The enquiry will take years, if not decades, assuming it ever happened at all. (We have a deadlocked government in the US - if the Democrats called for an enquiry, they Republicans would block it out of spite. Same the other way round.)
By the time any conclusion was reached, most of the former employees will be dead or overseas in a tax haven, possibly making a fortune off insider memoirs.
The last launch was a "bonus run" and might never happen. NASA is responsible for certifying the product is launch-ready, not LM's employees. If the launch is scrubbed due to cheap tank defects, it's no skin off the teeth of any of LM's employees - the next-gen heavy lifter won't exist before they're permanently retired or dead, and won't use a liquid fuel tank.
The problem is, the fuel tank production facility has already closed. There aren't any spare parts. It could well be that the last production cycle was done on the cheap for just that reason - there's nobody to complain to, there can't be any penalties placed on those responsible, they get their last paycheck, and if they walk away with the difference in costs, well who'se going to even notice?
There's an excellent paper on the FSF's website that suggests that rewards only produce behaviour that result in getting those rewards not the behaviour intended by those rewards.
(It's also why people study for the exam rather than the subject the exam is about; the former produces rewards. The latter may produce a better understanding and greater skills, but it will also produce a lower grade and less recognition by academia or employers.)
Incentives have to be very, very carefully thought out. Stock options, for example, are likely to produce a company that looks attractive to investors but not necessarily a company that produces anything worth a damn. Think "dot-com". A company that looks good is worth having (you can't do much if you don't have any investors), so stock options may be smart as part of the deal, but there's got to be more to cover the other side of the equation.
You are correct. Frankly, the fixation on a work ethic that idolizes long weeks is reducing both the quality AND the quantity of work done. The brain doesn't work well under such conditions.
The recommendation by Lady Grey was to divide the work day into four segments with a brief rest and some food between each segment, with a maximum of 2 hours in a segment (with a maximum of 8 hours total). This was developed to maximize the brain's ability to focus during each segment, to not overload the system on fewer, heavier meals, and to maximize energy. As far as I know, this advice is still considered to be the ideal in maximizing efficiency.
A startup, especially, should be far more concerned with maximizing efficiency than with maximizing hours worked. Hours worked = resources consumed. Startups want to MINIMIZE resource consumption as far as possible without reducing production. I would honestly suggest that the OP tell his boss that more breaks, not more hours, will improve the odds of success.
Not really. You just require that mobile devices that connect to classified or commercially sensitive networks that relate to defense meet FIPS standards and if they can perform computations are also EAL6 or EAL7 certified.
Yes, there's not much that's at that level, but if you create a demand for such products you will see the production of such products.
It's also true that fixed devices internal to the secure networks don't need to be that highly secure, but you've got to bear in mind that mobile devices are exposed to a greater number of threats from a greater number of directions under a greater number of circumstances. It's only common sense that they be certified to a greater standard.
The malware-related espionage attack was against the Pentagon. That's an example of something that should not have ever been possible.
That a cyber-attack was launched years later against the credit union when the DoD has already gained experience in defending against cyber-attacks, and experience in the consequences of failing is the part that bothers me.
A hypothetical parallel would be one car manufacturer using a vendor's gas tanks that are prone to exploding after an affiliated manufacturer has already discovered that that specific model of gas tank from that specific vendor is a major hazard. You expect people to learn from not only their mistakes but the mistakes of those they are close to.
This has clearly not happened here. The Credit Union has elected to ignore the lessons learned by those they are close to, presumably in the belief that it's somebody else's problem.
When we define insanity as doing the same thing expecting different results, we need to include "doing the same things as others" as part of that.
That is actually a very useful guide to the benefits and problems of SRBs. Thanks.
Space is hard, but really many industries are a hell of a lot more complex (and therefore arguably harder). The difference is that space is also very expensive and very high profile. (People notice rockets exploding more often than they notice cars crashing.) This means that the risks are greatly skewed and the quality control needs to be a lot more stringent - with the catch that it's easier and cheaper to test-drive cars than to test-drive rockets.
The S-IC stage had a dry weight of about 288,000 pounds (131,000 kg) and fully fueled at launch had a total weight of 5.0 million pounds (2.3 million kg).
That's a hell of a lot of additional weight. About four and three quarters of a million pounds for fuel. And the dry weight is not insignificant.
If you can achieve 36mi altitude when lifting the same mass with under 5.0 million pounds of solid or hybrid fuel, then pure liquid fuels are only useful in the extreme upper atmosphere or space.
("Useful" doesn't mean "it can get the job done" in this sort of situation, it means "it can get the job done efficiently". Useful != Usable.)
The Russians avoided the stacking problem (and the problems involved in large rocket nozzles) by having very large clusters of SRBs. This approach seems to be relatively reliable (the Russians don't seem to have noticeably more launch failures than the US).
As I've noted elsewhere, though, hybrid rockets (using a mix of solid and liquid fuels) seems to be the way to go, as it gives most of the benefits of solid with most of the benefits of liquid. It may also reduce the casting problem, as half your fuel doesn't need to be cast.
Calling them less efficient is not entirely honest. Solid fuel requires no cryogenic storage (which is bulky) and solids have a higher density than liquids of the same composition (ice/water is a rare exception). They also give more thrust per pound of fuel.
It is accurate to say that you can't control them - they're either on or off. That makes them less efficient at certain specific tasks. But they're actually far more efficient in terms of any important metric (mass or volume).
Most serious alternatives to solid fuel involves hybrid fuels (used by Spaceship One, for example), where there's a solid component (maximizing how much you can get from the engine) and a liquid component (for the on/off capability and the controllability).
Pure liquid rockets are only useful in the extreme upper atmosphere or space, and even then a hybrid rocket with LOX as part of the liquid component would likely have the edge.
In short, infected devices have caused serious problems (and occasionally fatalities). The Pentagon has been subject to malware-related cyber-attacks, including (as noted in the list) serious cases of espionage, in the past. That people are (a) running devices that are open to attack, and (b) are able to connect such devices to any Pentagon network, is seriously pathetic.
The radar will simply be smarter. If you can't observe the aircraft directly, then the missile radar will simply deduce where the aircraft is from indirect observations. I imagine that there might be an attempt to use a derivative of modern weather radar to look for unnatural air currents.
If you recall, Lockheed-Martin sold the hard drive with the F-22 blueprints to the Iranians. Allegedly by mistake. The odds of the other air powers NOT producing F-22-style designs was virtually zero.
Back in the days when Europe was served by X.25 lines and International Packet Switch Stream, there was regulation and Government oversight. That's a hell of a lot of countries that COULD have deemed given types of traffic a nuicense. And didn't.
The ARPAnet became the Internet when the NSF took over control from DARPA. The NSF regulated traffic but didn't classify anyone's pet project a nuisance (except perhaps the Internet Worm).
When the Internet was deregulated and Government was taken out of the picture, we started seeing serious problems.
I'll take an ounce of observation of what happened over a tonne of political theory.
Robert Owen (founder of the University of Manchester in England) tried really hard to set up such communities, but lacked the social awareness, technology and resources to make it a practical reality.
However, kudos to him for trying.
These days, it would be extremely difficult without becoming dangerously close to a cult. But it might be possible. See if this would make any sense: Have a single small, inclusive community as per your description, that is educated to the limits of the individuals (and not to some set standard). Said community then competes in some defined set of markets on the theory that they'll cooperate better than any corporation and be able to match skills to tasks far more effectively.
If said community could compete effectively, attempts to copy it will be inevitable. If the theory of said community was actually correct and not mere luck, then at least some of those attempts must succeed for the same reason.
Western society is very prone to crystallizing around one concept or another, so if you can devise a functional, minimally-stressed, maximally-competitive crystal into the mix, Western society will reset itself round it.
If, as is far more often the case, such efforts are flawed, have overlooked stress-points, and really don't function well, you might get some congealing (which is why we do have cults) and you might even get a huge mass of people to stick onto the ideas like so much over-cooked grease, but such efforts invariably break up. They're short-term nuicenses.
The key problem to all of this, however, is that nobody actually knows what the ideal community would be like. Beyond Plato's statement that such a society has to be well-informed and well-educated, we don't have even the beginnings of a theory.
He got engaged to his co-star on Girl in a Fireplace, too. Come to think of it, another of his co-stars went off to make a TV mini-series about a BDSM call-girl. What the hell is he doing to these girls' minds?
They will always go through one of the big ones. The ISPs are typically Tier 2 or Tier 3. The Internet Backbone is run by a bunch of Tier 1 providers and they don't (as a rule) sell to individuals. (And when they do, it's usually through a Tier 2 spin-off.)
Nobody, but nobody, gets to buy a connection to a Tier 1's raw backbone.
You're correct, but you're only addressing part of the issue.
First, your local ISP doesn't get to do bugger all about YouTube versus Torrent traffic, because your local ISP isn't going to be a serious congestion point. It's the 99.99% of the Internet that you can't choose, even if you could pick a different provider, that decides what gets prioritized and what does not. You changing provider will do nothing.
Second, the local ISPs you do get to pick between will all use the same Tier 2 or Tier 3 provider, so will all experience about the same level of congestion, because that's where the problems are.
Third, even if a provider advertised such prioritization, chances are they don't actually provide it. Most wouldn't know how and have probably set things up randomly. Even if a God existed, said God would have no idea what the provider actually provided. Those that do know how probably only restrict on ports, so Torrent users will merely be inconvenienced for a few hours until the upstream nodes change to 80 or 443. Most of the talk isn't about restricting types of service, anyway, it's restricting sites.
Fourth, if an intermediate backbone provider decided Bing was good and Google was bad, you'd have bugger all access to Google no matter what your ISP's policy was.
The Internet is not strictly a monopoly. It's a federation. Unfortunately, closer to the Federation from Blake's 7 than Star Trek, but a federation nonetheless. The problem with a federation is that they can collectively decide who to exclude and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. So if you were to set up a new piece of fibre from, oh, Texas to New York (and how many Slashdotters could even afford that?), you still need to get permission from the providers at each end to let you hook in. Now that the Internet is a data carrier, not a telephone system, ALL regulations opening up exchanges can be thrown out the window. You have precisely zero rights.
Slashdot Mirror
This was available on the MBone as an IP camera before Google even existed.
The enquiry will take years, if not decades, assuming it ever happened at all. (We have a deadlocked government in the US - if the Democrats called for an enquiry, they Republicans would block it out of spite. Same the other way round.)
By the time any conclusion was reached, most of the former employees will be dead or overseas in a tax haven, possibly making a fortune off insider memoirs.
The last launch was a "bonus run" and might never happen. NASA is responsible for certifying the product is launch-ready, not LM's employees. If the launch is scrubbed due to cheap tank defects, it's no skin off the teeth of any of LM's employees - the next-gen heavy lifter won't exist before they're permanently retired or dead, and won't use a liquid fuel tank.
No, the ramp-up time would be well over the retirement date. Not just of the shuttle, but the IIS as well.
That's why NASA opted for hand-crafted fixes. It was that or cancel the launch. Those were the options.
The problem is, the fuel tank production facility has already closed. There aren't any spare parts. It could well be that the last production cycle was done on the cheap for just that reason - there's nobody to complain to, there can't be any penalties placed on those responsible, they get their last paycheck, and if they walk away with the difference in costs, well who'se going to even notice?
There's an excellent paper on the FSF's website that suggests that rewards only produce behaviour that result in getting those rewards not the behaviour intended by those rewards.
(It's also why people study for the exam rather than the subject the exam is about; the former produces rewards. The latter may produce a better understanding and greater skills, but it will also produce a lower grade and less recognition by academia or employers.)
Incentives have to be very, very carefully thought out. Stock options, for example, are likely to produce a company that looks attractive to investors but not necessarily a company that produces anything worth a damn. Think "dot-com". A company that looks good is worth having (you can't do much if you don't have any investors), so stock options may be smart as part of the deal, but there's got to be more to cover the other side of the equation.
You are correct. Frankly, the fixation on a work ethic that idolizes long weeks is reducing both the quality AND the quantity of work done. The brain doesn't work well under such conditions.
The recommendation by Lady Grey was to divide the work day into four segments with a brief rest and some food between each segment, with a maximum of 2 hours in a segment (with a maximum of 8 hours total). This was developed to maximize the brain's ability to focus during each segment, to not overload the system on fewer, heavier meals, and to maximize energy. As far as I know, this advice is still considered to be the ideal in maximizing efficiency.
A startup, especially, should be far more concerned with maximizing efficiency than with maximizing hours worked. Hours worked = resources consumed. Startups want to MINIMIZE resource consumption as far as possible without reducing production. I would honestly suggest that the OP tell his boss that more breaks, not more hours, will improve the odds of success.
Not really. You just require that mobile devices that connect to classified or commercially sensitive networks that relate to defense meet FIPS standards and if they can perform computations are also EAL6 or EAL7 certified.
Yes, there's not much that's at that level, but if you create a demand for such products you will see the production of such products.
It's also true that fixed devices internal to the secure networks don't need to be that highly secure, but you've got to bear in mind that mobile devices are exposed to a greater number of threats from a greater number of directions under a greater number of circumstances. It's only common sense that they be certified to a greater standard.
The malware-related espionage attack was against the Pentagon. That's an example of something that should not have ever been possible.
That a cyber-attack was launched years later against the credit union when the DoD has already gained experience in defending against cyber-attacks, and experience in the consequences of failing is the part that bothers me.
A hypothetical parallel would be one car manufacturer using a vendor's gas tanks that are prone to exploding after an affiliated manufacturer has already discovered that that specific model of gas tank from that specific vendor is a major hazard. You expect people to learn from not only their mistakes but the mistakes of those they are close to.
This has clearly not happened here. The Credit Union has elected to ignore the lessons learned by those they are close to, presumably in the belief that it's somebody else's problem.
When we define insanity as doing the same thing expecting different results, we need to include "doing the same things as others" as part of that.
That is actually a very useful guide to the benefits and problems of SRBs. Thanks.
Space is hard, but really many industries are a hell of a lot more complex (and therefore arguably harder). The difference is that space is also very expensive and very high profile. (People notice rockets exploding more often than they notice cars crashing.) This means that the risks are greatly skewed and the quality control needs to be a lot more stringent - with the catch that it's easier and cheaper to test-drive cars than to test-drive rockets.
That's a hell of a lot of additional weight. About four and three quarters of a million pounds for fuel. And the dry weight is not insignificant.
If you can achieve 36mi altitude when lifting the same mass with under 5.0 million pounds of solid or hybrid fuel, then pure liquid fuels are only useful in the extreme upper atmosphere or space.
("Useful" doesn't mean "it can get the job done" in this sort of situation, it means "it can get the job done efficiently". Useful != Usable.)
Well, only since the advent of guns. Before that, messengers were either burned at the stake or hung, drawn and quartered.
The Russians avoided the stacking problem (and the problems involved in large rocket nozzles) by having very large clusters of SRBs. This approach seems to be relatively reliable (the Russians don't seem to have noticeably more launch failures than the US).
As I've noted elsewhere, though, hybrid rockets (using a mix of solid and liquid fuels) seems to be the way to go, as it gives most of the benefits of solid with most of the benefits of liquid. It may also reduce the casting problem, as half your fuel doesn't need to be cast.
Calling them less efficient is not entirely honest. Solid fuel requires no cryogenic storage (which is bulky) and solids have a higher density than liquids of the same composition (ice/water is a rare exception). They also give more thrust per pound of fuel.
It is accurate to say that you can't control them - they're either on or off. That makes them less efficient at certain specific tasks. But they're actually far more efficient in terms of any important metric (mass or volume).
Most serious alternatives to solid fuel involves hybrid fuels (used by Spaceship One, for example), where there's a solid component (maximizing how much you can get from the engine) and a liquid component (for the on/off capability and the controllability).
Pure liquid rockets are only useful in the extreme upper atmosphere or space, and even then a hybrid rocket with LOX as part of the liquid component would likely have the edge.
Let's look at this.
In short, infected devices have caused serious problems (and occasionally fatalities). The Pentagon has been subject to malware-related cyber-attacks, including (as noted in the list) serious cases of espionage, in the past. That people are (a) running devices that are open to attack, and (b) are able to connect such devices to any Pentagon network, is seriously pathetic.
Actually, the most reliable storage medium is core memory. Magnetic tape is merely the most reliable storage medium that's also useful.
Before or after they add in markup?
Maybe AOL has decided to cut back.
The radar will simply be smarter. If you can't observe the aircraft directly, then the missile radar will simply deduce where the aircraft is from indirect observations. I imagine that there might be an attempt to use a derivative of modern weather radar to look for unnatural air currents.
If you recall, Lockheed-Martin sold the hard drive with the F-22 blueprints to the Iranians. Allegedly by mistake. The odds of the other air powers NOT producing F-22-style designs was virtually zero.
Back in the days when Europe was served by X.25 lines and International Packet Switch Stream, there was regulation and Government oversight. That's a hell of a lot of countries that COULD have deemed given types of traffic a nuicense. And didn't.
The ARPAnet became the Internet when the NSF took over control from DARPA. The NSF regulated traffic but didn't classify anyone's pet project a nuisance (except perhaps the Internet Worm).
When the Internet was deregulated and Government was taken out of the picture, we started seeing serious problems.
I'll take an ounce of observation of what happened over a tonne of political theory.
Robert Owen (founder of the University of Manchester in England) tried really hard to set up such communities, but lacked the social awareness, technology and resources to make it a practical reality.
However, kudos to him for trying.
These days, it would be extremely difficult without becoming dangerously close to a cult. But it might be possible. See if this would make any sense: Have a single small, inclusive community as per your description, that is educated to the limits of the individuals (and not to some set standard). Said community then competes in some defined set of markets on the theory that they'll cooperate better than any corporation and be able to match skills to tasks far more effectively.
If said community could compete effectively, attempts to copy it will be inevitable. If the theory of said community was actually correct and not mere luck, then at least some of those attempts must succeed for the same reason.
Western society is very prone to crystallizing around one concept or another, so if you can devise a functional, minimally-stressed, maximally-competitive crystal into the mix, Western society will reset itself round it.
If, as is far more often the case, such efforts are flawed, have overlooked stress-points, and really don't function well, you might get some congealing (which is why we do have cults) and you might even get a huge mass of people to stick onto the ideas like so much over-cooked grease, but such efforts invariably break up. They're short-term nuicenses.
The key problem to all of this, however, is that nobody actually knows what the ideal community would be like. Beyond Plato's statement that such a society has to be well-informed and well-educated, we don't have even the beginnings of a theory.
He got engaged to his co-star on Girl in a Fireplace, too. Come to think of it, another of his co-stars went off to make a TV mini-series about a BDSM call-girl. What the hell is he doing to these girls' minds?
They will always go through one of the big ones. The ISPs are typically Tier 2 or Tier 3. The Internet Backbone is run by a bunch of Tier 1 providers and they don't (as a rule) sell to individuals. (And when they do, it's usually through a Tier 2 spin-off.)
Nobody, but nobody, gets to buy a connection to a Tier 1's raw backbone.
You're correct, but you're only addressing part of the issue.
First, your local ISP doesn't get to do bugger all about YouTube versus Torrent traffic, because your local ISP isn't going to be a serious congestion point. It's the 99.99% of the Internet that you can't choose, even if you could pick a different provider, that decides what gets prioritized and what does not. You changing provider will do nothing.
Second, the local ISPs you do get to pick between will all use the same Tier 2 or Tier 3 provider, so will all experience about the same level of congestion, because that's where the problems are.
Third, even if a provider advertised such prioritization, chances are they don't actually provide it. Most wouldn't know how and have probably set things up randomly. Even if a God existed, said God would have no idea what the provider actually provided. Those that do know how probably only restrict on ports, so Torrent users will merely be inconvenienced for a few hours until the upstream nodes change to 80 or 443. Most of the talk isn't about restricting types of service, anyway, it's restricting sites.
Fourth, if an intermediate backbone provider decided Bing was good and Google was bad, you'd have bugger all access to Google no matter what your ISP's policy was.
The Internet is not strictly a monopoly. It's a federation. Unfortunately, closer to the Federation from Blake's 7 than Star Trek, but a federation nonetheless. The problem with a federation is that they can collectively decide who to exclude and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. So if you were to set up a new piece of fibre from, oh, Texas to New York (and how many Slashdotters could even afford that?), you still need to get permission from the providers at each end to let you hook in. Now that the Internet is a data carrier, not a telephone system, ALL regulations opening up exchanges can be thrown out the window. You have precisely zero rights.