with, just because it's "cheating" to not pretend you can't track their changes.
Or are you going to tell me it's "cheating" when people read MS document revision histories, or the "redacted" parts of PDFs?
Let's be honest: If a politician made a policy blunder, and then tried to hide it behind robots.txt, he'd be a laughingstock.
Ah, the typical whining of someone who thinks their extremist minority opinion should have the same chance at ruling his fellow citizens as the more centrist, moderate majority opinion... which chance it would have, if he actually went to the trouble of convincing a majority of his fellow citizens to support it, instead of demanding that they accept it even though they don't support it.
Take the Greens, for example: If the Greens were able to convince a majority of the electorates in even as few as six or seven states, they'd be well on their way to achieving the Presidency.
As it is, the Greens have yet to convince the majority of the electorate in even one state. So why should they get any play at all on the national stage? Wake me up when one of your other parties has a strong faction in their state legislature, a Congressman or two, and maybe a Senator. Then we'll talk.
Well, according to the Long Tail Theory, there are people out there who enjoy long slow train wreck porn.
But I don't need to rely on theory: I've actually seen porn that resembles a long slow train wreck. It was awsome.
By this logic, melting ice is good for polar bears, because it eliminates the weak and stupid bears, freeing up more resources for the stronger, more adaptable bears.
I'm pretty sure that if the military started to invade Small Town USA, any alleged "right" to keep and bear arms would be totally irrelevant. People would start keeping and bearing arms in self defense whether the constitution granted that right or not, and whether the government recognized that right or not (but probably not; there's no point in invading Small Town USA if you're not going to abolish private gun ownership at the same time). And, of course, it'd be irrelevant for the other reason that keeping and bearing small arms against a fully industrialized information-age army which had no compunction about engaging openly in total war against a civilian population would be entirely pointless.
Let me guess: Your mom is a brunette...
Sputnik didn't need a maneuvering engine; its rocket was able to put it into the "sweet spot" just fine. Anyway, an engine is an engine is an engine. Ballistics are ballistics. The Tsiolkovsky equations are what they are. Once you've begun to perpetrate rocket science, the second stage of your launch vehicle is just as good a maneuvering engine as is a third stage bolted to the payload itself.
All Americans do have that access.
But officials are a limited resource. Obviously the Americans that work harder to get some of that resource will be the ones who benefit the most from those resources.
What you're really asking is "wouldn't it be nice if nobody was allowed to put any more effort into influencing officials than the effort I put into it today?"
And no, that wouldn't be nice at all. It's a free country: Everybody is free to specialize in accessing and influencing officials if they want to, and free to sell the benefits of their specialization to the highest bidder. And free to specialize in something else, and thereby generate enough personal wealth to retain the services of a lobbying specialist. And free to form an association with any number of other like-minded citizens, and pool their wealth for the purpose of accessing and influencing officials either directly, or through the services of a specialist. And free to do none of the above, and whine about it on the Internet instead.
No.
You were specifically complaining that I called this scenario (ISPs blocking Child Porn) a matter of life and death.
In fact, the argument I was making rests on the assumption that this scenario is not a matter of life and death.
I agree with you that it is not a matter of life and death. I never claimed it was a matter of life and death. Your entire impassioned rant against my judgement and character, allegedly because I thought this scenario was a matter of life and death, was in fact based on a profound misunderstanding on your part.
All the points you have since raised are very interesting, and it's true that you and I do not agree on many (most? All?) of them. But none of them are the point about matters of life and death that you raised originally, and about which you and I agree.
Not plebs at all: Citizens participating in a constitutionally-governed representative republic. Which constitution, incidentally, specifies that the political opinions of the citizenry are mediated, checked, and balanced by three bodies of representatives, who each constitute ultimate and co-equal authorities on all things constitutional.
The policies of the Executive aren't unconstitutional because the GP says so: They're unconstitutional because the Supreme Court says so. If you don't like that system, feel free to change it.
Scott McClellan's book also says he knew all along that they were lying... Which forces us to conclude that he only grew a conscience when it came time to cash in on a tell-all memoir.
And uphold it he has, until the Supreme Court says otherwise. And even then, so long as he desists from any policy the Supreme Court has deemed unconstitutional. Or would you rather we just accept you as our self-appointed arbiter of all things Constitutional?
Given the amount of damage the American war machine could do if somebody really wanted to use it that way, I'm forced to conclude that Bush doesn't even want to be a mass murderer. Of course, that kind of undermines my whole Bush-hatred theory...
I'm not defending an accusation of a crime. I'm rebutting the claim that Bush has killed more innocent people than any mass murderer. Stalin has killed more innocent people.
Well, I suppose they could drop everything else long enough to vote against proceeding with an impeachment...
Bitches don't know about my Stalin.
Ironically, you missed my point even while making it for me.
Please re-read my post. I think that if you give it careful consideration, you will realize that I agree with you, and that the only knee jerking here is yours.
Not at all. States sometimes execute innocent people. Soldiers sometimes kill civilians. Patients sometimes die on the operating table. But we don't argue that justice is an undesireable goal, or that war is not sometimes a necessary evil, or that surgery is not generally a good service to provide to those that need it.
There may be good reasons why ISPs blocking child pornography is a bad idea, but "they won't do it perfectly" isn't one of those good reasons.
Nice try, but no. My concern over the application of the slippery slope argument here is that it's generally a bad argument, and that the premise "it's not a perfect solution!" is not a strong argument against that solution. We use imperfect solutions where people's lives are at stake--what makes this situation so special that imperfect solutions are unacceptable?
Yes, and law enforcement sometimes apprehends innocent people. And judicial systems sometimes convict innocent people. The perfect is the enemy of the good. Just because something only has a 99% success rate, that doesn't automatically mean we're on a slippery slope to a 1% success rate, or even an 80% success rate.
Thompson was a sensationalist. O'Rourke is an opinion writer. If you like crazy narratives, the former is excellent. If you agree with a certain kind of worldview, the latter is likewise excellent. But don't confuse either for the facts on the ground. And don't confuse either with Naomi Klein.