In this case, a stable, well-known and quite familiar technology is "the best kit we can."
If only it were indeed so. But the technology seems to me to be none of stable, well-known, or familiar -- a lot of the failure space of the system simply isn't mapped, partly due to operating conditions and partly to the ludicrously small number of flights we've actually made (for a 20 year program). It's becoming apparent that this is not an isolated incident; NASA seems to have known things weren't quite right for a while. (This is not the first time, for example, that foam insulation has impacted the shuttle on launch. I don't care if the stuff weighs only 3 oz.; it's not the sort of thing that should be accepted as routine.)
By the reasoning you offer, it was better when the airlines allowed their fleets to climb into the double (or triple) decades, and it was folly (on safety grounds) to undergo the modernization of the past few years. I don't know about you, but I prefer flying in a 5-year-old plane than a 25-year-old one.
What was needed -- what remains needed -- is a steady, rational program of incremental improvement and many generations of vehicles with shorter actual use times. It's almost as if the world stopped investigating aircraft after, say, the Sopwith Camel.
the space shuttle's brilliance was the fact that it was reusable
Given that the lead time between flights has increased, the complexity of the system has increased, and the costs (rather than, as promised, decreasing) have in fact also increased... perhaps the Shuttle isn't all that "brilliant" after all. The future almost certainly does lie with resuable craft eventually... but our "future" got stuck in 1981 and hasn't moved forward from the test-bed vehicle to true operational usability.
Space Walks also take a long time, the shuttle may not be that large but to inspect it thuroughly before re-entry would add considerable resource requirements to every launch.
Not every launch. Just every launch that is accompanied by a filmed collision event. Remember, the day of launch, they knew something had fallen from the tank to the left wing. Sure, they all decided it was 3 oz. of foam and couldn't have done much damage. I think it's irresponsible, though, that no attempt was made to actually inspect the wing. A launch-collision event is an anomaly -- it requires extra effort.
Perhaps the real crime is that we've been flying these buckets for 20+ years but haven't developed at least a camera drone that could be manuvered to inspect any given patch of the craft.
Re:Did you take Physics in high school
on
Latest Columbia News
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Indeed, I even teach it.
Blockquoth the poster:
Ok, they were in low orbit, travelling at Mach 18, and you want to send up a rescue mission.
Um, travelling that speed relative to the Earth. I am pretty sure that Atlantis, being of essentially the same type as Columbia, could have executed a similar orbital plan. In other words, it would easily have the capability to match orbits. At that point, the relative speeds are zero, making your next point
First of all i don't even want to get into the difficulties of transferring a crew from one shuttle to another
less relevant that you might want. I think a tether system between the two orbiters would have been (comparatively) simple to set up and operate. It would be risky and daring, but better than leaving seven people to die in space.
[sigh] why doesn't anyone seem to understand that, with the shuttle at least, it doesn't work that way. Do you have any idea how much preparing a shuttle launch costs?
[Double sigh] Why doesn't anyone seem to understand the frustration of many that it takes so much time and money to ready a Shuttle launch? That's why they should have been retired long, long ago. To be serious in space, we need round-the-clock launch capabilities, which means (a) many more spacecraft that are (b) much more robust. Sadly, that means (c) more money -- not much as far as globe-straddling post-empires go, but more than the public seems willing to spend.
Atlantis, scheduled to go up the first of March, actually could have been launched in a week or so. But only if they said to heck with most of the safety checks. If something goes wrong (as it did on Columbia WITH all the safety stuff), you've screwed two shuttles and two crews, instead of one.
Do you seriously think there is even one member of the astronaut corps that would not accept that risk, rather than abandon the Columbia crew?
Even so, what do you do then? There's no way to "dock" two shuttles and Columbia didn't have jetpack suits onboard, and I don't believe everyone was rated for EVA.
Um, any reason that Atlantis could bring along the jet-pack spacesuits and then have someone ferry them to Columbia? Sure, they weren't EVA-rated, but they'd have had a hell of an incentive to learn fast. And I've got to believe that a tethered spacewalk -- out, across, in -- is simple enough to be picked up by people already selected for high intelligence.
A rescue would have been thinkable... except for people cuffed by their own earlier pattern of thought.
Actually, totally IMPOSSIBLE. They were in to low an orbit to dock with ISS, and no where near enough fuel to get there.
Back before the proposed space station became the crippled bastardized joke that is the ISS, it was proposed to build a class of "orbital transfer vehicles" which would have lived entirely in space and would be used to ferry things from low orbits to higher ones. Had we had a real space station program, where the station is the hub of an entire orbital infrastructure, then plucking off the astronauts from a doomed Columbia would have been possible.
Then again, if we had a real functioning orbital infrastructure, the Columbia might not have been doomed... it might have been reparable (albeit expensively) in orbit. Indeed, with a real orbital infrastructure, we wouldn't still be flying these 1970s-era jalopies.
What would be the point of inspecting the spacecraft in orbit?
Because more data is better than less data. Maybe there is nothing that could have been done... but maybe there was. There'd be a hell of an incentive to find something. Are you arguing that it would have been better, during Apollo 13, if the oxygen had bled away quietly (instead of explosively) and the batteries drain slowly so that the astronauts didn't know they were running out until just before re-entry? Of course not.
We don't know what might have been done, but there could have two weeks of round-the-clock brainstorming to find something.
Oh dear God please spare us from mentioning the ESTEEMED boy genius Harlan Ellison and his freakin' masterpiece "City on the Edge of Forever"!
More than that, I had the "opportunity" to read the original script, per the book he put out a few years back. Boy, did that stink! The only good parts were what eventually made it into the filmed script, which Ellison publicly and repeatedly disavowed. His contributions obscured a good story, which happily was salvaged.
I think the movie failed simply due to horrible timing. The previews had me interested in seeing it, but by the time I had seen The Two Towers three times, I wasn't very interested in hitting the theater for a week or two, and by then Nemisis was out of the theaters. If it came back to a big screen this week, I would probably go out and see it. I'm sure that's true of a lot of geeks.
Maybe. I didn't go see it because the trailers made me think it was hackneyed, confused, effects-driven, and cliche. I don't know if any of that is true, because I haven't felt one iota to go see it now, or to await its release on DVD. The Trek movies have been getting steadily worse and this one just failed to convince me it would rise above the threshhold.
Besides, haven't they destroyed the Enterprise in, like, every Next Generation movie?:)
Who the hell actually types in domain names anymore. My first stop on the net is usually google. Why? There is no way of telling where a domain name actually goes.
Wow. It must be interesting to cruise the Net and never return to a site you've already visited. I don't use domain names for search purposes. But once I've found slashdot.org or bn.com or thinkgeek.com, yes, indeed, I use those to jump right to the page I want without having to pass through a search engine. I like google -- which, of course, I get to by "google.com" -- but I don't need to visit them every time I want to buy a book, for example.
Instead it's more crap about Saddam. Ever hear of subliminal messages? Anyway, I know war is inevitable but my feeling (and apparently the feeling of every other news channel except FNC) is that for a few brief hours the looming war is what's irrelevant.
God help me, but I'm about to defend Fox News Channel... IMHO, they're using the ticker in exactly the right manner. The main story occupies the main window, but other news doesn't suddenly stop happening. I don't know if what they're running really counts as "news", but that would be an appropriate thing to run.
In a country where Space Exploration is as deeply rooted as Conflict is in another, how can anyone dispel such a history in such a way? You cannot.
You must not have been paying attention after Challenger, then. In 1986 we heard calls for the suspension of the manned space program indefinitely. and a lot of "Anything worth doing, robots can do". This is not the same nation as was founded by the pioneers; we've grown bigger, older, and more comfortable. While there are legions of people who say, "I'll go no matter what the risks", our risk-averse PR-driven TV-motivated so-called leaders will worry more about how it plays on the evening news.
I don't want to be callous and this is a tragedy for the families and the two nations. But in almost 50 years of spaceflight we've suffered, now, just 17 casualties. That's not actually such a bad record when open a new frontier... just ask the settles of Roanoke.
Welcome to hell. It may be a bit warm here, but there's plenty of music and movies for sale.
And, thanks to ClearChannel, they all look and sound exactly the same.:)
Re:Where are you getting this? Read the DMCA!
on
Copyright Rumblings
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· Score: 1
Blockquoth the poster:
But a technology is only banned if it...
- "... is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title"
So, exactly as I said: If two pieces are protected by the same DRM scheme, and one of them passes into public domain, it is still prohibited to "traffic" in any device that circumvented the DRM to access it. It would remain so until the last item protected under the scheme passed into public domain. If the content source simply placed one item per year under the DRM, it would apply to all materials indefinitely.
And, unlike copyright, the "anticircumvention technology" doesn't have to expire. So, although the work could be in public domain, access to it is still restricted under this "copyright" act.
There are no exemptions in the DMCA for access to public domain works behind DRM schemes -- at least, not behind ones that happen to also be used on protected materials. If you can find it, I'd be much happier. But I am not going to hold my breath.
Well, if the technology can be used to decode a significant amount of public domain content, then it is probably not "primarily designed" for work protected under title 17.
This is of course nonsense. The technology could have been developed to protect works while under copyright, but -- for now, at least -- copyright does expire. The eventual passing into public domain of some works does not retroactively change the fact that the DRM was primarily -- indeed, explicitly -- designed to protect covered works.
Re:So let me get this straight...
on
Copyright Rumblings
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Blockquoth the poster:
Is that correct? Does the DMCA not apply to circumventing acess protection to copyright works? How can this still apply after the copyright has expired?
Yes, it's correct. The DMCA, while nominally a copyright act, has a lot of (hopefully) unintended consequences. Because a DRM scheme might be used on many, many works -- and because those works would pass into public domain at different times -- work on breaking any DRM scheme is prohibited. Consider: Books A, B, and C are all protected by Frobozco Magic Digital Rights Management Technology. Book A goes into public domain in, say, 2077, but B and C enter public domain in 2082. If you're allowed to crack FMDRMT in order to read Book A, you'd also possess the technology to read B and C, even though that would be infringement.
Now, you might wonder, shouldn't it be the actual infringement that is illegal, and not the mere potential to infringe? Old school, yes. But not in the brave new world of intellectual "property".
Of course, this encourages the Content Cartel to lock up everything behind the same DRM, and to continue using it for many many years. That way, even the "public domain" works cannot be legally accessed without paying a fee. That's the way we're going to get perpetual copyright. The Sony Bono Act was -- pardon the pun -- strictly Mickey Mouse in comparison.
I guess you get more protection for your patent if it takes 3+ years from application -> issuance.
Isn't that the rationale behind so-called "submarine" patents... to keep running the clock, so that your protection never expires? (And so you can broaden the patent to include new technologies along the way...)
I hate this preemptive rulemaking bullshit. If something causes a problem out of proportion to it's benefit then ban it. Certainly they shouldn't be banned until they have been shown to be dangerous!
Wow, I usually try not to flame. But this is just stupid. Let's let everything happen, then pick up the pieces? That's outright irresponsible. "Really -- I just want my own nuke to feel secure. Let's give everyone a nuke. If it's a problem, we can ban them later."
The "unknown" is not intrinsically unknowable. You can take a look at traffic densities and the Segway footprint and make an intelligent prediction about its impact. And, ultralibertarians aside, the purpose of a government is, in part, to secure the safety of its citizens. They made a judgment -- which is exactly what elected officials are elected to do. So the decision doesn't favor your latest cool toy. Get over it.
Common sense sometimes has to wear silly clothes in the courts.
Granted. And it's unlikely that a Customs case is going to have any precedential value. But all we can go on is what the judge says forms the basis of her judgment, and what she wrote does disturb me. A judge has a responsibility to rule well and to make sure the ruling doesn't do damage itself. In other words, the judge shouldn't be dressing up common sense, or people might mistake the costume for the content.
Before the comic book geeks get worked up about "They may not be Homo Sapiens, but they're human dammit", it's just a stupid tax matter.
OK, so this shouldn't be the spark for the Mutant Uprising. But it's a little more relevant than you seem to think. To be "dolls", the figures had to depict humans. Otherwise, they were "toys". So the issue actually was, "Do the X-Men count as human?" This in turn demands we answer, "What makes a human human?"
And that's more important than you might want to admit. Sure, we're probably not likely to see Xavier and his cohorts on the streets of Manhattan. But how about cloned people? Or genetically modified -- even genetically enhanced -- people? What about, say, a weightlifter who's been designed from before birth to be the world's best weightlifter ever? What if the genetic modification was done under the sponsorship of a corporation? What if that corporation later asserted "property rights" to the modified person?
I found the judge's criteria, as quoted, quite disturbing. Apparently differing abilities was enough to classify the mutants as "non-human". The judge focused on their mutant powers, such as the ability to control storms or to withstand injury. Apparently she did not focus on their ability to speak, to reason, to create, to love... none of the things that make being human a worthwhile thing. People born without limbs are also "differently abled". People without sight often have sharper hearing. Does this make those people "other than human"?
Although the actual case is a bit of a joke, the issues raised are deep and pressing. We're heading to a place where the very notion of "human" will be under strain as never before. Perhaps it's good that somebody is reasoning about it ahead of time -- though I could have wished for a better result.
You're not trolling and I hope I'm not, either, but what matters here is the weighted average. That is, there may be a lot more people in, say, India than the US -- but are there more people using computers?
Slashdot Mirror
If only it were indeed so. But the technology seems to me to be none of stable, well-known, or familiar -- a lot of the failure space of the system simply isn't mapped, partly due to operating conditions and partly to the ludicrously small number of flights we've actually made (for a 20 year program). It's becoming apparent that this is not an isolated incident; NASA seems to have known things weren't quite right for a while. (This is not the first time, for example, that foam insulation has impacted the shuttle on launch. I don't care if the stuff weighs only 3 oz.; it's not the sort of thing that should be accepted as routine.)
By the reasoning you offer, it was better when the airlines allowed their fleets to climb into the double (or triple) decades, and it was folly (on safety grounds) to undergo the modernization of the past few years. I don't know about you, but I prefer flying in a 5-year-old plane than a 25-year-old one.
What was needed -- what remains needed -- is a steady, rational program of incremental improvement and many generations of vehicles with shorter actual use times. It's almost as if the world stopped investigating aircraft after, say, the Sopwith Camel.
Given that the lead time between flights has increased, the complexity of the system has increased, and the costs (rather than, as promised, decreasing) have in fact also increased... perhaps the Shuttle isn't all that "brilliant" after all. The future almost certainly does lie with resuable craft eventually
Not every launch. Just every launch that is accompanied by a filmed collision event. Remember, the day of launch, they knew something had fallen from the tank to the left wing. Sure, they all decided it was 3 oz. of foam and couldn't have done much damage. I think it's irresponsible, though, that no attempt was made to actually inspect the wing. A launch-collision event is an anomaly -- it requires extra effort.
Perhaps the real crime is that we've been flying these buckets for 20+ years but haven't developed at least a camera drone that could be manuvered to inspect any given patch of the craft.
Blockquoth the poster:
Um, travelling that speed relative to the Earth. I am pretty sure that Atlantis, being of essentially the same type as Columbia, could have executed a similar orbital plan. In other words, it would easily have the capability to match orbits. At that point, the relative speeds are zero, making your next point
less relevant that you might want. I think a tether system between the two orbiters would have been (comparatively) simple to set up and operate. It would be risky and daring, but better than leaving seven people to die in space.
[Double sigh] Why doesn't anyone seem to understand the frustration of many that it takes so much time and money to ready a Shuttle launch? That's why they should have been retired long, long ago. To be serious in space, we need round-the-clock launch capabilities, which means (a) many more spacecraft that are (b) much more robust. Sadly, that means (c) more money -- not much as far as globe-straddling post-empires go, but more than the public seems willing to spend.
Do you seriously think there is even one member of the astronaut corps that would not accept that risk, rather than abandon the Columbia crew?
Um, any reason that Atlantis could bring along the jet-pack spacesuits and then have someone ferry them to Columbia? Sure, they weren't EVA-rated, but they'd have had a hell of an incentive to learn fast. And I've got to believe that a tethered spacewalk -- out, across, in -- is simple enough to be picked up by people already selected for high intelligence.
A rescue would have been thinkable
Back before the proposed space station became the crippled bastardized joke that is the ISS, it was proposed to build a class of "orbital transfer vehicles" which would have lived entirely in space and would be used to ferry things from low orbits to higher ones. Had we had a real space station program, where the station is the hub of an entire orbital infrastructure, then plucking off the astronauts from a doomed Columbia would have been possible.
Then again, if we had a real functioning orbital infrastructure, the Columbia might not have been doomed... it might have been reparable (albeit expensively) in orbit. Indeed, with a real orbital infrastructure, we wouldn't still be flying these 1970s-era jalopies.
Because more data is better than less data. Maybe there is nothing that could have been done
We don't know what might have been done, but there could have two weeks of round-the-clock brainstorming to find something.
More than that, I had the "opportunity" to read the original script, per the book he put out a few years back. Boy, did that stink! The only good parts were what eventually made it into the filmed script, which Ellison publicly and repeatedly disavowed. His contributions obscured a good story, which happily was salvaged.
Maybe. I didn't go see it because the trailers made me think it was hackneyed, confused, effects-driven, and cliche. I don't know if any of that is true, because I haven't felt one iota to go see it now, or to await its release on DVD. The Trek movies have been getting steadily worse and this one just failed to convince me it would rise above the threshhold.
Besides, haven't they destroyed the Enterprise in, like, every Next Generation movie?
Wow. It must be interesting to cruise the Net and never return to a site you've already visited. I don't use domain names for search purposes. But once I've found slashdot.org or bn.com or thinkgeek.com, yes, indeed, I use those to jump right to the page I want without having to pass through a search engine. I like google -- which, of course, I get to by "google.com" -- but I don't need to visit them every time I want to buy a book, for example.
God help me, but I'm about to defend Fox News Channel... IMHO, they're using the ticker in exactly the right manner. The main story occupies the main window, but other news doesn't suddenly stop happening. I don't know if what they're running really counts as "news", but that would be an appropriate thing to run.
You must not have been paying attention after Challenger, then. In 1986 we heard calls for the suspension of the manned space program indefinitely. and a lot of "Anything worth doing, robots can do". This is not the same nation as was founded by the pioneers; we've grown bigger, older, and more comfortable. While there are legions of people who say, "I'll go no matter what the risks", our risk-averse PR-driven TV-motivated so-called leaders will worry more about how it plays on the evening news.
I don't want to be callous and this is a tragedy for the families and the two nations. But in almost 50 years of spaceflight we've suffered, now, just 17 casualties. That's not actually such a bad record when open a new frontier
And, thanks to ClearChannel, they all look and sound exactly the same.
So, exactly as I said: If two pieces are protected by the same DRM scheme, and one of them passes into public domain, it is still prohibited to "traffic" in any device that circumvented the DRM to access it. It would remain so until the last item protected under the scheme passed into public domain. If the content source simply placed one item per year under the DRM, it would apply to all materials indefinitely.
And, unlike copyright, the "anticircumvention technology" doesn't have to expire. So, although the work could be in public domain, access to it is still restricted under this "copyright" act.
There are no exemptions in the DMCA for access to public domain works behind DRM schemes -- at least, not behind ones that happen to also be used on protected materials. If you can find it, I'd be much happier. But I am not going to hold my breath.
This is of course nonsense. The technology could have been developed to protect works while under copyright, but -- for now, at least -- copyright does expire. The eventual passing into public domain of some works does not retroactively change the fact that the DRM was primarily -- indeed, explicitly -- designed to protect covered works.
Yes, it's correct. The DMCA, while nominally a copyright act, has a lot of (hopefully) unintended consequences. Because a DRM scheme might be used on many, many works -- and because those works would pass into public domain at different times -- work on breaking any DRM scheme is prohibited. Consider: Books A, B, and C are all protected by Frobozco Magic Digital Rights Management Technology. Book A goes into public domain in, say, 2077, but B and C enter public domain in 2082. If you're allowed to crack FMDRMT in order to read Book A, you'd also possess the technology to read B and C, even though that would be infringement.
Now, you might wonder, shouldn't it be the actual infringement that is illegal, and not the mere potential to infringe? Old school, yes. But not in the brave new world of intellectual "property".
Of course, this encourages the Content Cartel to lock up everything behind the same DRM, and to continue using it for many many years. That way, even the "public domain" works cannot be legally accessed without paying a fee. That's the way we're going to get perpetual copyright. The Sony Bono Act was -- pardon the pun -- strictly Mickey Mouse in comparison.
Wait... Is this some sort of RIAA-sponsored documentary?
Wow. I know that TV needs to expand its revenue stream, but should they really be playing two million ads during the game, even at a dollar a piece?
Ah, the lovely lack of verbal parentheses! You gotta love English.
Isn't that the rationale behind so-called "submarine" patents
Wow, I usually try not to flame. But this is just stupid. Let's let everything happen, then pick up the pieces? That's outright irresponsible. "Really -- I just want my own nuke to feel secure. Let's give everyone a nuke. If it's a problem, we can ban them later."
The "unknown" is not intrinsically unknowable. You can take a look at traffic densities and the Segway footprint and make an intelligent prediction about its impact. And, ultralibertarians aside, the purpose of a government is, in part, to secure the safety of its citizens. They made a judgment -- which is exactly what elected officials are elected to do. So the decision doesn't favor your latest cool toy. Get over it.
Granted. And it's unlikely that a Customs case is going to have any precedential value. But all we can go on is what the judge says forms the basis of her judgment, and what she wrote does disturb me. A judge has a responsibility to rule well and to make sure the ruling doesn't do damage itself. In other words, the judge shouldn't be dressing up common sense, or people might mistake the costume for the content.
OK, so this shouldn't be the spark for the Mutant Uprising. But it's a little more relevant than you seem to think. To be "dolls", the figures had to depict humans. Otherwise, they were "toys". So the issue actually was, "Do the X-Men count as human?" This in turn demands we answer, "What makes a human human?"
And that's more important than you might want to admit. Sure, we're probably not likely to see Xavier and his cohorts on the streets of Manhattan. But how about cloned people? Or genetically modified -- even genetically enhanced -- people? What about, say, a weightlifter who's been designed from before birth to be the world's best weightlifter ever? What if the genetic modification was done under the sponsorship of a corporation? What if that corporation later asserted "property rights" to the modified person?
I found the judge's criteria, as quoted, quite disturbing. Apparently differing abilities was enough to classify the mutants as "non-human". The judge focused on their mutant powers, such as the ability to control storms or to withstand injury. Apparently she did not focus on their ability to speak, to reason, to create, to love
Although the actual case is a bit of a joke, the issues raised are deep and pressing. We're heading to a place where the very notion of "human" will be under strain as never before. Perhaps it's good that somebody is reasoning about it ahead of time -- though I could have wished for a better result.
You're not trolling and I hope I'm not, either, but what matters here is the weighted average. That is, there may be a lot more people in, say, India than the US -- but are there more people using computers?
?