The original Planet X (where X stood for unknown value, not Roman ten) was derived from small perturbations in the orbit of Neptune, which in turn had been the way Neptune and Uranus were discovered, through gravitational effects on the orbits of their inner neighbors.
The search for Planet X began in earnest around the turn of the 20th century. Percival Lowell (justly famed but also justly taken with a grain of salt) claimed to have found it at least once. But it wasn't until Clyde Tombaugh engaged in the tedious exercise of studying thousands of glass photographic plates (using a special machine like a ViewFinder) that he found a blip that moved from one to the other. This was Pluto.
Pluto, alas, was far too small to have caused the perturbations ascribed to Planet X, so the controversy continued for a number of years. Only in the 1980s was it finally proven that the perturbations in Neptune's orbit were due to imprecise measurements from Earth-based observatories. Voyager 2 was instrumental in demonstrating this point by determining Neptune's mass during its flyby to a much higher degree than was formerly possible.
Now that Neptune is known to be, as it were, unperturbed, all but a few diehards agree there is no Planet X.
Indeed. Chiron is a Centaur with a very elliptical orbit taking it into the Kuiper Belt. Possibly because of this it has a coma, more like a comet than an asteroid. It was one of the first clues, aside from Pluto itself, that there might be a broad new class of objects -- the Trans-Neptunians. ----
First of all, mail from Amazon is not spam. Maybe in conversation, but generally, spam means unsolicited commercial e-mail. Let's go over this again:
This e-mail was solicited. It is not spam.
Then we have the issue that the husband wants to break into his wife's Amazon account to change the subscription. Does the husband ask his wife what her password and credit card are? No, he expects Amazon to just hand over this information to someone else, namely him. Let's go over this briefly:
Bravo to Amazon for protecting his wife's privacy.
The fact that this was difficult to do is good. The fact that this gentleman found dealing with a large corporation frustrating when he could simply have asked his wife, and then turns this into a Slashdot complaint, is bizarre. Particularly when his wife chose to receive the e-mail. Yes, Amazon greased the way, but c'mon...
What is the point of all this? What do they hope to get in the way of data from the ISS? I mean what is the point of the ISS anymore? They already know how humans react to extended space exposure. The reason NASA is losing funding is because stuff like this is pointless.
Nice troll, troll.
In point of fact I am not entirely behind the ISS; I would prefer more spending on planetary science, even at the expense of the crewed space program. But you shouldn't argue from ignorance.
The basic premise of your argument is that NASA is "losing funding". In point of fact NASA is not losing funding. Certain NASA programs are less well-funded than they could be, but ISS is Congress's baby, and they've willingly gone along with one slipped launch date and technical delay after another. They have restricted funding on specific things. At this point NASA cannot switch to experimental tech like a "balloon" habitat for ISS, nor can it officially spend anything on preparing for human visits to Mars. The planetary craft budget is notoriously starved. But funding for shuttle and ISS has been pretty much stable, taking into account a mandate to privatize and cut costs.
As far as research into extended space exposure, I tend to agree with you. Nevertheless, NASA does not, and in any case, they do not see medical research into long-term habitation as the primary purpose of ISS. It will certainly occur, and NASA astrodocs want to do their own experiments rather than translate Russian papers, but it's not the main reason.
ISS has two reasons to exist, which trump any others. The first is "international cooperation". This is rpetty much the only reason that ISS was ultimately funded: the Bush and Clinton administrations finessed a joint US/Russian ISS as a way to forge a relationship with the new Russia, incidentally toss them some cold hard US cash, and to stop sending nuclear engineers to places like Iran. So, foreign policy above all.
Second is that ISS, like Shuttle and Apollo before it, is a large, complex program that just happens to be spread -- and can be purposely spread even more -- across dozens of states and congressional districts. Hence pork above all but foreign policy.
Finally there is the political need for NASA to have a major "goal" program rather than just endless shuttle flights to low orbit. NASA has watned a space station since the early 1960s, and they finally have it. NASA doesn't really care that scientists, per se, may not have that much to do with it; it's not built for the scientists. It's also provided a way to build up space agencies in other countries, allow them to train astronauts, cooperate on a vast project, and generally learn how to handle a large engineering project in space.
All that said, the hope is that the microgravity environment will allow many different long-term experiments to be done that could not on a 10-day shuttle flight, covering materials, biology, and yes, human habitation, not just about medical but also about technology for doing it. This may yet prove useful. Folk like me see the utility, just not the cost-benefit ratio.
If you understand the political reality of a program like ISS the reasons for decisions made becomes much more clear. ----
This pretty much refutes the past assertion among the space community that space is too hostile (radiation, extreme heat & cold) to support microbial/fungal life
Sources, please. What "space community" ever claimed that? Vague terms like that are weasel words. In fact, it has long been accepted that microbes may be able to traverse space, especially if encased within an object such as a meteoroid. NASA has certainly never taken this view: the Apollo astronauts underwent decontamination and medical checks. NASA scientists studying Mars lander data (Viking, Pathfinder) have warned that Earth-origin microbes could contaminate samples and skew results.
So, now that you've demolished a straw man, where's the rest of your argument?:)
If fungi, bacteria, etc can survive (thrive!) on the exterior of Mir,
This article did not claim that fungi were surviving on the exterior of Mir. The fungi in question are everywhere inside Mir, which like most spacecraft, is actually warm (heat dissipation is always a key issue) and wet (partly sweat, mostly humidity from breathing). Essentially, the interior of Mir is not far from that of a steam bath, and you know how well fungi can grow in even a regular bathroom or shower.
why not on Mars? Are the environments really all that different?... it opens the possibility that some area of Mars that we haven't explored closely (ie, a lot) may contain evidence of past/present life
Actually, most scientists already believe that because everywhere we've explored on Earth has life, no matter how extreme the environment, that the prospects for life on Mars remain quite high. This spacecraft-internal fungus doesn't really change that view much.
Second, what if a probe (or people, someday) sent to Mars isn't properly sterile, and we expose the surface to mold/bacteria from Earth? That would confuse and cast doubt on any findings regarding Mars' biology. Suppose we did find evidence of mold on Mars. How do we know it originated there, and didn't just hitch a ride from Earth? I wonder if they've really thought about that.
As I've noted, they have definitely thought of that. Sterilization is a required component of any lander mission. Spacecraft on earth are kept in a "clean room" environment and contamination of experiments is an omnipresent concern for the scientists.
Even so, there would be experiments that could be done to compare the make-up of whatever mold etc. may be found. If two spacecraft sent to different Mars locations turned up exactly the same mold, and that mold were very similar to an Earth mold, the immediate concern would be that both spacecraft were contaminated and cross-checks would need to be done. On the other hand, NASA is already working on the possibility that microbial life has been transported from Earth to Mars, or vice versa, and back again, at numerous times in the past. Certainly the possibility seems much stronger now than it has in the past, given the suggestive meteorite evidence. ----
Bova's long out-of-print novel Millennium, about the fight for independence waged by a joint US-Soviet moonbase (hey, it was written over 20 years ago!), includes a visit to the Apollo 11 site... which has been preserved with a coating of plastic, so you can walk on it without disturbing the footprints. ----
troll wrote:
PROVE it works. It has never been shown to work.
Good gravy, man, I could write a Carnivore sniffer myself sitting in the vanity room. It's dead simple to log traffic, and Carnivore aside, there are hundreds of tools that already do it.
The fact that the government is using it is, by itself, evidence that it works to at least their satisfaction.
You may be confusing Carnivore with Echelon. Echelon scans broad swaths of public traffic looking for things to listen to or read carefully. Carnivore, though, is aimed at specific users. The difference in scale is tremendously important. ----
angstridden wrote:
Frankly, I was quite underwhelmed with the suggestions. They all basically add up to cheap, low-tech encryption or security by obscurity methods. Some were flat-out wrong. Going through an email proxy doesn't help if they're sniffing your connection by IP address. I'm not convinced that Carnovore doesn't do this (nor am I convinced that it does. But I wouldn't base my security strategy on the weaker assumption). Likewise, forging an email address is not going to trick the system. The FBI isn't stupid.
Hear, hear. Almost nothing is known about Carnivore's technology. Just about the only thing that is known is that it is installed under a warrant, the same as a telephone wiretap. In order for this to happen, the FBI will have to have had sufficient circumstantial evidence already in order to lay out their case to a judge. They will have made the decision to dedicate scarce manpower and equipment to the investigation of a particular individual, you. If Carnivore is sniffing you, as a practical matter, they must already suspect you of a crime.
In this case security by obscurity is nonsense, as is any kind of chaff or spam. The reasonable assumption is that the design of the system includes user specificity -- that is, even if you make the assumption that this hearsay about Carnivore is correct, and it searches by keyword, that keyword is very unlikely to be "bomb", and instead is very likely to be "youremail@thisisp.com", if it's a mail sniffer; and your.logon.IP.address if it's an IP sniffer. I'm guessing from what I've read that it's more the former than the latter, but both are equally technologically possible.
Thus, if you are possibly the target of an investigation, it would be reasonably prudent to assume that all your email (or possibly IP traffic) is logged at whatever choke point. This leads, of course, to desperation measures: move all criminal communications and activity to the Big Blue Room Backchannel; or use strong encryption, or just possibly steganography on what you do send. Either is risky, since Carnivore's presence means that they are trying to build a case against you, and once that case is built, they will have no compunctions about seizing the equipment you used to send those communications. Commonly, of course, that will give them all the evidence they will ever need -- the standard level of security, as most slashdotters should know, for almost anywhere, being "hoping nobody ever looks", or password="password" or foldername="stoleninfo". The wily criminal will have used Blowfish or equivalent to completely secure files, but even Blowfish has vulnerabilities, because Windows and other computers have pesky needs to write files on different parts of the disk while they're in use.
No, if you even have an inkling of a suspicion that the FBI is pointing Carnivore at you, best to melt your hard drive before they can get to you. One day, whether because of your computer, or because everyone has talky friends, they'll get a warrant to at least see what the hell you've been doing.
Now to the greater question, the legitimate worry that privacy advocates have regarding Carnivore's overspill capability. That is, just like the White House lost months worth of e-mail archives because of a sloppy search parameter (whether that was intentional I'll leave up to the reader), Carnivore could very easily accidentally log traffic that does not belong to the target of the investigation.
Once again this information will be standard internet e-mail. E-mail contents may be obscured, but e-mail recipients and senders cannot be -- and you can tell a lot about e-mail just by who sends or receives it. Those mails to "patrick naughton" just may not go unnoticed. It would be illegal to do so, but it wouldn't be the first time a law enforcement agency developed a lead based on illegally-obtained information. In short order you'd be back in the original situation: whatever you do being logged, whatever you send, even if encrypted, being noted for its circumstantial nature.
Bypassing Carnivore is technically possible, even if they're doing packet logging. Encrypted VPN, SSL, and other techniques could allow you to connect to a remote system and do what you need to there. Again, however, the where is easily determined, and the remote system would become the focus of the investigation.
Really, I don't think that there's an easy "defense" against Carnivore. The defense is in not attracting suspicion in the first place, and if that's too late, by pathologically practicing probably-impossible levels of security both in communications and on the node systems. It's like suggesting there's a defense against the cops staking out your house. All you can do is move the allegedly criminal activity elsewhere.
Note that none of the above assumes that you are involved in actual criminal activity. I know someone who works for an attorney who is under federal indictment for a fraudulent land sale that was arranged by a client, and who involved my friend via a forged signature. I know that my friend is completely innocent, although I can't with certainty say the same about the attorney. Mostly, it looks like it was a tax investigation of the client that ballooned into a fishing expedition and found this one thing. Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if the FBI had used Carnivore at some point in this investigation, as some documents were exchanged by e-mail. Possibly my friend's personal e-mail. Possibly, thereby, my e-mail between myself and my friend. Innocent activity, all of it, but still subject to investigation. Frustrating as hell, and arguably a form of harassment, but probably completely legal. Now, in practice, they haven't seized any computers here -- I'm just saying that this is an example where they could very easily have obtained a Carnivore warrant. ----
>The FBI really doesn't do Perry Mason-type investigations any more. They only have two tools in their kit, informants and wiretapping.
>That's why they're so worked up about Carnivore, it's their only hope.
In a sense, it should be easy to see that an incompetent FBI is a greater threat to average innocent citizens. viz. Steve Jackson Games, if nothing else.
That said, anyone actually committing crimes who relies on the methods in the linked article is a damned fool and deserves what happens to them. The FBI may not be as immensely clever as the movies would have us believe, but law enforcement relies on more than one method to close a case, and isn't averse to hiring people who do know what they're doing to go over the evidence. ----
First off, this isn't Slashdot's fault (although sometimes the posts are woefully unresearched). The London Times screwed up by saying "United Nations" a couple of times when there's nothing anywhere to indicate that the UN has anything to do with it.
The International Astronomical Union has been around since 1919, well predating the UN, and is headquartered in Brussels. While it's a member of the International Council of Scientific Unions, as far as I can tell, they have nothing to do with the United Nations. Well, OK, they're working with the ITU (which does) and the UN working group on peaceful uses of outer space, but neither of those institutional connections impacts the separate SKA working group. There are many international organizations that operate wholly independently of the UN.
While the SKA project is still a ways from reaching the point of a firm technical plan and seeking funding, there's no evidence they're going to ask the UN for money. In fact, a lot of the funding is likely to come from participating universities (who may in turn, of course, seek grants from their national governments to support their involvement). No UN bureaucracy at all.
The moral? Don't believe everything you read in the papers. Looks to me like the editor saw "International [Astronomical] Union" and assumed it was a UN agency. Not the case. ----
mcmonkey wrote:
Where are they going to get a base tower 50 Km tall? The tallest buildings are the Petronas Towers, both under.5 Km, so they're talking about something 100 times taller. In the 60-odd years between the Empire State Building (1931) and the Petronas(1996), the height of the tallest building increased less than 20%. So...last 70 years, 20% growth, next 50 years, 10000% growth.
The reason we haven't built bigger buildings has a lot more to do with economics and logistics than with technology. For instance, Frank Lloyd Wright proposed a mile-high tower called The Illinois that was never built... not because we couldn't (we probably could), but because nobody wanted to pay for it; one building that size would double the commercial real estate in downtown Chicago all by itself; the higher the building, the greater a percentage is devoted to dead space in elevator tubes that serve higher floors; and just logistically getting everyone who worked there to their desks in the morning would take all the transportation capacity of a modern major city, all pointing at maybe four square blocks, and taking six hours to fill and then empty the building.
And what happens when something flies into this thing? Heck, birds have trouble avoiding wind mills, so I expect this will generate a fair amount of road kill. I certainly wouldn't want to be on my way up when an airplane hits.
Well, one would hope that would never happen. But I'd rather ride on an elevator than a bomb made of rocket fuel. (R.I.P. 51-L)
FYI, Canadians: the committee on tall buildings ruled that Petronas is the tallest building, while CN Tower is the tallest freestanding structure. They're really not comparable. ----
Hairy Potter, woefully clueless American, wrote:
Looking at the equatorial slice, you have Central and the northern part of South America. That's close to the US, but the only country in that area that sounds somewhat reasaonable is Venezuela. I think they're stable, and at least somewhat technically clueful.
Hairy, you may want to read the newspapers once in a freaking while.
First of all, you're completely wrong about South America, which has come a long way in the last twenty years. Not only have most countries turned from military dictatorships or nationalistic juntas toward multiparty democracies, most are fully industrialized and modern. Brazil even has its own nascent space industry with a launch site at Alcantara, and an aeronautical industrial center calling itself Space Valley.
Brazil has skyscrapers, subways, and even computers. (What, did you think they lived in mud huts?!)
Venezuela, on the other hand, has recently turned into as close to a rogue state as you can get and not actually be one. The President has endured the censure of the United Nations, the Organziation of American States, and others, and has deliberately met with pariah leaders like Moammar Khadafy and Saddam Hussein. Venezuela is heavily Western-invested due to its oil industry, but many companies are reconsidering its long-term political stability.
A shame there aren't more, as close to the US is a major plus, since American will probablly pay for most of it.
Why would you assume that Americans will pay for most of it? Why would you assume that taxpayers will pay for most of it? More likely it will be built by an international consortium supported by investors and ultimately funded by the companies that buy its services. (Look at the Chunnel, or any modern major toll bridge, for examples.) Of course, that's assuming that stick-in-the-mud American industry is interested, which they may not be. (Our economy goes through phases during which it will throw money any and all innovation, no matter how inane, and during which the very word innovation is considered poison. Look at high-tech from 1999 to 2000 for an example.)
Going East, we get to Africa. Enough said there, I wouldn't invest a significant amount in Africa until it gets more stable.
Africa's a pretty big place, kiddo. Some parts are stable, others are not. That said, the industrialization there in 2000 isn't that convenient for a space industry. That could change, though.
Further East is India and Sri Lanka. India would certainly be a possibility, they have high tech, they speak English.
What kind of incompetent school did you go to, that you believe speaking English is a pre-requisite for mastering high technology? India is not only a land of breathtaking scenery mixed with breathtaking poverty, it is also a land that has made a leap to the cutting edge of high technology. The computer industry is supplied by a steady stream of incredibly smart and motivated people from India, many of which I've been proud to work with.
While Singapore has a harsh dictatorship, it is stable and high tech. Indonesia and the Phillipines have too many trouble.
Singapore's Asian-style strongman semi-democracy isn't what I would call open and free, but I wouldn't call it a dictatorship either.
Basically, I think you have a view of the world that is informed mainly by 30-second sound bites on CNN Headline News. Get out of the house once in a while. Talk to people who look different from you. Read a book or a newspaper. The rest of the world is a little more interesting and capable than you think -- and not all decisions about the future are made in the United States.
Phil Reed wrote [responding to someone else]:
>>Everyone keeps trying to do these space stations that keep failing and falling apart.
>Uh, exactly HOW MANY space station has there been? I count one.
The International Space Station is not yet commissioned
Commissioned? It isn't permanently occupied yet, but it's certainly operational.
so the only example I can think of is Mir. To ask why it's falling apart, you only have to look at the government that's running it. One example does not make a trend.
More pointedly, Mir is well beyond its planned operational lifetime. When ISS is 10 or 15 years old, it too will start to have "issues". You simply can't bring a module back to earth for service -- so if something breaks, well, it breaks in orbit. What else would you expect?
Nevertheless, Mir-Shuttle (otherwise known as ISS Phase I) was a valuable learning experience, and ISS will not run anywhere near the energy starvation levels of Mir, and NASA has plans to give ISS much more redundancy in propulsion and control as it grows. ----
If the count is up to date, this makes her fourteenth major award -- six Nebulas, and eight Hugos. That's more than any other sf author, even some of the big names... and she's still in the prime of her career.
Frankly, I had a hard time with The Doomsday Book, for various reasons including the fact that major characters playing with dangerous technology acted like idiots, but in the end it was very worthwhile. I'm just surprised it took me so many years to discover her. (Easy to do when you quit reading new sf, like I did.)
But I've now read more of her "Dunsworthy time machine" stories, the collection Fire Watch, which is top-notch, and I've jsut begun last year's Hugo winner for novel, To Say Nothing of the Dog. Not to be missed. If you've been off the SF beat for a while, pick up some Willis, you'll be glad you did. ----
The Sixth Sense was one of the most popular movies last year. Even if it wasn't looked on very kindly by many genre folk, it had a decent story, high production values, and some great acting by Willis, as well as yon precocious kid. So it was bound to get some of the more conventional votes here, as well as stand in for the fantasy crowd.
The Matrix was clearly the favorite going in, especially among young people. There would be a very strong vote for this movie no matter what. At the same time, a number of people just didn't like it (some of them are here). I, for one, thought it was the odds-on favorite, even though it was my personal 2nd choice.
The Iron Giant was a quirky entry that appealed to a certain minority. I thought a lot of people in this kind of literate forum might support it, but didn't expect it to win. It was my first choice.
Anyway, I forget what the other nom was -- Blair Witch? The Haunting?
With such a crowded field of worthy candidates, but all somewhat appealing to different crowds, the middle-of-the-road crowd-pleaser is a slam dunk -- nothin' but net. And GQ was actually better than that -- it was smart and funny. ----
As well as any other Office applications, when they launch an HTML type of document. It's pretty easy to grant permission this one time only, too -- so you always know if programs that normally shouldn't be net-enabled are trying to slip one past you.
Clearly you don't realize how either the "Internet Explorer component", or ZoneAlarm, works. Though Word uses the same HTML renderer, it is from within its own EXE. Granted, I don't kid myself that this will trap ALL instances of non-obvious internet use, but it goes a long way towards making me feel like I'm still in control. ----
The military gave birth to the space program. For the first 30 years, nearly all of our astronauts were active duty military persons. The military initially trained most of our astronauts. The military financed most of the early space program and continues to pay for several missions today. (see http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/factshee t.htm )
This is true up to a point. NASA and the military always had a close relationship, but this was also in many ways superficial. The scientists wanted space programs to do research; the military wanted space programs to focus on defense. Congress, above all, wanted them to cooperate and "cut costs". The early development of the space shuttle was closely tied to Air Force requirements; allegedly the size was doubled in order to accomodate the Keyhole (KH-10, KH-11) series of spy satellites. So, the scientific missions have been compromised by military involvement, but you could equally say that the missions wouldn't have occurred at all without Congress funding it as a quasi-military program.
The military needs satellites launched. That requires some NASA folks to get in that shuttle and get some flying time. That is better than playing with models in Florida. (see http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/kscpao/schedule/mixfle et.htm)
Actually, this has not been true since Challenger. The schedule you point to shows no military space shuttle launches, because the Air Force quit its involvement in the shuttle program after 1986; the last DOD "classified" space shuttle mission was STS-53 in 1992. They restarted expendable launch vehicle production lines for rockets like Titan and Pegasus. At this time the military is actually forbidden from depending on a single launch vehicle. Military pilots and others who become astronauts are no longer DOD employees (although they retain rank, seniority, and certain benefits under longstanding policies).
So, no astronauts "fly" to launch military satellites anymore. The only astronaut flights now are NASA science flights and space station construction flights (and soon, crew delivery). The Air Force has even gone so far as to launch its own lunar satellite mission with virtually no NASA involvement.
Therefore, I believe that the military has been useful to our space program and hope thier interest will continue as it benefits the program as a whole.
My first web experience was using the Cello browser, written by Cornell university in order to expand its gopher law offerings to the vastly superior hypertext.
This was only shortly after finding my first somewhat graphical ftp client.
I was working at a help desk in those days, and managed to convince my boss to let me play around with the internet in my spare time. I had a modem already, and a Unix shell account with access to newsgroups and mailing lists, but actually making a Windows PC talk to the internet was an incredibly wondrous thing [heh, still can be some days]. There wasn't even Trumpet Winsock in those days, nor a Novell-supplied winsock client -- I had to download two or three separate drivers, one of which had to be loaded into the Netware ODI client, and eventually it was all working. (Somebody else had a similar experience.)
Those were heady days.
I think I used Cello until Netscape came out. ----
I wouldn't be so smug: Slashdot just spent 92 seconds opening this edit page. Before that I waited almost three minutes for the article page with comments to load. And before that, I was surfing in directly to a specific single comment from an external link -- that never opened at all. I finally gave up on that window.
I'm sure Linux/Apache (or whatever you guys are running on over here, I don't follow that gossip) does have an overall stability edge over Redmond product, but NT was never the joke it's made out to be around here and 2000 is even more competitive. ----
According to the 1999 Annual Report, the USPS had: Operating Revenue of $63B Operating Expenses of $62B
for a 3.3% margin. This margin is known to rise and fall in a roughly three-year cycle tied to postage stamp rate increases.
The US Government contributed $3 Billion in capital outlays, i.e. buildings, equipment, vehicles, and other permanent purchases. Clearly, though, this could be handled completely privately with a small increase in postage rates. ----
And if I remember correctly, the Federal Reserve is actually private as well. That's right, the organization that prints money. All those crazy collectors coins, tours of the mints, and stuff of that sort make money.
Uh, wrong. The Federal Reserve is an independent agency run by a Presidentially-appointed board of governors, who also selects the Chairman (e.g. Alan Greenspan) with the consent of the Senate (like any Cabinet member). The Federal Reserve controls the money supply by setting bank reserve requirements and setting the federal discount rate.
This is quite different from the process of printing money (by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing) or minting coins (the US Mint). The printing of money is statutorily limited under the Federal Reserve central banking system in order to control inflation.
Doubtless you're thinking of many of the congressionally-mandated private corporations, such as Fannie Mae (formerly the Federal National Mortgage Corporation) or Freddie Mac. These are private stock corporations that simply have to answer to a congressional mandate to fulfill a specific function, while making money for their investors. ----
The United States Postal Service, while originally spawned by the government, is not part of the government at this point in any way. It's an independant agency. So to say that it's a government agency that's carrying your correspondence is incorrect. They only have a little bit more to do with the government than UPS or FedEx.
The United States Post Office Department was once a cabinet-level agency, but that was changed in 1969, when it was converted to what is called an "independent establishment of the executive branch of the Government of the United States". The Postmaster General is appointed by a board of governors that the President appoints. Postal employees are counted as Federal employees.
Perhaps you're thinking of an independent quasi-governmental corporation like Amtrak. This solution was proposed but rejected by Congress during postal reform. The USPS is self-supporting and often acts like a company, but in reality it retains a Congressional mandate to offer flat-rate postal service to all parts of the US, whether or not it's profitable.
I know what you're saying, but you went too far in suggesting it's "not part of the government in any way". True, it has much more discretion and independence than most federal agencies, it's insulated from politics by having a governing board, and it is structured much more like a corporation than an agency. But it most certainly remains part of the government.
Whether the US will follow the lead of some other countries and spinoff the postal service as a public corporation remains to be seen. (Even Germany, when it spun off Deutsche Telekom, retained the bundespost as a government agency -- although to this day they own 51% of DT stock.) In the end the internet may eventually make snail mail obsolete, but not just yet. At this point postal mail is recognized as an essential service of government in almost every nation.
mattw sez: think we should pass a law prohibiting politicians and members of the government from discussing or promoting laws which contradict, restrict, or attempt to invalidate constitutional rights. Try to restrict free speech? Get tossed.
We have this already. They're called elections.
Get fined. I'd love to see Orrin Hatch on trial for "attempting to violate the inalienable rights of constituents". Hah!
Yes, well, I'd hate to see any legislator on trial for political views. Even Orrin Hatch. Putting legislators on trial smacks of Putin's Russia. ----
Slashdot Mirror
The original Planet X (where X stood for unknown value, not Roman ten) was derived from small perturbations in the orbit of Neptune, which in turn had been the way Neptune and Uranus were discovered, through gravitational effects on the orbits of their inner neighbors.
The search for Planet X began in earnest around the turn of the 20th century. Percival Lowell (justly famed but also justly taken with a grain of salt) claimed to have found it at least once. But it wasn't until Clyde Tombaugh engaged in the tedious exercise of studying thousands of glass photographic plates (using a special machine like a ViewFinder) that he found a blip that moved from one to the other. This was Pluto.
Pluto, alas, was far too small to have caused the perturbations ascribed to Planet X, so the controversy continued for a number of years. Only in the 1980s was it finally proven that the perturbations in Neptune's orbit were due to imprecise measurements from Earth-based observatories. Voyager 2 was instrumental in demonstrating this point by determining Neptune's mass during its flyby to a much higher degree than was formerly possible.
Now that Neptune is known to be, as it were, unperturbed, all but a few diehards agree there is no Planet X.
Read the Search for Planet X for detailed information.
----
Indeed. Chiron is a Centaur with a very elliptical orbit taking it into the Kuiper Belt. Possibly because of this it has a coma, more like a comet than an asteroid. It was one of the first clues, aside from Pluto itself, that there might be a broad new class of objects -- the Trans-Neptunians.
----
First of all, mail from Amazon is not spam. Maybe in conversation, but generally, spam means unsolicited commercial e-mail. Let's go over this again:
...
This e-mail was solicited. It is not spam.
Then we have the issue that the husband wants to break into his wife's Amazon account to change the subscription. Does the husband ask his wife what her password and credit card are? No, he expects Amazon to just hand over this information to someone else, namely him. Let's go over this briefly:
Bravo to Amazon for protecting his wife's privacy.
The fact that this was difficult to do is good. The fact that this gentleman found dealing with a large corporation frustrating when he could simply have asked his wife, and then turns this into a Slashdot complaint, is bizarre. Particularly when his wife chose to receive the e-mail. Yes, Amazon greased the way, but c'mon
Bottom line:
this problem was solvable.
Bottom line:
complainant didn't feel like following through.
Next!
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What is the point of all this? What do they hope to get in the way of data from the ISS? I mean what is the point of the ISS anymore? They already know how humans react to extended space exposure. The reason NASA is losing funding is because stuff like this is pointless.
Nice troll, troll.
In point of fact I am not entirely behind the ISS; I would prefer more spending on planetary science, even at the expense of the crewed space program. But you shouldn't argue from ignorance.
The basic premise of your argument is that NASA is "losing funding". In point of fact NASA is not losing funding. Certain NASA programs are less well-funded than they could be, but ISS is Congress's baby, and they've willingly gone along with one slipped launch date and technical delay after another. They have restricted funding on specific things. At this point NASA cannot switch to experimental tech like a "balloon" habitat for ISS, nor can it officially spend anything on preparing for human visits to Mars. The planetary craft budget is notoriously starved. But funding for shuttle and ISS has been pretty much stable, taking into account a mandate to privatize and cut costs.
As far as research into extended space exposure, I tend to agree with you. Nevertheless, NASA does not, and in any case, they do not see medical research into long-term habitation as the primary purpose of ISS. It will certainly occur, and NASA astrodocs want to do their own experiments rather than translate Russian papers, but it's not the main reason.
ISS has two reasons to exist, which trump any others. The first is "international cooperation". This is rpetty much the only reason that ISS was ultimately funded: the Bush and Clinton administrations finessed a joint US/Russian ISS as a way to forge a relationship with the new Russia, incidentally toss them some cold hard US cash, and to stop sending nuclear engineers to places like Iran. So, foreign policy above all.
Second is that ISS, like Shuttle and Apollo before it, is a large, complex program that just happens to be spread -- and can be purposely spread even more -- across dozens of states and congressional districts. Hence pork above all but foreign policy.
Finally there is the political need for NASA to have a major "goal" program rather than just endless shuttle flights to low orbit. NASA has watned a space station since the early 1960s, and they finally have it. NASA doesn't really care that scientists, per se, may not have that much to do with it; it's not built for the scientists. It's also provided a way to build up space agencies in other countries, allow them to train astronauts, cooperate on a vast project, and generally learn how to handle a large engineering project in space.
All that said, the hope is that the microgravity environment will allow many different long-term experiments to be done that could not on a 10-day shuttle flight, covering materials, biology, and yes, human habitation, not just about medical but also about technology for doing it. This may yet prove useful. Folk like me see the utility, just not the cost-benefit ratio.
If you understand the political reality of a program like ISS the reasons for decisions made becomes much more clear.
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Dr Tom sez:
>Americans should remember that they don't live in a democracy.
Yeah, right, Dr. Tom, like "representative democracy" isn't in the first definition in two dictionaries.
Just because you want "direct democracy" doesn't mean you get to change the definition of the word to suit yourself.
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This pretty much refutes the past assertion among the space community that space is too hostile (radiation, extreme heat & cold) to support microbial/fungal life
:)
... it opens the possibility that some area of Mars that we haven't explored closely (ie, a lot) may contain evidence of past/present life
Sources, please. What "space community" ever claimed that? Vague terms like that are weasel words. In fact, it has long been accepted that microbes may be able to traverse space, especially if encased within an object such as a meteoroid. NASA has certainly never taken this view: the Apollo astronauts underwent decontamination and medical checks. NASA scientists studying Mars lander data (Viking, Pathfinder) have warned that Earth-origin microbes could contaminate samples and skew results.
So, now that you've demolished a straw man, where's the rest of your argument?
If fungi, bacteria, etc can survive (thrive!) on the exterior of Mir,
This article did not claim that fungi were surviving on the exterior of Mir. The fungi in question are everywhere inside Mir, which like most spacecraft, is actually warm (heat dissipation is always a key issue) and wet (partly sweat, mostly humidity from breathing). Essentially, the interior of Mir is not far from that of a steam bath, and you know how well fungi can grow in even a regular bathroom or shower.
why not on Mars? Are the environments really all that different?
Actually, most scientists already believe that because everywhere we've explored on Earth has life, no matter how extreme the environment, that the prospects for life on Mars remain quite high. This spacecraft-internal fungus doesn't really change that view much.
Second, what if a probe (or people, someday) sent to Mars isn't properly sterile, and we expose the surface to mold/bacteria from Earth? That would confuse and cast doubt on any findings regarding Mars' biology. Suppose we did find evidence of mold on Mars. How do we know it originated there, and didn't just hitch a ride from Earth? I wonder if they've really thought about that.
As I've noted, they have definitely thought of that. Sterilization is a required component of any lander mission. Spacecraft on earth are kept in a "clean room" environment and contamination of experiments is an omnipresent concern for the scientists.
Even so, there would be experiments that could be done to compare the make-up of whatever mold etc. may be found. If two spacecraft sent to different Mars locations turned up exactly the same mold, and that mold were very similar to an Earth mold, the immediate concern would be that both spacecraft were contaminated and cross-checks would need to be done. On the other hand, NASA is already working on the possibility that microbial life has been transported from Earth to Mars, or vice versa, and back again, at numerous times in the past. Certainly the possibility seems much stronger now than it has in the past, given the suggestive meteorite evidence.
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Bova's long out-of-print novel Millennium, about the fight for independence waged by a joint US-Soviet moonbase (hey, it was written over 20 years ago!), includes a visit to the Apollo 11 site ... which has been preserved with a coating of plastic, so you can walk on it without disturbing the footprints.
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So the official government position is, "we can't". But that would be no fun. Slashdot readers prefer posting to reading, anyway
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troll wrote:
PROVE it works. It has never been shown to work.
Good gravy, man, I could write a Carnivore sniffer myself sitting in the vanity room. It's dead simple to log traffic, and Carnivore aside, there are hundreds of tools that already do it.
The fact that the government is using it is, by itself, evidence that it works to at least their satisfaction.
You may be confusing Carnivore with Echelon. Echelon scans broad swaths of public traffic looking for things to listen to or read carefully. Carnivore, though, is aimed at specific users. The difference in scale is tremendously important.
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angstridden wrote:
Frankly, I was quite underwhelmed with the suggestions. They all basically add up to cheap, low-tech encryption or security by obscurity methods. Some were flat-out wrong. Going through an email proxy doesn't help if they're sniffing your connection by IP address. I'm not convinced that Carnovore doesn't do this (nor am I convinced that it does. But I wouldn't base my security strategy on the weaker assumption). Likewise, forging an email address is not going to trick the system. The FBI isn't stupid.
Hear, hear. Almost nothing is known about Carnivore's technology. Just about the only thing that is known is that it is installed under a warrant, the same as a telephone wiretap. In order for this to happen, the FBI will have to have had sufficient circumstantial evidence already in order to lay out their case to a judge. They will have made the decision to dedicate scarce manpower and equipment to the investigation of a particular individual, you. If Carnivore is sniffing you, as a practical matter, they must already suspect you of a crime.
In this case security by obscurity is nonsense, as is any kind of chaff or spam. The reasonable assumption is that the design of the system includes user specificity -- that is, even if you make the assumption that this hearsay about Carnivore is correct, and it searches by keyword, that keyword is very unlikely to be "bomb", and instead is very likely to be "youremail@thisisp.com", if it's a mail sniffer; and your.logon.IP.address if it's an IP sniffer. I'm guessing from what I've read that it's more the former than the latter, but both are equally technologically possible.
Thus, if you are possibly the target of an investigation, it would be reasonably prudent to assume that all your email (or possibly IP traffic) is logged at whatever choke point. This leads, of course, to desperation measures: move all criminal communications and activity to the Big Blue Room Backchannel; or use strong encryption, or just possibly steganography on what you do send. Either is risky, since Carnivore's presence means that they are trying to build a case against you, and once that case is built, they will have no compunctions about seizing the equipment you used to send those communications. Commonly, of course, that will give them all the evidence they will ever need -- the standard level of security, as most slashdotters should know, for almost anywhere, being "hoping nobody ever looks", or password="password" or foldername="stoleninfo". The wily criminal will have used Blowfish or equivalent to completely secure files, but even Blowfish has vulnerabilities, because Windows and other computers have pesky needs to write files on different parts of the disk while they're in use.
No, if you even have an inkling of a suspicion that the FBI is pointing Carnivore at you, best to melt your hard drive before they can get to you. One day, whether because of your computer, or because everyone has talky friends, they'll get a warrant to at least see what the hell you've been doing.
Now to the greater question, the legitimate worry that privacy advocates have regarding Carnivore's overspill capability. That is, just like the White House lost months worth of e-mail archives because of a sloppy search parameter (whether that was intentional I'll leave up to the reader), Carnivore could very easily accidentally log traffic that does not belong to the target of the investigation.
Once again this information will be standard internet e-mail. E-mail contents may be obscured, but e-mail recipients and senders cannot be -- and you can tell a lot about e-mail just by who sends or receives it. Those mails to "patrick naughton" just may not go unnoticed. It would be illegal to do so, but it wouldn't be the first time a law enforcement agency developed a lead based on illegally-obtained information. In short order you'd be back in the original situation: whatever you do being logged, whatever you send, even if encrypted, being noted for its circumstantial nature.
Bypassing Carnivore is technically possible, even if they're doing packet logging. Encrypted VPN, SSL, and other techniques could allow you to connect to a remote system and do what you need to there. Again, however, the where is easily determined, and the remote system would become the focus of the investigation.
Really, I don't think that there's an easy "defense" against Carnivore. The defense is in not attracting suspicion in the first place, and if that's too late, by pathologically practicing probably-impossible levels of security both in communications and on the node systems. It's like suggesting there's a defense against the cops staking out your house. All you can do is move the allegedly criminal activity elsewhere.
Note that none of the above assumes that you are involved in actual criminal activity. I know someone who works for an attorney who is under federal indictment for a fraudulent land sale that was arranged by a client, and who involved my friend via a forged signature. I know that my friend is completely innocent, although I can't with certainty say the same about the attorney. Mostly, it looks like it was a tax investigation of the client that ballooned into a fishing expedition and found this one thing. Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if the FBI had used Carnivore at some point in this investigation, as some documents were exchanged by e-mail. Possibly my friend's personal e-mail. Possibly, thereby, my e-mail between myself and my friend. Innocent activity, all of it, but still subject to investigation. Frustrating as hell, and arguably a form of harassment, but probably completely legal. Now, in practice, they haven't seized any computers here -- I'm just saying that this is an example where they could very easily have obtained a Carnivore warrant.
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>The FBI really doesn't do Perry Mason-type investigations any more. They only have two tools in their kit, informants and wiretapping.
>That's why they're so worked up about Carnivore, it's their only hope.
In a sense, it should be easy to see that an incompetent FBI is a greater threat to average innocent citizens. viz. Steve Jackson Games, if nothing else.
That said, anyone actually committing crimes who relies on the methods in the linked article is a damned fool and deserves what happens to them. The FBI may not be as immensely clever as the movies would have us believe, but law enforcement relies on more than one method to close a case, and isn't averse to hiring people who do know what they're doing to go over the evidence.
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First off, this isn't Slashdot's fault (although sometimes the posts are woefully unresearched). The London Times screwed up by saying "United Nations" a couple of times when there's nothing anywhere to indicate that the UN has anything to do with it.
The International Astronomical Union has been around since 1919, well predating the UN, and is headquartered in Brussels. While it's a member of the International Council of Scientific Unions, as far as I can tell, they have nothing to do with the United Nations. Well, OK, they're working with the ITU (which does) and the UN working group on peaceful uses of outer space, but neither of those institutional connections impacts the separate SKA working group. There are many international organizations that operate wholly independently of the UN.
While the SKA project is still a ways from reaching the point of a firm technical plan and seeking funding, there's no evidence they're going to ask the UN for money. In fact, a lot of the funding is likely to come from participating universities (who may in turn, of course, seek grants from their national governments to support their involvement). No UN bureaucracy at all.
The moral? Don't believe everything you read in the papers. Looks to me like the editor saw "International [Astronomical] Union" and assumed it was a UN agency. Not the case.
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mcmonkey wrote: .5 Km, so they're talking about something 100 times taller. In the 60-odd years between the Empire State Building (1931) and the Petronas(1996), the height of the tallest building increased less than 20%. So...last 70 years, 20% growth, next 50 years, 10000% growth.
... not because we couldn't (we probably could), but because nobody wanted to pay for it; one building that size would double the commercial real estate in downtown Chicago all by itself; the higher the building, the greater a percentage is devoted to dead space in elevator tubes that serve higher floors; and just logistically getting everyone who worked there to their desks in the morning would take all the transportation capacity of a modern major city, all pointing at maybe four square blocks, and taking six hours to fill and then empty the building.
Where are they going to get a base tower 50 Km tall? The tallest buildings are the Petronas Towers, both under
The reason we haven't built bigger buildings has a lot more to do with economics and logistics than with technology. For instance, Frank Lloyd Wright proposed a mile-high tower called The Illinois that was never built
And what happens when something flies into this thing? Heck, birds have trouble avoiding wind mills, so I expect this will generate a fair amount of road kill. I certainly wouldn't want to be on my way up when an airplane hits.
Well, one would hope that would never happen. But I'd rather ride on an elevator than a bomb made of rocket fuel. (R.I.P. 51-L)
FYI, Canadians: the committee on tall buildings ruled that Petronas is the tallest building, while CN Tower is the tallest freestanding structure. They're really not comparable.
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Hairy Potter, woefully clueless American, wrote:
Looking at the equatorial slice, you have Central and the northern part of South America. That's close to the US, but the only country in that area that sounds somewhat reasaonable is Venezuela. I think they're stable, and at least somewhat technically clueful.
Hairy, you may want to read the newspapers once in a freaking while.
First of all, you're completely wrong about South America, which has come a long way in the last twenty years. Not only have most countries turned from military dictatorships or nationalistic juntas toward multiparty democracies, most are fully industrialized and modern. Brazil even has its own nascent space industry with a launch site at Alcantara, and an aeronautical industrial center calling itself Space Valley.
Brazil has skyscrapers, subways, and even computers. (What, did you think they lived in mud huts?!)
Venezuela, on the other hand, has recently turned into as close to a rogue state as you can get and not actually be one. The President has endured the censure of the United Nations, the Organziation of American States, and others, and has deliberately met with pariah leaders like Moammar Khadafy and Saddam Hussein. Venezuela is heavily Western-invested due to its oil industry, but many companies are reconsidering its long-term political stability.
A shame there aren't more, as close to the US is a major plus, since American will probablly pay for most of it.
Why would you assume that Americans will pay for most of it? Why would you assume that taxpayers will pay for most of it? More likely it will be built by an international consortium supported by investors and ultimately funded by the companies that buy its services. (Look at the Chunnel, or any modern major toll bridge, for examples.) Of course, that's assuming that stick-in-the-mud American industry is interested, which they may not be. (Our economy goes through phases during which it will throw money any and all innovation, no matter how inane, and during which the very word innovation is considered poison. Look at high-tech from 1999 to 2000 for an example.)
Going East, we get to Africa. Enough said there, I wouldn't invest a significant amount in Africa until it gets more stable.
Africa's a pretty big place, kiddo. Some parts are stable, others are not. That said, the industrialization there in 2000 isn't that convenient for a space industry. That could change, though.
Further East is India and Sri Lanka. India would certainly be a possibility, they have high tech, they speak English.
What kind of incompetent school did you go to, that you believe speaking English is a pre-requisite for mastering high technology? India is not only a land of breathtaking scenery mixed with breathtaking poverty, it is also a land that has made a leap to the cutting edge of high technology. The computer industry is supplied by a steady stream of incredibly smart and motivated people from India, many of which I've been proud to work with.
While Singapore has a harsh dictatorship, it is stable and high tech. Indonesia and the Phillipines have too many trouble.
Singapore's Asian-style strongman semi-democracy isn't what I would call open and free, but I wouldn't call it a dictatorship either.
Basically, I think you have a view of the world that is informed mainly by 30-second sound bites on CNN Headline News. Get out of the house once in a while. Talk to people who look different from you. Read a book or a newspaper. The rest of the world is a little more interesting and capable than you think -- and not all decisions about the future are made in the United States.
Good grief.
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Phil Reed wrote [responding to someone else]:
>>Everyone keeps trying to do these space stations that keep failing and falling apart.
>Uh, exactly HOW MANY space station has there been? I count one.
Actually, there have been several Soviet-Russian stations over the years, of which Mir is merely the latest.
The International Space Station is not yet commissioned
Commissioned? It isn't permanently occupied yet, but it's certainly operational.
so the only example I can think of is Mir. To ask why it's falling apart, you only have to look at the government that's running it. One example does not make a trend.
More pointedly, Mir is well beyond its planned operational lifetime. When ISS is 10 or 15 years old, it too will start to have "issues". You simply can't bring a module back to earth for service -- so if something breaks, well, it breaks in orbit. What else would you expect?
Nevertheless, Mir-Shuttle (otherwise known as ISS Phase I) was a valuable learning experience, and ISS will not run anywhere near the energy starvation levels of Mir, and NASA has plans to give ISS much more redundancy in propulsion and control as it grows.
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...for her novella, The Winds of Marble Arch (online at Asimov's).
... and she's still in the prime of her career.
If the count is up to date, this makes her fourteenth major award -- six Nebulas, and eight Hugos. That's more than any other sf author, even some of the big names
Frankly, I had a hard time with The Doomsday Book, for various reasons including the fact that major characters playing with dangerous technology acted like idiots, but in the end it was very worthwhile. I'm just surprised it took me so many years to discover her. (Easy to do when you quit reading new sf, like I did.)
But I've now read more of her "Dunsworthy time machine" stories, the collection Fire Watch, which is top-notch, and I've jsut begun last year's Hugo winner for novel, To Say Nothing of the Dog. Not to be missed. If you've been off the SF beat for a while, pick up some Willis, you'll be glad you did.
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I think it's pretty clear why this happened.
The Sixth Sense was one of the most popular movies last year. Even if it wasn't looked on very kindly by many genre folk, it had a decent story, high production values, and some great acting by Willis, as well as yon precocious kid. So it was bound to get some of the more conventional votes here, as well as stand in for the fantasy crowd.
The Matrix was clearly the favorite going in, especially among young people. There would be a very strong vote for this movie no matter what. At the same time, a number of people just didn't like it (some of them are here). I, for one, thought it was the odds-on favorite, even though it was my personal 2nd choice.
The Iron Giant was a quirky entry that appealed to a certain minority. I thought a lot of people in this kind of literate forum might support it, but didn't expect it to win. It was my first choice.
Anyway, I forget what the other nom was -- Blair Witch? The Haunting?
With such a crowded field of worthy candidates, but all somewhat appealing to different crowds, the middle-of-the-road crowd-pleaser is a slam dunk -- nothin' but net. And GQ was actually better than that -- it was smart and funny.
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As well as any other Office applications, when they launch an HTML type of document. It's pretty easy to grant permission this one time only, too -- so you always know if programs that normally shouldn't be net-enabled are trying to slip one past you.
Clearly you don't realize how either the "Internet Explorer component", or ZoneAlarm, works. Though Word uses the same HTML renderer, it is from within its own EXE. Granted, I don't kid myself that this will trap ALL instances of non-obvious internet use, but it goes a long way towards making me feel like I'm still in control.
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The military gave birth to the space program. For the first 30 years, nearly all of our astronauts were active duty military persons. The military initially trained most of our astronauts. The military financed most of the early space program and continues to pay for several missions today. (see http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/factshee t.htm )
e et.htm)
This is true up to a point. NASA and the military always had a close relationship, but this was also in many ways superficial. The scientists wanted space programs to do research; the military wanted space programs to focus on defense. Congress, above all, wanted them to cooperate and "cut costs". The early development of the space shuttle was closely tied to Air Force requirements; allegedly the size was doubled in order to accomodate the Keyhole (KH-10, KH-11) series of spy satellites. So, the scientific missions have been compromised by military involvement, but you could equally say that the missions wouldn't have occurred at all without Congress funding it as a quasi-military program.
The military needs satellites launched. That requires some NASA folks to get in that shuttle and get some flying time. That is better than playing with models in Florida. (see http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/kscpao/schedule/mixfl
Actually, this has not been true since Challenger. The schedule you point to shows no military space shuttle launches, because the Air Force quit its involvement in the shuttle program after 1986; the last DOD "classified" space shuttle mission was STS-53 in 1992. They restarted expendable launch vehicle production lines for rockets like Titan and Pegasus. At this time the military is actually forbidden from depending on a single launch vehicle. Military pilots and others who become astronauts are no longer DOD employees (although they retain rank, seniority, and certain benefits under longstanding policies).
So, no astronauts "fly" to launch military satellites anymore. The only astronaut flights now are NASA science flights and space station construction flights (and soon, crew delivery). The Air Force has even gone so far as to launch its own lunar satellite mission with virtually no NASA involvement.
Therefore, I believe that the military has been useful to our space program and hope thier interest will continue as it benefits the program as a whole.
You're about ten years too late.
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My first web experience was using the Cello browser, written by Cornell university in order to expand its gopher law offerings to the vastly superior hypertext.
This was only shortly after finding my first somewhat graphical ftp client.
I was working at a help desk in those days, and managed to convince my boss to let me play around with the internet in my spare time. I had a modem already, and a Unix shell account with access to newsgroups and mailing lists, but actually making a Windows PC talk to the internet was an incredibly wondrous thing [heh, still can be some days]. There wasn't even Trumpet Winsock in those days, nor a Novell-supplied winsock client -- I had to download two or three separate drivers, one of which had to be loaded into the Netware ODI client, and eventually it was all working. (Somebody else had a similar experience.)
Those were heady days.
I think I used Cello until Netscape came out.
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I wouldn't be so smug: Slashdot just spent 92 seconds opening this edit page. Before that I waited almost three minutes for the article page with comments to load. And before that, I was surfing in directly to a specific single comment from an external link -- that never opened at all. I finally gave up on that window.
I'm sure Linux/Apache (or whatever you guys are running on over here, I don't follow that gossip) does have an overall stability edge over Redmond product, but NT was never the joke it's made out to be around here and 2000 is even more competitive.
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The USPS eliminated the operations subsidy in 1983.
According to the 1999 Annual Report, the USPS had:
Operating Revenue of $63B
Operating Expenses of $62B
for a 3.3% margin. This margin is known to rise and fall in a roughly three-year cycle tied to postage stamp rate increases.
The US Government contributed $3 Billion in capital outlays, i.e. buildings, equipment, vehicles, and other permanent purchases. Clearly, though, this could be handled completely privately with a small increase in postage rates.
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See my other post.
And if I remember correctly, the Federal Reserve is actually private as well. That's right, the organization that prints money. All those crazy collectors coins, tours of the mints, and stuff of that sort make money.
Uh, wrong. The Federal Reserve is an independent agency run by a Presidentially-appointed board of governors, who also selects the Chairman (e.g. Alan Greenspan) with the consent of the Senate (like any Cabinet member). The Federal Reserve controls the money supply by setting bank reserve requirements and setting the federal discount rate.
This is quite different from the process of printing money (by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing) or minting coins (the US Mint). The printing of money is statutorily limited under the Federal Reserve central banking system in order to control inflation.
Doubtless you're thinking of many of the congressionally-mandated private corporations, such as Fannie Mae (formerly the Federal National Mortgage Corporation) or Freddie Mac. These are private stock corporations that simply have to answer to a congressional mandate to fulfill a specific function, while making money for their investors.
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The United States Postal Service, while originally spawned by the government, is not part of the government at this point in any way. It's an independant agency. So to say that it's a government agency that's carrying your correspondence is incorrect. They only have a little bit more to do with the government than UPS or FedEx.
The United States Post Office Department was once a cabinet-level agency, but that was changed in 1969, when it was converted to what is called an "independent establishment of the executive branch of the Government of the United States". The Postmaster General is appointed by a board of governors that the President appoints. Postal employees are counted as Federal employees.
Perhaps you're thinking of an independent quasi-governmental corporation like Amtrak. This solution was proposed but rejected by Congress during postal reform. The USPS is self-supporting and often acts like a company, but in reality it retains a Congressional mandate to offer flat-rate postal service to all parts of the US, whether or not it's profitable.
I know what you're saying, but you went too far in suggesting it's "not part of the government in any way". True, it has much more discretion and independence than most federal agencies, it's insulated from politics by having a governing board, and it is structured much more like a corporation than an agency. But it most certainly remains part of the government.
Whether the US will follow the lead of some other countries and spinoff the postal service as a public corporation remains to be seen. (Even Germany, when it spun off Deutsche Telekom, retained the bundespost as a government agency -- although to this day they own 51% of DT stock.) In the end the internet may eventually make snail mail obsolete, but not just yet. At this point postal mail is recognized as an essential service of government in almost every nation.
The Cato institute sponsored a talk on Postal Service privatization if you're interested.
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mattw sez:
think we should pass a law prohibiting politicians and members of the government from discussing or promoting laws which contradict, restrict, or attempt to invalidate constitutional rights. Try to restrict free speech? Get tossed.
We have this already. They're called elections.
Get fined. I'd love to see Orrin Hatch on trial for "attempting to violate the inalienable rights of constituents". Hah!
Yes, well, I'd hate to see any legislator on trial for political views. Even Orrin Hatch. Putting legislators on trial smacks of Putin's Russia.
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