Re:Penguin has been ignoring the issue since 2000
on
The Saga of Katie.com
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· Score: 2, Interesting
My solution, if I were her? Keep using it as my personal domain (albeit with a small disclaimer pointing at the correct URL for the book somewhere on the site, blended in with the design, and NO other acknowlegment); the legal owner can do whatever they want with the site, so Putnam can shove it, and if idiots can't read the "not affiliated with" disclaimer, then they're just that: idiots) and with no e-mail address posted for people to flame to.
I've actually only recently had a posted address on my site (I'm using my gmail account for this purpose; my other webmail account, from Yahoo, is a pure forced-registration spam trap) and I don't read the junk that spammers are sending to webmaster@...
Don't like the idiots? Ignore them. Your legal name? They have no case to take it, especially if you were there first. Remember that schoolyard advice to ignore bullies? These idiots are nothing more than bullies. Reacting to them is just going to make them try harder.
I block ads because they're so damned annoying. If advertisers want us to look at them, they need to stop plastering everything that moves, and some things that don't, with ads. I got tired of the ads taking up more space on the screen than the content.
Advertisers, are you listening? You had a chance and you blew it. It's your fault.
Apple has a reason (they developed Quicktime) to use that format. NPR didn't develop Real or WMA -- not quite an apt comparison there. No reason they can't offer multiple stream choices.
I should have said, though, that I requested an alternate choice, and instead of add an extra choice for people who want it, they just changed from one crappy format to another... without adding the extra option.
Although it is a common myth, VW does not own Porsche and Porsche does not own VW. The two companies do have a long history of working together on new models, however, dating back to the very first Volkswagen: Ferdinand Porsche designed the original air-cooled Beetle, then called the KdF-Wagen, as a government-sponsored initiative to build a simple, reliable, and cheap car that anyone could own (and there was a government-sponsored savings program, too).
The original creator of the program did not live to see the Beetle become the "people's car" he dreamed of, but Porsche Sr. did. I recall reading somewhere that he cried once upon seeing Beetles swarming all over the Autobahns, relatively soon before his death. (The Autobahn and the Beetle were designed to complement each other, and both are very amazing things.)
And yes, indeed: the Cayenne and Touareg are largely the same vehicle, the most obvious differences being some bodywork (I think the VW version looks better) and different interior fitments and different engine/suspension options.
VW does however own SEAT, Skoda, and Bentley as well as the makes you listed.
(Incidentally, while no civilian ever got a KDF-Wagen under the government savings program, some people who had taken part in the program were able to later get a discount on the version of the Beetle which finally did make it into civilian production.)
I don't think it's that. I think they're just being cheap because I can look into first class on the very same flight, if I'm not on Southwest, and they have REAL GLASS GLASSES.
Actually, you are. I bring my own on the rare times I fly because 1/4 a can of soda being watered down by excessive amounts of ice is not my idea of "a glass of something to drink". I tell them I can just drink it out of the can and they tell me I can't have the can. WTF?
Yes, there are mac viruses. Far, far less than there are today. What you see these days is mostly proof-of-concept stuff and "trojans" that aren't likely to spread far and that require a lot more user intervention than is typical on Windows. I should have said "fewer" instead of "no" viruses, and you got me there.
However, I still feel that they are easier to use (even my mom can do it, and she had a horrible time with Windows), are more secure, and there's a lot less spyware and adware for them out there.
Looking at just the cost to get the hardware is unwise. There's more to it than that -- aftermarket software, installation support costs, ongoing support costs, user support costs, cleaning viruses/spyware/spamware support costs, etc... all are a serious factor with Windows and the costs are lower or nonexistent (depending on category) for Macs and Linux.
These people are just locking themselves into paying MORE.
It's not so strange. It's bad because people have replaced a safe monoculture (no viruses, spyware, adware, easy to use) with a dangerous one (reverse all of the above).
I work at a university. I've been asked to redo the department's website. I work support. The new site will be playing up the benefits of Macs overtly and subtly.
Uranium is a radioactive material. Mere possesssion of radioactive materials has the potential to harm other people. For this reason, whether or not the possessor plans to do anything dangerous with it or simply store it in a box in a closet, there is always a potential to cause harm to otheres by the simple act of possession.
A piece of electronics, on the other hand, will harm no one if it is stored in a closet, regardless of whether the owner has modified it with a chip. A car that's been chipped to enhance its engine performance won't harm anyone just sitting in a driveway, or when being used on the roads -- it may be easier to speed if you chip your car, but the act of chipping your car doesn't mean you will speed. It may mean you want to rectify shortcomings that are inherent in its design (the manufacturer may have held its performance back because it didn't want to pay for better parts), and you legally own the car, so you are entitled to do as you wish with it -- especially since no one else is being harmed.
The potential to cause harm by possession of the item is the difference in these two examples.
It's very common for magazines and newspapers to edit images, especially those used for covers or front-page articles, although many papers will refuse to make substantial edits and keep the final image basically true to the original content.
So yes, the picture is probably edited to a point, but still doesn't greatly alter the original content or purpose of the image.
You do have a point about the fact that many of her characters have perfect recall, which makes me think, as I write this, of how common eidetic memory (or heightened memory) really is in the general population, and whether it's really tied to autism and Asperger's as I've seen other commenters say. (I'm not doubting them; I just don't know the answer.) Next time I read the book, though, I'll pay more attention to whether the man seems autistic or might have Asperger's (I know someone who was diagnosed with it and he's described the symptoms/effects to me before.)
I've always thought that Moreta herself was modeled after Amelia Earheart. I've seen a painting of her in a book called "People of Pern" and she's the spitting image of Amelia even down to the leather jacket and aviator's cap and flying goggles ("Curse you, Red Baron!") from WWI and the 20s-30s. And they both did disappear after round-the-world flights (on the last leg of the trip, no less) after overextending tolerance levels too far, and no trace of either was ever found. (There are plans, though, to search for Amelia's Electra on the ocean bottom near Howland Island.)
I didn't think all of McCaffrey's stuff ended up being the same... not too much so... though sometimes it did seem like some of the premises of some of the series were being stretched a little thin. Putting it all down and coming back to it some years later seems to have helped out, though I still prefer the earlier Pern books over the newer ones. (That's not considering the fact that there's still a problem of "the war is over, what do we do with the soldiers?" that makes later Pern books just not as... compelling. Frankly, it's always going to be more interesting to write about going to war than it is to write about the relatively boring stuff that happens once everybody goes back home and there's no need for a large military anymore and there are no battles).
Her son Todd is now writing some Pern books (Dragon's Kin was interesting, if not as engrossing as some of the other books, and now he's writing one called Dragon's Eye, which I'll check out from the library when it comes out.)
So if you need to go there to spend time with your dying father/grandfather BECAUSE HE'S DYING, they expect you to not eat anything while there, not stay anywhere, not get from the airport to where he's hospitalized, etc. etc. And the airlines are asshats and suddenly lose any recognition of the words "bereavement fare" and "family emergency" and "I cannot wait, I have to GO NOW" simply because of where you are trying to go (which is sadly typical of their behavior, I think, and a lot of why they're having money/image problems lately) just because of where your family happens to live.
That seems to me rather cold-hearted and discriminatory on the part of the airlines/government and unfairly passes judgment on those who just happen to be from a particular part of the world and immigrated here for whatever their reasons might have been. Those people haven't done anything wrong and yet they're being fined and thrown in jail for trying to do the same thing anyone else would do... like visit their family, send money back home from wages earned fairly, not necessarily their immediate family (yes, really, there's a law telling you who you have to send money to and how much)...
Discrimination doesn't have to be about skin color to be discrimination -- it can be ethnic, too. I can't believe these crazy laws are still on the books after literally half a century. Why hasn't Congress repealed this? I'm sure the families of immigrants (and immigrants themselves) can be heard if they want to, and I can't see why they wouldn't want to.
In one Anne McCaffrey novel I read, the local idiot savant was really good at remembering details about horse races -- he could not only remember every race a particular horse had won, but he could track the horse's lineage back over many many decades, which would be useful for breeding purposes. He was not able to function in normal society, so he'd been put to work for a stable that bred race horses.
It always seemed to me (though the novel never specified) that the man was likely autistic.
And don't bother to drop it in the box. It's a waste of time. It costs money and it'll get nuked and glow in the dark and sit in a warehouse for a couple weeks til the bill's already been passed. Fax or email it. It's the only way to be sure.
A lot. The blueprints were destroyed, and the infrastructure is no longer suitable for use with Apollo hardware.
However, that doesn't mean that we couldn't design new hardware along the same lines as Apollo, using the same reasoning the original engineers did, but at the same time incorporating new ideas and advances in technology.
The shuttle looks plenty sexy, though I guess it just depends on your preferences! I think it looks pretty cool, myself.
The original payload capacity of the Shuttle was 65,000 pounds into low earth orbit, though that's increased over the years. Shuttle payloads aren't constrained to LEO, though -- if they have attached kick motors, they can reach higher orbits or leave Earth's gravitational field entirely.
No, I don't think it would. MAYBE it would mean the end of the Shuttle program, but that's been in the works for a long time, and if they will ever stop cancelling potential replacements, we might find a way to get humans into orbit without using the Shuttle or Soyuz.
And who the hell are we to say what risks other people may and may not take with their lives? You don't have the right. Nor do I. If somebody wants to do something risky, THEY make the choice.
And if you read the details carefully, these missions ARE NOT against the CAIB report (what does Challenger have to do with it? The O-ring problem was addressed long ago with SRB segment joint redesigns). The sole problem here is a scared bureaucrat who is too much of a wimp to listen to what literally hundreds of people are trying to tell him and being far too literal and trying to put words in the mouths of others that know far more than he does about how this system works. An accountant has no business making those assumptions.
ALL launch systems have flaws. It's crazy to assume that they don't. The main problem with the Shuttle is that it doesn't have an escape system always available during the ascent. However, there's really no easy way around the fact that if you run into a problem during re-entry, you've got big problems. So future vehicles are going to be designed such that their heat shields aren't as vulnerable to pitting and debris strikes. The materials used on the Shuttle may well be used in the future, but in new ways that don't have the same kinds of problems we see now.
And the Hubble is NOT out of date -- yes, if you consider the original specifications, you could say so; however, the Hubble was designed to be maintained in orbit just so that it doesn't become obsolete. It has nearly all new instruments, new solar panels, new power supplies, etc. etc. And it doesn't have to be replaced when it's done such a fantastic job -- that's the entire point.
I made the mistake of opening up one of Anne McCaffrey's Pern novels as a soaking-in-tub read the other week, and I've gotten re-hooked on the series. While the books don't play this up (excepting a few of the later ones), the fact is that these books actually, to me at least, provide a surprising amount of insight into why NASA is falling apart and no longer inspiring like it once did.
The books are about a lost Terran colony (that's us) that has been out of touch with the rest of the universe by accident (a series of natural disasters shortly after the colony was formed destroyed much of the colony infrastructure) and design (frustration with wars, politics, etc. elsewhere meant the colonists were isolationists in search of a simpler life).
In the Pern series, all of the colonists were volunteers. So too are all astronauts (and, presumably, all cosmonauts and taikonauts; so far, the sole civilian astronaut was also a volunteer). They know the risks they take, and it's within their rights, I think, to want to take them. Right now we have the bureaucrats running scared, and they're losing sight of that fact. Too bad, too, because Senator Jake Garn flew on the shuttle once and knows the risks involved. (Is he still a senator?)
So that's strike one against NASA -- they've gotten scared.
What's important to think about here is this: anyone who's read the series knows that there's absolutely no sign of any Terran involvement anywhere. Why might that be?
While the initial planetary exploration efforts were government-funded (see Dragonsdawn for more about the intial survey, and some of the associated short stories like Rescue Run), the actual settling of the planet was carried out by private interests. And that's because the government doesn't really have an interest in supporting long, involved work like that (because of the costs, relatively low return, and so on) beyond adding to its territory ("we have a colony there; we'll defend it; we can say we have a bigger empire now, and the people can pay taxes"). But if it eventually becomes generally accepted that the surrounding area is part of a nation's territory and no trouble ever is stirred up there, it'll just sort of quietly be forgotten except for boundaries on some maps gathering dust in some library somewhere, which (while never explained in the books) is quite a likely scenario.
Why should the government continue to care, when private interests in the form of corporations or non-profit organizations will arise spontaneously to do the job once it's been proven possible by all that government research collectively supported by our tax dollars (remember, NASA gets 1-2% of the federal budget, if even that)? The focus shifts from government sponsorship to private over time. (This transition is in progress now for spaceflight in the form of the X-Prize.) Once private industry figures out how to make a profit out of it the way it did with the "empty" Americas, I'm betting that all kinds of private-industry spacecraft will be built (hotels, asteroid mining are just two of the most common conjectures) and will eventually vastly outnumber government craft, as is already the case with communications satellites. The government doesn't have to deal with managing and funding all that -- it just issues regulations and collects taxes and fees. Just like it issues Charters to proposed colonies, licenses spacecraft, and collects application fees as well as (presumably) taxes from the colony itself once it's formed. Politicians are, after all, inherently lazy.
So that's strike two -- the loss of government incentive to become involved, because there's nothing in it for them anymore and because private interests have arisen that can do the job for less and with greater efficiency (Arianespace, Energia RSC).
There's a real-life parallel here: the exploration of the Americas, what we now call the New World. The original 1492 Columbus expedition was government-funded and was originally intended to open up trade routes (back to
The astronauts are actually quite in favor of doing the mission. They know what they signed up for and they don't like bureaucrats telling them that oh no, we suddenly aren't going to let you do your jobs. Guess what... spaceflight is risky.
Set network.http.sendRefererHeader to false in about:config and the links will start working again. Or use Tabbrowser Extensions to temporarily block http referrer headers.
Idea for extension (I can't program, but a credit in the credits section would be great;)): allow blacklisting of referral header transmission depending on what domain you're about to visit, e.g. if bugzilla won't let you come from certain sites, don't transmit referrer headers when clicking a link that leads to mozilla.org.
I know about those cases -- but has anyone yet been sued for hacking by planting the spyware? The spyware companies have claimed they ask permission to install first; have we yet had a case in which a site that does drive-by downloads is captured as evidence, then the maker of the spyware it installs AND the website been hit with lawsuits?
Slashdot Mirror
My solution, if I were her? Keep using it as my personal domain (albeit with a small disclaimer pointing at the correct URL for the book somewhere on the site, blended in with the design, and NO other acknowlegment); the legal owner can do whatever they want with the site, so Putnam can shove it, and if idiots can't read the "not affiliated with" disclaimer, then they're just that: idiots) and with no e-mail address posted for people to flame to.
...
I've actually only recently had a posted address on my site (I'm using my gmail account for this purpose; my other webmail account, from Yahoo, is a pure forced-registration spam trap) and I don't read the junk that spammers are sending to webmaster@
Don't like the idiots? Ignore them. Your legal name? They have no case to take it, especially if you were there first. Remember that schoolyard advice to ignore bullies? These idiots are nothing more than bullies. Reacting to them is just going to make them try harder.
They can fucking deal. They've been getting fat off everyone for too damn long as it is.
Get it here (this link points to the free version):
Order: RealPlayer for Mac OS X
The Mac version is amazingly suckage-free. The Windows version, on the other hand... yegh. But then, I only use the winbox for games anyway.
I block ads because they're so damned annoying. If advertisers want us to look at them, they need to stop plastering everything that moves, and some things that don't, with ads. I got tired of the ads taking up more space on the screen than the content.
Advertisers, are you listening? You had a chance and you blew it. It's your fault.
Apple has a reason (they developed Quicktime) to use that format. NPR didn't develop Real or WMA -- not quite an apt comparison there. No reason they can't offer multiple stream choices.
I should have said, though, that I requested an alternate choice, and instead of add an extra choice for people who want it, they just changed from one crappy format to another... without adding the extra option.
I complained to my local NPR station for only supporting Real since I wanted to be able to use iTunes to listen.
They switched from Real to WMA.
Gee, guys, that doesn't solve my problem at all.
Although it is a common myth, VW does not own Porsche and Porsche does not own VW. The two companies do have a long history of working together on new models, however, dating back to the very first Volkswagen: Ferdinand Porsche designed the original air-cooled Beetle, then called the KdF-Wagen, as a government-sponsored initiative to build a simple, reliable, and cheap car that anyone could own (and there was a government-sponsored savings program, too).
The original creator of the program did not live to see the Beetle become the "people's car" he dreamed of, but Porsche Sr. did. I recall reading somewhere that he cried once upon seeing Beetles swarming all over the Autobahns, relatively soon before his death. (The Autobahn and the Beetle were designed to complement each other, and both are very amazing things.)
And yes, indeed: the Cayenne and Touareg are largely the same vehicle, the most obvious differences being some bodywork (I think the VW version looks better) and different interior fitments and different engine/suspension options.
VW does however own SEAT, Skoda, and Bentley as well as the makes you listed.
(Incidentally, while no civilian ever got a KDF-Wagen under the government savings program, some people who had taken part in the program were able to later get a discount on the version of the Beetle which finally did make it into civilian production.)
(though I have to admit that I have only flown Southwest for the last couple of years, so I don't know what "regular" airlines do these days.)
I don't think it's that. I think they're just being cheap because I can look into first class on the very same flight, if I'm not on Southwest, and they have REAL GLASS GLASSES.
Actually, you are. I bring my own on the rare times I fly because 1/4 a can of soda being watered down by excessive amounts of ice is not my idea of "a glass of something to drink". I tell them I can just drink it out of the can and they tell me I can't have the can. WTF?
Yes, there are mac viruses. Far, far less than there are today. What you see these days is mostly proof-of-concept stuff and "trojans" that aren't likely to spread far and that require a lot more user intervention than is typical on Windows. I should have said "fewer" instead of "no" viruses, and you got me there.
However, I still feel that they are easier to use (even my mom can do it, and she had a horrible time with Windows), are more secure, and there's a lot less spyware and adware for them out there.
Looking at just the cost to get the hardware is unwise. There's more to it than that -- aftermarket software, installation support costs, ongoing support costs, user support costs, cleaning viruses/spyware/spamware support costs, etc ... all are a serious factor with Windows and the costs are lower or nonexistent (depending on category) for Macs and Linux.
These people are just locking themselves into paying MORE.
It's not so strange. It's bad because people have replaced a safe monoculture (no viruses, spyware, adware, easy to use) with a dangerous one (reverse all of the above).
I work at a university. I've been asked to redo the department's website. I work support. The new site will be playing up the benefits of Macs overtly and subtly.
Bwahahahahah.
Uranium is a radioactive material. Mere possesssion of radioactive materials has the potential to harm other people. For this reason, whether or not the possessor plans to do anything dangerous with it or simply store it in a box in a closet, there is always a potential to cause harm to otheres by the simple act of possession.
A piece of electronics, on the other hand, will harm no one if it is stored in a closet, regardless of whether the owner has modified it with a chip. A car that's been chipped to enhance its engine performance won't harm anyone just sitting in a driveway, or when being used on the roads -- it may be easier to speed if you chip your car, but the act of chipping your car doesn't mean you will speed. It may mean you want to rectify shortcomings that are inherent in its design (the manufacturer may have held its performance back because it didn't want to pay for better parts), and you legally own the car, so you are entitled to do as you wish with it -- especially since no one else is being harmed.
The potential to cause harm by possession of the item is the difference in these two examples.
It's very common for magazines and newspapers to edit images, especially those used for covers or front-page articles, although many papers will refuse to make substantial edits and keep the final image basically true to the original content.
So yes, the picture is probably edited to a point, but still doesn't greatly alter the original content or purpose of the image.
Wow, someone recognized the book! Great! :)
... not too much so ... though sometimes it did seem like some of the premises of some of the series were being stretched a little thin. Putting it all down and coming back to it some years later seems to have helped out, though I still prefer the earlier Pern books over the newer ones. (That's not considering the fact that there's still a problem of "the war is over, what do we do with the soldiers?" that makes later Pern books just not as ... compelling. Frankly, it's always going to be more interesting to write about going to war than it is to write about the relatively boring stuff that happens once everybody goes back home and there's no need for a large military anymore and there are no battles).
You do have a point about the fact that many of her characters have perfect recall, which makes me think, as I write this, of how common eidetic memory (or heightened memory) really is in the general population, and whether it's really tied to autism and Asperger's as I've seen other commenters say. (I'm not doubting them; I just don't know the answer.) Next time I read the book, though, I'll pay more attention to whether the man seems autistic or might have Asperger's (I know someone who was diagnosed with it and he's described the symptoms/effects to me before.)
I've always thought that Moreta herself was modeled after Amelia Earheart. I've seen a painting of her in a book called "People of Pern" and she's the spitting image of Amelia even down to the leather jacket and aviator's cap and flying goggles ("Curse you, Red Baron!") from WWI and the 20s-30s. And they both did disappear after round-the-world flights (on the last leg of the trip, no less) after overextending tolerance levels too far, and no trace of either was ever found. (There are plans, though, to search for Amelia's Electra on the ocean bottom near Howland Island.)
I didn't think all of McCaffrey's stuff ended up being the same
Her son Todd is now writing some Pern books (Dragon's Kin was interesting, if not as engrossing as some of the other books, and now he's writing one called Dragon's Eye, which I'll check out from the library when it comes out.)
So if you need to go there to spend time with your dying father/grandfather BECAUSE HE'S DYING, they expect you to not eat anything while there, not stay anywhere, not get from the airport to where he's hospitalized, etc. etc. And the airlines are asshats and suddenly lose any recognition of the words "bereavement fare" and "family emergency" and "I cannot wait, I have to GO NOW" simply because of where you are trying to go (which is sadly typical of their behavior, I think, and a lot of why they're having money/image problems lately) just because of where your family happens to live.
...
That seems to me rather cold-hearted and discriminatory on the part of the airlines/government and unfairly passes judgment on those who just happen to be from a particular part of the world and immigrated here for whatever their reasons might have been. Those people haven't done anything wrong and yet they're being fined and thrown in jail for trying to do the same thing anyone else would do... like visit their family, send money back home from wages earned fairly, not necessarily their immediate family (yes, really, there's a law telling you who you have to send money to and how much)
Discrimination doesn't have to be about skin color to be discrimination -- it can be ethnic, too. I can't believe these crazy laws are still on the books after literally half a century. Why hasn't Congress repealed this? I'm sure the families of immigrants (and immigrants themselves) can be heard if they want to, and I can't see why they wouldn't want to.
In one Anne McCaffrey novel I read, the local idiot savant was really good at remembering details about horse races -- he could not only remember every race a particular horse had won, but he could track the horse's lineage back over many many decades, which would be useful for breeding purposes. He was not able to function in normal society, so he'd been put to work for a stable that bred race horses.
It always seemed to me (though the novel never specified) that the man was likely autistic.
And don't bother to drop it in the box. It's a waste of time. It costs money and it'll get nuked and glow in the dark and sit in a warehouse for a couple weeks til the bill's already been passed. Fax or email it. It's the only way to be sure.
A lot. The blueprints were destroyed, and the infrastructure is no longer suitable for use with Apollo hardware.
However, that doesn't mean that we couldn't design new hardware along the same lines as Apollo, using the same reasoning the original engineers did, but at the same time incorporating new ideas and advances in technology.
The shuttle looks plenty sexy, though I guess it just depends on your preferences! I think it looks pretty cool, myself.
The original payload capacity of the Shuttle was 65,000 pounds into low earth orbit, though that's increased over the years. Shuttle payloads aren't constrained to LEO, though -- if they have attached kick motors, they can reach higher orbits or leave Earth's gravitational field entirely.
No, I don't think it would. MAYBE it would mean the end of the Shuttle program, but that's been in the works for a long time, and if they will ever stop cancelling potential replacements, we might find a way to get humans into orbit without using the Shuttle or Soyuz.
And who the hell are we to say what risks other people may and may not take with their lives? You don't have the right. Nor do I. If somebody wants to do something risky, THEY make the choice.
And if you read the details carefully, these missions ARE NOT against the CAIB report (what does Challenger have to do with it? The O-ring problem was addressed long ago with SRB segment joint redesigns). The sole problem here is a scared bureaucrat who is too much of a wimp to listen to what literally hundreds of people are trying to tell him and being far too literal and trying to put words in the mouths of others that know far more than he does about how this system works. An accountant has no business making those assumptions.
ALL launch systems have flaws. It's crazy to assume that they don't. The main problem with the Shuttle is that it doesn't have an escape system always available during the ascent. However, there's really no easy way around the fact that if you run into a problem during re-entry, you've got big problems. So future vehicles are going to be designed such that their heat shields aren't as vulnerable to pitting and debris strikes. The materials used on the Shuttle may well be used in the future, but in new ways that don't have the same kinds of problems we see now.
And the Hubble is NOT out of date -- yes, if you consider the original specifications, you could say so; however, the Hubble was designed to be maintained in orbit just so that it doesn't become obsolete. It has nearly all new instruments, new solar panels, new power supplies, etc. etc. And it doesn't have to be replaced when it's done such a fantastic job -- that's the entire point.
I made the mistake of opening up one of Anne McCaffrey's Pern novels as a soaking-in-tub read the other week, and I've gotten re-hooked on the series. While the books don't play this up (excepting a few of the later ones), the fact is that these books actually, to me at least, provide a surprising amount of insight into why NASA is falling apart and no longer inspiring like it once did.
The books are about a lost Terran colony (that's us) that has been out of touch with the rest of the universe by accident (a series of natural disasters shortly after the colony was formed destroyed much of the colony infrastructure) and design (frustration with wars, politics, etc. elsewhere meant the colonists were isolationists in search of a simpler life).
In the Pern series, all of the colonists were volunteers. So too are all astronauts (and, presumably, all cosmonauts and taikonauts; so far, the sole civilian astronaut was also a volunteer). They know the risks they take, and it's within their rights, I think, to want to take them. Right now we have the bureaucrats running scared, and they're losing sight of that fact. Too bad, too, because Senator Jake Garn flew on the shuttle once and knows the risks involved. (Is he still a senator?)
So that's strike one against NASA -- they've gotten scared.
What's important to think about here is this: anyone who's read the series knows that there's absolutely no sign of any Terran involvement anywhere. Why might that be?
While the initial planetary exploration efforts were government-funded (see Dragonsdawn for more about the intial survey, and some of the associated short stories like Rescue Run), the actual settling of the planet was carried out by private interests. And that's because the government doesn't really have an interest in supporting long, involved work like that (because of the costs, relatively low return, and so on) beyond adding to its territory ("we have a colony there; we'll defend it; we can say we have a bigger empire now, and the people can pay taxes"). But if it eventually becomes generally accepted that the surrounding area is part of a nation's territory and no trouble ever is stirred up there, it'll just sort of quietly be forgotten except for boundaries on some maps gathering dust in some library somewhere, which (while never explained in the books) is quite a likely scenario.
Why should the government continue to care, when private interests in the form of corporations or non-profit organizations will arise spontaneously to do the job once it's been proven possible by all that government research collectively supported by our tax dollars (remember, NASA gets 1-2% of the federal budget, if even that)? The focus shifts from government sponsorship to private over time. (This transition is in progress now for spaceflight in the form of the X-Prize.) Once private industry figures out how to make a profit out of it the way it did with the "empty" Americas, I'm betting that all kinds of private-industry spacecraft will be built (hotels, asteroid mining are just two of the most common conjectures) and will eventually vastly outnumber government craft, as is already the case with communications satellites. The government doesn't have to deal with managing and funding all that -- it just issues regulations and collects taxes and fees. Just like it issues Charters to proposed colonies, licenses spacecraft, and collects application fees as well as (presumably) taxes from the colony itself once it's formed. Politicians are, after all, inherently lazy.
So that's strike two -- the loss of government incentive to become involved, because there's nothing in it for them anymore and because private interests have arisen that can do the job for less and with greater efficiency (Arianespace, Energia RSC).
There's a real-life parallel here: the exploration of the Americas, what we now call the New World. The original 1492 Columbus expedition was government-funded and was originally intended to open up trade routes (back to
The astronauts are actually quite in favor of doing the mission. They know what they signed up for and they don't like bureaucrats telling them that oh no, we suddenly aren't going to let you do your jobs. Guess what... spaceflight is risky.
Stupid bureaucrats.
Set network.http.sendRefererHeader to false in about:config and the links will start working again. Or use Tabbrowser Extensions to temporarily block http referrer headers.
;)): allow blacklisting of referral header transmission depending on what domain you're about to visit, e.g. if bugzilla won't let you come from certain sites, don't transmit referrer headers when clicking a link that leads to mozilla.org.
Idea for extension (I can't program, but a credit in the credits section would be great
I know about those cases -- but has anyone yet been sued for hacking by planting the spyware? The spyware companies have claimed they ask permission to install first; have we yet had a case in which a site that does drive-by downloads is captured as evidence, then the maker of the spyware it installs AND the website been hit with lawsuits?