If fraud did not exist, VISA would find itself under competitive pressures to lower its fees and interest rates. The credit industry is cut-throat. ----
In this case, the sword is popular public opinion. NASA has from the beginning of the space program invested enormous energy in achieving high approval ratings, from the micromanaging of the "straight-arrow" Gemini astronauts' lives to the Pathfinder mission. NASA is now refocusing its planetary science program on the tantalizing, but slim, possibility of finding life outside Earth (Mars, Europa...) in the belief that only this will motivate public opinion.
Permit me to exercise my skeptic-o-meter and suggest that raising expectations too high is a mistake. When programs and missions with other objectives get harnessed to the yoke of becoming another public relations wowzer, the science, more often than not, loses. The book The Hubble Wars provides an instructive example of how NASA's focus on an engineering success blinded it to the science needs of the mission.
As you (JoeWalsh) suggest, NASA believes it's dependent on public support to continue with its programs. (The fact is, we could have a NASA that provided us with both planetary science and propulsion research for a fraction of the budget; it's maddeningly less-than-really-useful do-nothing projects like Shuttle and ISS that eat up the budget. Which, in a cynical way, is exactly what it was designed for.)
Unless we're actively exploring and working toward getting people living on Mars or someplace like the asteroids or L5, you're correct -- we're putting the species at risk. When it's within our grasp! How frustrating.
But in the end, NASA has to accept responsibility for continually going to the trough of public opinion to win support for dubious and expensive projects. When you're that dependent on the goodwill of the voters, you're going to find a day when they turn off the spigot. ----
We have the technology now to send a man to mars. But the government would rather blow money on things like social programs and welfare which is creating more problems than it helps.
I would hardly say that money used to feed someone, or give them hospital care, is "blown". Aside from that, you do realize that the largest single government program is Social Security, which is paid for by your FICA taxes (not income taxes), and the next largest is defense? Entitlement ("social", "welfare") programs take up only Where the Federal Budget dollar goes
The chart isn't very helpful in showing how the annual budget actually involves returning money to Social Security that was borrowed during the DEFENSE spending binge of the 1980-1995 period, but it does show how 14% is just paying interest on the national debt. We should be paying down both the Trust Fund loans and other government debts so that this crippling rate of interest can be reduced.
Today the government is all about managing problems, not solving them. God forbid they actually solve a problem and someone is out of a job.
I think you have a very short-sighted view of what government is actually doing, let alone what it can accomplish. Few people believe that we can "solve" poverty, for instance, but we can certainly provide a way out of poverty for those willing to make an effort.
What does this have to do with space? In any case, dealing with a given problem (poverty, crime, the economy) usually has to be combined with other objectives (science, education, tax reduction). ----
Why has there not been a single communications satalite set in orbit around mars? Part of the problem with this last mission was they sent an unmanned mission into a communication blind spot
Wrong. The current series of Mars missions were designed to be somewhat integrated, with MGS providing mapping support and backup communications. Mars Climate Orbiter was intended to be the primary comm link with Earth, so its loss was a blow for that reason beyond just the science, but it wasn't a crippling problem because MGS could do double-duty.
MPL's communications blackout during descent had nothing to do with MCO or MGS availability. It had to do with avoiding interference with the radar instrument it was carrying that would be active during descent. A design that would have allowed both devices to be active would have cost a great deal more, and was one of the design trade-offs ("acceptable risks") that this mission undertook.
As it happened, since there wasn't any word from the two surface probes either, I'm of the opinion that separation failed and there wasn't even a successful descent, let alone a problem on landing. ----
According to this Expendable Launch Vehicle Cost Comparison, Soyuz is actually one of the cheapest ways to orbit at US$18M a pop. (It's those 27 years to depreciate base manufacturing costs that helps.) And each flight could presumably carry one cosmonaut and two passengers. I'm not sure anyone has a good way to estimate Energia's numbers, though: Russia's financial situation is such that cold hard American cash is worth far more than its paper conversion value, and they've probably run flights at a worse loss basis for the Russian government. Besides, this will help subsidize a running production line (more vehicles == cheaper costs), as well as advertise their satellite launch services.
I wonder what makes space travel so expensive? Is it the fuel (liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen I believe), the cost of the vehicle itself (the various booster stages and so on) or the maintenance costs(engineers, repairs and general upkeep).
Fuels differ. LOX/LH is what the shuttle rockets use, but Soyuz uses a LOX/Kerosene fuel in all 3 stages. Figure 30 cents/kg for the combination, and you'll need something like 270,000 kg., but that's less than $100,000. The Soyuz crew vehicle is theoretically reusable, but they tend to land hard and space-rating afterward would be tricky. In practice Energia probably salvages what they can and sticks it back in the assembly line. What you're looking at are the overall costs of running the infrastructure. The shuttle has basically the same problem: if you look at pure materials and other "just this time" costs, you can come up with ridiculously low numbers (say, $60-100 million); but when you have 5 launches in a year and pay $5 billion for the privilege, you know there's more to it than that.
Why haven't we developed cool spacecrafts like they had in Star Wars:TPM that can go straight into the atmosphere? [you mean out of?] It would seem to be more an economic issue as opposed to a technological issue. I guess they can't develop quite enough thrust to escape the Earth's gravity without using those huge rockets.
SSTO (Single Stage to Orbit) vehicles have been on the drawing board since the earliest days of NASA, but none has ever been built. The closest prototypes from recent years have suffered from the existence of the shuttle and other working launch systems. The DC-X was a promising vehicle, but it was damaged during a hard landing. The VentureStar project is billed as a next-generation shuttle, but since STS will be around for at least another 15-20 years it's not imminent. The X-33 is a prototype of some of its technology, but it's been delayed by problems of its own. The X-38 is a similarly-shaped (flying wing) vehicle, that would be a lifeboat for an ISS crew of up to 7; but it's an orbit-to-ground vehicle only.
Meanwhile, the non-governmental "space launches for profit" crowd has a number of possibilities close to reality. Kistler Aerospace has a two-stage reusable design, and Rotary Rocket uses an innovative rotor design to land a cone-shaped vehicle straight up (just like those 50s sci-fi flicks). The main obstacle remains a robust launching industry, with competition keeping the prices of expendable rockets low. Boeing and LockMart pretty much have this market sewn up; in fact there are more launches than can be accomodated at American facilities. A company called SeaLaunch partners with Boeing and Ukraine to orbit satellites from a floating oil-derrick-platform that lives in Hawaii. Launch facilities are being worked on in Canada and Alaska (to serve the polar orbit market), while India and China beef up their launch facilities. Indonesia and the Phillipines are proposing launch sites. It's really a wide-open market, as long as you're not talking about people yet. Give some of these systems a couple of years to mature and lower costs, and you'll have $1000/pound to earth orbit. That's when launching people will become easy.
Close. The last Mir crew departed several months ago, closing down systems and bringing back essential equipment. There have always been contradictory statements about whether any return flights would be financially feasible, but returning was always a technological option; Mir is still in a safe orbit for some time. Russia never intended to just let it "crash and burn"; it's far too large, and crosses too many populated areas, to risk that (remember Skylab?). The intent was always to send up a final Proton flight to de-orbit it somewhat more safely over the Pacific. NASA, as well, would prefer this. ----
Cool down. There's no evidence they actually intended to pay; indeed, the fact that they didn't suggests they were trying to lure him into doing something they could use to identify him. Ultimately, the story relies on the word of a criminal.
Certainly, though, you could write them off as a vendor after their poor attention to security issues. ----
However, this is not the crisis situation that it's been made out to be. These victims will not be responsible for paying any fees incurred on their credit cards. All banks and credit card companies insure that customers won't have to pay for fraud.
If you think you're not paying for credit card fraud, think again. If VISA loses $1 billion in a given period to fraud, who do you think pays for it? That's right -- all VISA customers. ----
Call your bank. Most likely they will simply issue you a new card.
Since you stated this is a debit card, be aware of a little-known fact:
Debit cards do not have the same protections as credit cards.
While many bank policies are similar to the legal limitations on credit card liability, they are not, repeat not subject to the same laws. Read this recent article explaining the differences. Under certain circumstances, your entire bank account could be cleaned out, and the bank wouldn't have to give you one cent back. ----
slashdot-terminal wrote: I could believe that this guy is just working alone without the help of his government the day pigs fly!
I find it much more plausible that he is an individual than that there is a vast Russian government conspiracy to shake down American dot-coms. But I wouldn't put it past the Russian mafia. (Most likely he did have help setting up that bank account.)
I don't see this as a government operation because it's just too small. There's more money in shaking down the US for space station funding, many times more money... ----
There is an enormous difference between the credit card issuer's financial systems, and your average e-commerce website. Saying a cracker could just as easily break into "their servers" is ignorance.
There isn't a high risk to using your credit card online, as long as you know who you're buying from (e.g. perhaps brandnewsexsite.com isn't the best place). We put our cards at risk in many other ways (e.g. 1-800 operators who are low-paid prisoners, the waitress who sneaks your card into her palmpilot reader while she's behidn the counter, etc.). ----
I didn't say it wasn't NSI's fault. It was the fault of NSI and the domain registrars jointly. And they weren't checking (probably just a case of somebody writing a simple perl filter, but without checking the appropriate RFC), and now they are. ----
responded to me to wit: Can you explain how this is supposed to work, though? If you create a bunch of additional top-level domains (let's say *.arts, *.firm, *.biz, *.dot, *.sucks) someone like Disney is going to want to register their trademarks in all those domains.
True, but I'm not so concerned with these pre-existing trademark issues. Of course somebody registering mickeymouse.biz is going to run into legal problems.
What I'm more worried about are the situations where Smith Webventures Inc. registers smith.com, and then proceeds to lawyer-letter smith.net and smith.org into submission, somewhat along the lines of the ongoing Leonardo case, or the eToys.com/Etoy.com situation. It's the johnny-come-latelies who probably will NOT become lasting, global trademarks, but whose VC money allows them to afford flashy lawyers, who are going to do the majority of this kind of domain blood-fighting.
I'm not saying create three or six new domains; probably the only way to solve this is to allow hundreds or thousands of new TLDs, which would not only make it impossible for any but the most ardent trademark borderline-pissers to go everywhere, but would eliminate the now (and increasingly) common complaint that there is "consumer confusion" -- the basis of most trademark rulings. Right now, everyone has been lulled into believing that finding the six letters "d i s n e y" somewhere automatically means that Disney Corp. owns or should own that internet property. That's fine for Walt and his progeny, but what about Joe Disney, local printer, down the street? Isn't he deserving of the use of his name somehow? That's what I want to protect.
The many-many TLD idea would also make it possible for the guy who has a business (or even non-business) idea tomorrow to own a domain name that communicates it without having to go to 200 characters or a $2 million investment before opening his doors.
I'm not saying I have the answers, but the current inaction isn't helping things any. ----
It's egregious to attribute this to ICANN and say that the cynics were right. Of course there will be small problems with any distributed system. The fault here, though, lays with the registrars who improperly registered names that shouldn't have existed. It's ironic that NetSol ends up being the good guy here (from one standpoint only, of course, not the domain owners' by a long shot!).
Hopefully this incident will give ICANN a kick in the pants as far as moving on to the next phase. There need to be more TLDs, and there need to be rules that allow those TLDs to expand the domain name universe, not just give trademark-grabbers more TLDs to register theirs in. The situation right now is getting ridiculous. ----
With the numbers of home workers now stretching into the millions, there is an urgent need to ensure that these workers are protected from injury. The problem is whose responsibility this is going to be.
With the publication of this new "interpretive letter", OSHA put thousands of companies on notice that they were now going to be responsible for workplace ergonomics/safety issues in home offices over which they have little direct control.
At the same time, millions of telecommuters, salesmen, freelancers, consultants, and others found themselves faced with the possibility that the company they now work with at arm's length will suddenly require an inspection of their home office.
Neither the companies nor the telecommuters, by and large, wanted any part of this. Companies would have been forced to either buy new equipment and expand human resources monitoring, or rescind moves toward telecommuting; workers would have been forced to let the company inspect their home, or return to the office. Very few workers consider RSI a serious problem... until they get it. A small few might consider this a great opportunity to squeeze some new office furniture out of the company.
In a word, this regulation could have killed the telecommuting golden goose.
The good that has been done is to bring this issue to the forefront. The OSHA people are asking for input on how to implement basic regulatory requirements for the home office. This can have a happy ending; for instance, in a related situation, the IRS at first announced highly restrictive new guidelines for tax deductibility of home offices, then Congress rewrote the law so that the status quo would continue.
The outcome here is possibly/likely going to result in individual responsibility for these safety/ergonomic issues, while signing off on a legal form that absolves the employer of responsibility. Hopefully, in the process, there will also be an education campaign to ensure that these spun-off workers have some sense of how the decisions they're making will affect their future health. ----
(I want to reply to this article in two ways, so I'll make two different posts.)
You're severely underrating Chicago. I live and work here, and I think it's a great city with potential. They've carefully nurtured the city during the Long Boom, and we expect that the population will have grown in the 90s for the first time in 50 years. There's more housing in and near downtown than in a couple of generations. The worst vestiges of "urban removal" are being corrected, and the Loop is once again vibrant.
Ameritech has no unlimited local calling
Wrong. As you can see in this chart of Illinois Ameritech rates, Band A (and the Chicago area has poor DSL and ISDN access.
In 2000, DSL is readily available almost anywhere in the metro region, as dslreports.com shows. You may not always get a choice of providers, but it is available, and the fact that Ameritech sat this particular revolution out ought to be grating on them as they sleep. Your information is just out of date. (Rhythms claims that they'll have half the country DSL-covered by sometime next year, anyway.)
Commonwealth Edison can't keep the damn lights on in the summer, because their transmission and distribution systems are crud and Edison doesn't seem to realize this.
I'm not sure it's the network so much as the management. After the embarrassing downtown Chicago outage this year (my building was affected; I was inbound to work, but my coworkers had to walk down 20 floors), they hired a new team. I'm not defending them; I just don't think that frustration over a power utility is unique, and would point out that stress on a system is a sign of rapid growth.
Local regulations require that Ethernet cable be strung through metal conduit,
I believe this is true in the city, but I'm certain it's not true everywhere in the metro area. The bigger problem is dealing with the unions. You have to have a licensed electrician on site if you're a big shop.
So, despite having several major universities with very good CS departments (University of Chicago, Northwestern, DePaul, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Loyola University), not one but two nearby national research laboratories, and recently starting up a new communications center in the old Donnelly Directory building,
I won't quibble with this list, but I could add to it.
Chicago will probably never become a center of computer business. Chicago has Motorola in the suburbs and that's about as good as it's going to get.
Besides Motorola (which is not only the top high-tech company here, but the biggest company in Chicagoland period), there's: System Software Associates, Tellabs, CDW, Anixter, Whittman-Hart (bought USWeb), Comdisco, DeVry, Galileo, Tribune Corp. (AOL partner), US Cellular, yesmail.com, Hewitt Associates, and Zebra Technologies. Other companies from around here have been bought up: US Robotics (3Com), Platinum (CA), Whitewater Group (Symantec), and others I can't recall.
No, we're not flashy like Silicon Valley, but unlike some of those SV startups, we have people who've worked their whole careers right inside all those boring, low-tech businesses that are trying to get wired right now. I think it's more likely that Chicago will continue to be a center of this kind of boring "infrastructure" high-tech, as opposed to VC-attracting, Superbowl- one-shot- advertising, gone-by-next-year SV firms.
As an example, Hewitt is well-known as a human resources consulting firm. They've built a worldwide reputation, but they found themselves stagnating. The last few years they've turned their HR software and expert systems into the foundation for many human-resources intranet sites, which has turned into a thriving side business. Will it get them dot-com street cred? Nah. Will it pay the light bill? You bet.
On the other hand, Chicago has very good resources for another industry entirely: biotech.
I agree with you here, where I don't agree is that this is overlooked. Try Chicago Biotech Network, a city-funded virtual incubator, and their parent organization says "The agricultural biotechnology revolution began in Illinois, and now there are over 1,280 biotechnology, biomedicine, pharmaceutical firms located here." I don't think that's overlooked.
ask, what kind of geeks can we attract to this city?
I think this is a good point. I just think you undersold Chicago, and didn't catch that even in the computer industry, there are different kinds of geeks... maybe we're not web geeks here, but we are wiring geeks, manufacturing geeks, and appliance geeks. ----
I want to reply to this article in two ways, so I'll make two different posts.
The first problem is the subject line. "Not all cities can go high tech"? That's complete BS, and pretty inane for a slashdotter. High tech can be anywhere, that's its virtue. I believe this particular server we're on comes from some tiny place in Michigan, for example. The second silly aspect is assuming that "high tech" is some kind of strange, alien, different business that you can either get or not. High tech is everywhere, sometimes it's the front door (dot coms), sometimes it's an add-on (catalog companies), sometimes it's a whole new way of doing business. The innovations of the next ten years are far more likely to come from places outside Silicon Valley than in.
Practically the only reason for the concentration in Silicon Valley is the combination of startup money and abundant potential employees.
You've listed a number of issues that should be considered, and those are good ones. But the question was, what can Pittsburgh change? What they need to attract are VCs and techs, and don't think that all of those want to go to SV, because more and more people are hoping to build a tech career where they want to be. I grew up in the Midwest; it took a year in New York before I realized I belong in the Midwest. I'd rather build a career here, with recognized limitations (e.g. not likely to be on cover of Fortune), surrounded by friends and others like me (stolid, unprepossessing, Midwest folk). I believe that a lot of others would say the same, no matter where they're from. The challenge is to keep them, and Pittsburgh is approaching that question. I think it's forward thinking of them; they long since gave up on being Steeltown USA, and they've rejuvenated the downtown somewhat. They have a lot of old building stock that's just aching to be converted to high-tech lofts. They need to do it; the only question is how. ----
Does it really matter who "Time" chooses? Who decides at Time who the person of the century is? It's an editor/owner type of deal. Why should I listen to some guy in a suit telling me that the man of the century is Einstein or whatever?
No, it doesn't matter, but don't get your panties all twisted up about it. It's not THE person of the century, it's TIME's person of the century. Parlor game. Discussion sparker (note surrounding). To some extent, a marketing gimmick, but one that's lasted 75 odd years. Big hairy deal.
I recommend you all stop waisting your time thinking what a single most important person of the century is. Just think about "people" who have influenced particular fields or parts of the every day life.
PS: Why not have a person of the century? Women are people as well.. maybe TIME hasn't figured that one yet.
They've been pressured to change it for some time now, and they decided that 1999/2000 was the perfect moment. THis year, for the first time, Jeff Bezos was the PERSON of the year, and Albert Einstein (for those of us paying attention via the home game) the PERSON of the century.
If you're going to start tossing grenades around, better make sure you know where the pins are. ----
how does NASA spell success after two complete failures with the mars probes?
The Hubble team is an entirely separate team from the Mars probes. One team had a success. Two Mars teams had failures.
Anyway it's not like they haven't messed up on the hubble project before.
True dat. But the embarrassment over the Hubble optics could have been handled much better; they dug their own grave there.
We need to hurry up and privatize NASA befor ethey thow away any more tax dollars.
So what business, exactly, is going to spend money on a Mars probe? Just asking.
The MPL mission was about as privatized as a government program gets: the whole probe was designed and built by outside contractors to a NASA spec. Really, this is the way things should be done. MPL was a failure within aceptable risk. MCO was a horrible avoidable failure, but it's possible that the govt-contractor relationship was partly to blame. This isn't easy. ----
I can't see any compelling reason for changing the cpu, if the old one was working. If the old cpu had failed, then why not replace by a new identical chip? Why risk the chance of finding a bug in the new one? Unless they want to try some new algorithm, why upgrade?
The Hubble was designed from the beginning to be periodically upgraded, not only by swapping out instruments and installing different ones, but in improving the instruments in place. The computer upgrade has been in the works for several years; a prototype was tested aboard the John Glenn shuttle mission last year. This isn't an idle "hey, let's toss a new box in" procedure.
You are correct about satellite precision; in fact, pointing precision has always been one of the sticking points regarding the computer. The new computer gives them more memory to run more complex routines, probably something the controllers have been clamoring for since 1993! ----
The computer on Hubble is programmed from the ground. The new computer simply upgrades the processing capability of the existing software, perhaps allowing new routines. (Early on, with the original 286 board, they discovered that the anti-jitter routines they devised wouldn't fit -- let alone anything else like data transfer. Presumably 1993's 386 co-px solved that.)
The post-Challenger restriction on flights was NOT on an artificial window like "winter", but on specific temperatures reached at the Cape. It's very, very rare for even a January freeze there, but it happened in 1986. No, they should not launch the shuttle, even with redesigned O-rings and boosters, if it gets too cold. But just because it's December does not mean the same thing as being too cold. ----
There is a design freeze built into almost every program, but it is not, repeat not, based on anything as inane (or prescient) as a five-years-before-launch timeline. For example, the faster-better-cheaper probes don't necessarily even take that long from project approval to launch! The Confirmation Design Review of MPL was barely two years prior to launch. (Read into that what you will.)
The reason for using a 486 instead of a Pentium can be as simple as power and cooling requirements, or as complex as the issue of running a custom RTOS written in C versus running an off-the-shelf Windoe Manager written in C++ and something else godawful. (Or maybe that's the simple decision.) ----
Shuttle flights are numbered in the order that the missions are planned. The shuttle schedule gets moved around for all sorts of reasons, from weather in Kazakhstan to wiring problems to wacked-out gyroscopes in orbit. It would be confusing to change the numbers around to match the actual launch order.
The big gap is unusual, mainly because about a dozen International Space Station missions, that have to be done in a certain order, are all waiting on the Russians to launch the Service Module.
Consider that the STS-103 numbering scheme is an improvement over the cryptic "STS-61C" scheme they briefly used in the 1980s: first digit=year, second digit=launch site (1=KSC, 2=Vandenberg), final character=order scheduled in year. And even those would get mixed around. ----
Actually, it isn't supposed to make a profit. It's merely supposed to be self-supporting. This is pretty much the way Amtrak, tollway authorities, some bridges and tunnels, and so forth are run.
It can't make a *profit* since there are no *owners* except the public. It can have a revenue surplus.
Before 1971, it was a terrible sinkhole for money. Now, it's supposed to manage its market for equalizing revenues and expenses, solely on the basis of what it charges. No taxpayer money.
The Federal protection is based on the idea that a) first-class mail delivery is a federal responsibility (not only by law, but in principle: to serve all citizens equally); b) a competitive environment would not allow it to cover its expenses; therefore c) no private first-class mail, or you're interfering with a) by defunding the agency. The exceptions won for FedEx and UPS were carved out over a long period of time, and the justification is that these are premium services that it would be unreasonable to expect the USPS to provide. UPS, for example, at one time had to operate under strict freight standards and a fiction that private packages were business freight. Later, though, the USPS were allowed to compete in this market (they begged) with Express Mail. ----
Slashdot Mirror
If fraud did not exist, VISA would find itself under competitive pressures to lower its fees and interest rates. The credit industry is cut-throat.
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My bad, I think you're right.
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In this case, the sword is popular public opinion. NASA has from the beginning of the space program invested enormous energy in achieving high approval ratings, from the micromanaging of the "straight-arrow" Gemini astronauts' lives to the Pathfinder mission. NASA is now refocusing its planetary science program on the tantalizing, but slim, possibility of finding life outside Earth (Mars, Europa ...) in the belief that only this will motivate public opinion.
Permit me to exercise my skeptic-o-meter and suggest that raising expectations too high is a mistake. When programs and missions with other objectives get harnessed to the yoke of becoming another public relations wowzer, the science, more often than not, loses. The book The Hubble Wars provides an instructive example of how NASA's focus on an engineering success blinded it to the science needs of the mission.
As you (JoeWalsh) suggest, NASA believes it's dependent on public support to continue with its programs. (The fact is, we could have a NASA that provided us with both planetary science and propulsion research for a fraction of the budget; it's maddeningly less-than-really-useful do-nothing projects like Shuttle and ISS that eat up the budget. Which, in a cynical way, is exactly what it was designed for.)
Unless we're actively exploring and working toward getting people living on Mars or someplace like the asteroids or L5, you're correct -- we're putting the species at risk. When it's within our grasp! How frustrating.
But in the end, NASA has to accept responsibility for continually going to the trough of public opinion to win support for dubious and expensive projects. When you're that dependent on the goodwill of the voters, you're going to find a day when they turn off the spigot.
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We have the technology now to send a man to mars. But the government would rather blow money on things like social programs and welfare which is creating more problems than it helps.
I would hardly say that money used to feed someone, or give them hospital care, is "blown". Aside from that, you do realize that the largest single government program is Social Security, which is paid for by your FICA taxes (not income taxes), and the next largest is defense? Entitlement ("social", "welfare") programs take up only
Where the Federal Budget dollar goes
The chart isn't very helpful in showing how the annual budget actually involves returning money to Social Security that was borrowed during the DEFENSE spending binge of the 1980-1995 period, but it does show how 14% is just paying interest on the national debt. We should be paying down both the Trust Fund loans and other government debts so that this crippling rate of interest can be reduced.
Today the government is all about managing problems, not solving them. God forbid they actually solve a problem and someone is out of a job.
I think you have a very short-sighted view of what government is actually doing, let alone what it can accomplish. Few people believe that we can "solve" poverty, for instance, but we can certainly provide a way out of poverty for those willing to make an effort.
What does this have to do with space? In any case, dealing with a given problem (poverty, crime, the economy) usually has to be combined with other objectives (science, education, tax reduction).
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Why has there not been a single communications satalite set in orbit around mars? Part of the problem with this last mission was they sent an unmanned mission into a communication blind spot
Wrong. The current series of Mars missions were designed to be somewhat integrated, with MGS providing mapping support and backup communications. Mars Climate Orbiter was intended to be the primary comm link with Earth, so its loss was a blow for that reason beyond just the science, but it wasn't a crippling problem because MGS could do double-duty.
MPL's communications blackout during descent had nothing to do with MCO or MGS availability. It had to do with avoiding interference with the radar instrument it was carrying that would be active during descent. A design that would have allowed both devices to be active would have cost a great deal more, and was one of the design trade-offs ("acceptable risks") that this mission undertook.
As it happened, since there wasn't any word from the two surface probes either, I'm of the opinion that separation failed and there wasn't even a successful descent, let alone a problem on landing.
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According to this Expendable Launch Vehicle Cost Comparison, Soyuz is actually one of the cheapest ways to orbit at US$18M a pop. (It's those 27 years to depreciate base manufacturing costs that helps.) And each flight could presumably carry one cosmonaut and two passengers. I'm not sure anyone has a good way to estimate Energia's numbers, though: Russia's financial situation is such that cold hard American cash is worth far more than its paper conversion value, and they've probably run flights at a worse loss basis for the Russian government. Besides, this will help subsidize a running production line (more vehicles == cheaper costs), as well as advertise their satellite launch services.
k ets_wg.html
I wonder what makes space travel so expensive? Is it the fuel (liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen I believe), the cost of the vehicle itself (the various booster stages and so on) or the maintenance costs(engineers, repairs and general upkeep).
Fuels differ. LOX/LH is what the shuttle rockets use, but Soyuz uses a LOX/Kerosene fuel in all 3 stages. Figure 30 cents/kg for the combination, and you'll need something like 270,000 kg., but that's less than $100,000. The Soyuz crew vehicle is theoretically reusable, but they tend to land hard and space-rating afterward would be tricky. In practice Energia probably salvages what they can and sticks it back in the assembly line. What you're looking at are the overall costs of running the infrastructure. The shuttle has basically the same problem: if you look at pure materials and other "just this time" costs, you can come up with ridiculously low numbers (say, $60-100 million); but when you have 5 launches in a year and pay $5 billion for the privilege, you know there's more to it than that.
Soyuz launch vehicles (the type that go to Mir).
Why haven't we developed cool spacecrafts like they had in Star Wars:TPM that can go straight into the atmosphere? [you mean out of?] It would seem to be more an economic issue as opposed to a technological issue. I guess they can't develop quite enough thrust to escape the Earth's gravity without using those huge rockets.
SSTO (Single Stage to Orbit) vehicles have been on the drawing board since the earliest days of NASA, but none has ever been built. The closest prototypes from recent years have suffered from the existence of the shuttle and other working launch systems. The DC-X was a promising vehicle, but it was damaged during a hard landing. The VentureStar project is billed as a next-generation shuttle, but since STS will be around for at least another 15-20 years it's not imminent. The X-33 is a prototype of some of its technology, but it's been delayed by problems of its own. The X-38 is a similarly-shaped (flying wing) vehicle, that would be a lifeboat for an ISS crew of up to 7; but it's an orbit-to-ground vehicle only.
Meanwhile, the non-governmental "space launches for profit" crowd has a number of possibilities close to reality. Kistler Aerospace has a two-stage reusable design, and Rotary Rocket uses an innovative rotor design to land a cone-shaped vehicle straight up (just like those 50s sci-fi flicks). The main obstacle remains a robust launching industry, with competition keeping the prices of expendable rockets low. Boeing and LockMart pretty much have this market sewn up; in fact there are more launches than can be accomodated at American facilities. A company called SeaLaunch partners with Boeing and Ukraine to orbit satellites from a floating oil-derrick-platform that lives in Hawaii. Launch facilities are being worked on in Canada and Alaska (to serve the polar orbit market), while India and China beef up their launch facilities. Indonesia and the Phillipines are proposing launch sites. It's really a wide-open market, as long as you're not talking about people yet. Give some of these systems a couple of years to mature and lower costs, and you'll have $1000/pound to earth orbit. That's when launching people will become easy.
http://www.space.com/business/launching/new_roc
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Close. The last Mir crew departed several months ago, closing down systems and bringing back essential equipment. There have always been contradictory statements about whether any return flights would be financially feasible, but returning was always a technological option; Mir is still in a safe orbit for some time. Russia never intended to just let it "crash and burn"; it's far too large, and crosses too many populated areas, to risk that (remember Skylab?). The intent was always to send up a final Proton flight to de-orbit it somewhat more safely over the Pacific. NASA, as well, would prefer this.
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Cool down. There's no evidence they actually intended to pay; indeed, the fact that they didn't suggests they were trying to lure him into doing something they could use to identify him. Ultimately, the story relies on the word of a criminal.
Certainly, though, you could write them off as a vendor after their poor attention to security issues.
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However, this is not the crisis situation that it's been made out to be. These victims will not be responsible for paying any fees incurred on their credit cards. All banks and credit card companies insure that customers won't have to pay for fraud.
If you think you're not paying for credit card fraud, think again. If VISA loses $1 billion in a given period to fraud, who do you think pays for it? That's right -- all VISA customers.
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Call your bank. Most likely they will simply issue you a new card.
Since you stated this is a debit card, be aware of a little-known fact:
Debit cards do not have the same protections as credit cards.
While many bank policies are similar to the legal limitations on credit card liability, they are not, repeat not subject to the same laws. Read this recent article explaining the differences. Under certain circumstances, your entire bank account could be cleaned out, and the bank wouldn't have to give you one cent back.
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slashdot-terminal wrote:
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I could believe that this guy is just working alone without the help of his government the day pigs fly!
I find it much more plausible that he is an individual than that there is a vast Russian government conspiracy to shake down American dot-coms. But I wouldn't put it past the Russian mafia. (Most likely he did have help setting up that bank account.)
I don't see this as a government operation because it's just too small. There's more money in shaking down the US for space station funding, many times more money
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There is an enormous difference between the credit card issuer's financial systems, and your average e-commerce website. Saying a cracker could just as easily break into "their servers" is ignorance.
There isn't a high risk to using your credit card online, as long as you know who you're buying from (e.g. perhaps brandnewsexsite.com isn't the best place). We put our cards at risk in many other ways (e.g. 1-800 operators who are low-paid prisoners, the waitress who sneaks your card into her palmpilot reader while she's behidn the counter, etc.).
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I said it wasn't ICANN's fault.
I didn't say it wasn't NSI's fault. It was the fault of NSI and the domain registrars jointly. And they weren't checking (probably just a case of somebody writing a simple perl filter, but without checking the appropriate RFC), and now they are.
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responded to me to wit:
Can you explain how this is supposed to work, though? If you create a bunch of additional top-level domains (let's say *.arts, *.firm, *.biz, *.dot, *.sucks) someone like Disney is going to want to register their trademarks in all those domains.
True, but I'm not so concerned with these pre-existing trademark issues. Of course somebody registering mickeymouse.biz is going to run into legal problems.
What I'm more worried about are the situations where Smith Webventures Inc. registers smith.com, and then proceeds to lawyer-letter smith.net and smith.org into submission, somewhat along the lines of the ongoing Leonardo case, or the eToys.com/Etoy.com situation. It's the johnny-come-latelies who probably will NOT become lasting, global trademarks, but whose VC money allows them to afford flashy lawyers, who are going to do the majority of this kind of domain blood-fighting.
I'm not saying create three or six new domains; probably the only way to solve this is to allow hundreds or thousands of new TLDs, which would not only make it impossible for any but the most ardent trademark borderline-pissers to go everywhere, but would eliminate the now (and increasingly) common complaint that there is "consumer confusion" -- the basis of most trademark rulings. Right now, everyone has been lulled into believing that finding the six letters "d i s n e y" somewhere automatically means that Disney Corp. owns or should own that internet property. That's fine for Walt and his progeny, but what about Joe Disney, local printer, down the street? Isn't he deserving of the use of his name somehow? That's what I want to protect.
The many-many TLD idea would also make it possible for the guy who has a business (or even non-business) idea tomorrow to own a domain name that communicates it without having to go to 200 characters or a $2 million investment before opening his doors.
I'm not saying I have the answers, but the current inaction isn't helping things any.
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It's egregious to attribute this to ICANN and say that the cynics were right. Of course there will be small problems with any distributed system. The fault here, though, lays with the registrars who improperly registered names that shouldn't have existed. It's ironic that NetSol ends up being the good guy here (from one standpoint only, of course, not the domain owners' by a long shot!).
Hopefully this incident will give ICANN a kick in the pants as far as moving on to the next phase. There need to be more TLDs, and there need to be rules that allow those TLDs to expand the domain name universe, not just give trademark-grabbers more TLDs to register theirs in. The situation right now is getting ridiculous.
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This is a problem no matter how you look at it.
... until they get it. A small few might consider this a great opportunity to squeeze some new office furniture out of the company.
With the numbers of home workers now stretching into the millions, there is an urgent need to ensure that these workers are protected from injury. The problem is whose responsibility this is going to be.
With the publication of this new "interpretive letter", OSHA put thousands of companies on notice that they were now going to be responsible for workplace ergonomics/safety issues in home offices over which they have little direct control.
At the same time, millions of telecommuters, salesmen, freelancers, consultants, and others found themselves faced with the possibility that the company they now work with at arm's length will suddenly require an inspection of their home office.
Neither the companies nor the telecommuters, by and large, wanted any part of this. Companies would have been forced to either buy new equipment and expand human resources monitoring, or rescind moves toward telecommuting; workers would have been forced to let the company inspect their home, or return to the office. Very few workers consider RSI a serious problem
In a word, this regulation could have killed the telecommuting golden goose.
The good that has been done is to bring this issue to the forefront. The OSHA people are asking for input on how to implement basic regulatory requirements for the home office. This can have a happy ending; for instance, in a related situation, the IRS at first announced highly restrictive new guidelines for tax deductibility of home offices, then Congress rewrote the law so that the status quo would continue.
The outcome here is possibly/likely going to result in individual responsibility for these safety/ergonomic issues, while signing off on a legal form that absolves the employer of responsibility. Hopefully, in the process, there will also be an education campaign to ensure that these spun-off workers have some sense of how the decisions they're making will affect their future health.
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(I want to reply to this article in two ways, so I'll make two different posts.)
... maybe we're not web geeks here, but we are wiring geeks, manufacturing geeks, and appliance geeks.
You're severely underrating Chicago. I live and work here, and I think it's a great city with potential. They've carefully nurtured the city during the Long Boom, and we expect that the population will have grown in the 90s for the first time in 50 years. There's more housing in and near downtown than in a couple of generations. The worst vestiges of "urban removal" are being corrected, and the Loop is once again vibrant.
Ameritech has no unlimited local calling
Wrong. As you can see in this chart of Illinois Ameritech rates, Band A (and the Chicago area has poor DSL and ISDN access.
In 2000, DSL is readily available almost anywhere in the metro region, as dslreports.com shows. You may not always get a choice of providers, but it is available, and the fact that Ameritech sat this particular revolution out ought to be grating on them as they sleep. Your information is just out of date. (Rhythms claims that they'll have half the country DSL-covered by sometime next year, anyway.)
Commonwealth Edison can't keep the damn lights on in the summer, because their transmission and distribution systems are crud and Edison doesn't seem to realize this.
I'm not sure it's the network so much as the management. After the embarrassing downtown Chicago outage this year (my building was affected; I was inbound to work, but my coworkers had to walk down 20 floors), they hired a new team. I'm not defending them; I just don't think that frustration over a power utility is unique, and would point out that stress on a system is a sign of rapid growth.
Local regulations require that Ethernet cable be strung through metal conduit,
I believe this is true in the city, but I'm certain it's not true everywhere in the metro area. The bigger problem is dealing with the unions. You have to have a licensed electrician on site if you're a big shop.
So, despite having several major universities with very good CS departments (University of Chicago, Northwestern, DePaul, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Loyola University), not one but two nearby national research laboratories, and recently starting up a new communications center in the old Donnelly Directory building,
I won't quibble with this list, but I could add to it.
Chicago will probably never become a center of computer business. Chicago has Motorola in the suburbs and that's about as good as it's going to get.
Besides Motorola (which is not only the top high-tech company here, but the biggest company in Chicagoland period), there's: System Software Associates, Tellabs, CDW, Anixter, Whittman-Hart (bought USWeb), Comdisco, DeVry, Galileo, Tribune Corp. (AOL partner), US Cellular, yesmail.com, Hewitt Associates, and Zebra Technologies. Other companies from around here have been bought up: US Robotics (3Com), Platinum (CA), Whitewater Group (Symantec), and others I can't recall.
No, we're not flashy like Silicon Valley, but unlike some of those SV startups, we have people who've worked their whole careers right inside all those boring, low-tech businesses that are trying to get wired right now. I think it's more likely that Chicago will continue to be a center of this kind of boring "infrastructure" high-tech, as opposed to VC-attracting, Superbowl- one-shot- advertising, gone-by-next-year SV firms.
As an example, Hewitt is well-known as a human resources consulting firm. They've built a worldwide reputation, but they found themselves stagnating. The last few years they've turned their HR software and expert systems into the foundation for many human-resources intranet sites, which has turned into a thriving side business. Will it get them dot-com street cred? Nah. Will it pay the light bill? You bet.
US News profiles Chicago high-tech market
On the other hand, Chicago has very good resources for another industry entirely: biotech.
I agree with you here, where I don't agree is that this is overlooked. Try Chicago Biotech Network, a city-funded virtual incubator, and their parent organization says "The agricultural biotechnology revolution began in Illinois, and now there are over 1,280 biotechnology, biomedicine, pharmaceutical firms located here." I don't think that's overlooked.
ask, what kind of geeks can we attract to this city?
I think this is a good point. I just think you undersold Chicago, and didn't catch that even in the computer industry, there are different kinds of geeks
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I want to reply to this article in two ways, so I'll make two different posts.
The first problem is the subject line. "Not all cities can go high tech"? That's complete BS, and pretty inane for a slashdotter. High tech can be anywhere, that's its virtue. I believe this particular server we're on comes from some tiny place in Michigan, for example. The second silly aspect is assuming that "high tech" is some kind of strange, alien, different business that you can either get or not. High tech is everywhere, sometimes it's the front door (dot coms), sometimes it's an add-on (catalog companies), sometimes it's a whole new way of doing business. The innovations of the next ten years are far more likely to come from places outside Silicon Valley than in.
Practically the only reason for the concentration in Silicon Valley is the combination of startup money and abundant potential employees.
You've listed a number of issues that should be considered, and those are good ones. But the question was, what can Pittsburgh change? What they need to attract are VCs and techs, and don't think that all of those want to go to SV, because more and more people are hoping to build a tech career where they want to be. I grew up in the Midwest; it took a year in New York before I realized I belong in the Midwest. I'd rather build a career here, with recognized limitations (e.g. not likely to be on cover of Fortune), surrounded by friends and others like me (stolid, unprepossessing, Midwest folk). I believe that a lot of others would say the same, no matter where they're from. The challenge is to keep them, and Pittsburgh is approaching that question. I think it's forward thinking of them; they long since gave up on being Steeltown USA, and they've rejuvenated the downtown somewhat. They have a lot of old building stock that's just aching to be converted to high-tech lofts. They need to do it; the only question is how.
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Does it really matter who "Time" chooses? Who decides at Time who the person of the century is? It's an editor/owner type of deal. Why should I listen to some guy in a suit telling me that the man of the century is Einstein or whatever?
No, it doesn't matter, but don't get your panties all twisted up about it. It's not THE person of the century, it's TIME's person of the century. Parlor game. Discussion sparker (note surrounding). To some extent, a marketing gimmick, but one that's lasted 75 odd years. Big hairy deal.
I recommend you all stop waisting your time thinking what a single most important person of the century is. Just think about "people" who have influenced particular fields or parts of the every day life.
Just for you, because you're being a snot:
10 webpages on who else mattered.
PS: Why not have a person of the century? Women are people as well.. maybe TIME hasn't figured that one yet.
They've been pressured to change it for some time now, and they decided that 1999/2000 was the perfect moment. THis year, for the first time, Jeff Bezos was the PERSON of the year, and Albert Einstein (for those of us paying attention via the home game) the PERSON of the century.
If you're going to start tossing grenades around, better make sure you know where the pins are.
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how does NASA spell success after two complete failures with the mars probes?
The Hubble team is an entirely separate team from the Mars probes. One team had a success. Two Mars teams had failures.
Anyway it's not like they haven't messed up on the hubble project before.
True dat. But the embarrassment over the Hubble optics could have been handled much better; they dug their own grave there.
We need to hurry up and privatize NASA befor ethey thow away any more tax dollars.
So what business, exactly, is going to spend money on a Mars probe? Just asking.
The MPL mission was about as privatized as a government program gets: the whole probe was designed and built by outside contractors to a NASA spec. Really, this is the way things should be done. MPL was a failure within aceptable risk. MCO was a horrible avoidable failure, but it's possible that the govt-contractor relationship was partly to blame. This isn't easy.
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I can't see any compelling reason for changing the cpu, if the old one was working. If the old cpu had failed, then why not replace by a new identical chip? Why risk the chance of finding a bug in the new one? Unless they want to try some new algorithm, why upgrade?
The Hubble was designed from the beginning to be periodically upgraded, not only by swapping out instruments and installing different ones, but in improving the instruments in place. The computer upgrade has been in the works for several years; a prototype was tested aboard the John Glenn shuttle mission last year. This isn't an idle "hey, let's toss a new box in" procedure.
You are correct about satellite precision; in fact, pointing precision has always been one of the sticking points regarding the computer. The new computer gives them more memory to run more complex routines, probably something the controllers have been clamoring for since 1993!
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The computer on Hubble is programmed from the ground. The new computer simply upgrades the processing capability of the existing software, perhaps allowing new routines. (Early on, with the original 286 board, they discovered that the anti-jitter routines they devised wouldn't fit -- let alone anything else like data transfer. Presumably 1993's 386 co-px solved that.)
The post-Challenger restriction on flights was NOT on an artificial window like "winter", but on specific temperatures reached at the Cape. It's very, very rare for even a January freeze there, but it happened in 1986. No, they should not launch the shuttle, even with redesigned O-rings and boosters, if it gets too cold. But just because it's December does not mean the same thing as being too cold.
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There is a design freeze built into almost every program, but it is not, repeat not, based on anything as inane (or prescient) as a five-years-before-launch timeline. For example, the faster-better-cheaper probes don't necessarily even take that long from project approval to launch! The Confirmation Design Review of MPL was barely two years prior to launch. (Read into that what you will.)
The reason for using a 486 instead of a Pentium can be as simple as power and cooling requirements, or as complex as the issue of running a custom RTOS written in C versus running an off-the-shelf Windoe Manager written in C++ and something else godawful. (Or maybe that's the simple decision.)
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Shuttle flights are numbered in the order that the missions are planned. The shuttle schedule gets moved around for all sorts of reasons, from weather in Kazakhstan to wiring problems to wacked-out gyroscopes in orbit. It would be confusing to change the numbers around to match the actual launch order.
The big gap is unusual, mainly because about a dozen International Space Station missions, that have to be done in a certain order, are all waiting on the Russians to launch the Service Module.
Consider that the STS-103 numbering scheme is an improvement over the cryptic "STS-61C" scheme they briefly used in the 1980s: first digit=year, second digit=launch site (1=KSC, 2=Vandenberg), final character=order scheduled in year. And even those would get mixed around.
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Actually, it isn't supposed to make a profit. It's merely supposed to be self-supporting. This is pretty much the way Amtrak, tollway authorities, some bridges and tunnels, and so forth are run.
It can't make a *profit* since there are no *owners* except the public. It can have a revenue surplus.
Before 1971, it was a terrible sinkhole for money. Now, it's supposed to manage its market for equalizing revenues and expenses, solely on the basis of what it charges. No taxpayer money.
The Federal protection is based on the idea that a) first-class mail delivery is a federal responsibility (not only by law, but in principle: to serve all citizens equally); b) a competitive environment would not allow it to cover its expenses; therefore c) no private first-class mail, or you're interfering with a) by defunding the agency. The exceptions won for FedEx and UPS were carved out over a long period of time, and the justification is that these are premium services that it would be unreasonable to expect the USPS to provide. UPS, for example, at one time had to operate under strict freight standards and a fiction that private packages were business freight. Later, though, the USPS were allowed to compete in this market (they begged) with Express Mail.
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