Unions are first recorded in history around 300BC, became institutions around 1100 AD and were exercising collective bargaining and other union activities before 1349. (In contrast, laissez-faire does not get any use in economics outside of France until 1774.)
I'm just...curious as to what you imagine unions as doing for those 2074 years. Clearly it wasn't spending money on campaigns (a rather crass American invention that didn't spring up until much later). Nor was it much to do with the subversion of the free market or, indeed, force.
(In other words, don't blame Unionism if American unions happen to be corrupt - assuming they even are. If American unions are indeed corrupt, you still have to go back to the people who compose them, and that means people like you. You don't just get the system you deserve, you create it with your own hands in full knowledge of what you are doing. Don't blame the end result for not being what you'd like, it was you who made it that way.)
Since you clearly did not understand what I wrote, I will rephrase. Free choice requires that there be an ability to choose between non-identical options at both the initial point and at the first level beyond. The number of choices is immaterial so long as it remains above 1 after eliminating false options, duplicates and synonymous choices, and irrational choices. (An irrational choice would be one that no reasonable/rational person would consider a valid option in the context of whatever the situation is. Thus, jumping off a bridge is not a rational way of getting Internet access although it is arguably a choice of sorts. A monopolist could not offer that as proof of choice.) The first level matters because a choice of middlemen for the same product doesn't mean you have a useful choice. And that is where we probably differ. To me, if the choice has no impact on what happens, if you can point to no non-transient difference, then you have done nothing. If all roads lead to Rome then you have chosen nothing.
There's nothing a corrupt businessman can do? Oh, so you get to pick which power stations power the grid in your area? Thought not. You get to pick which PBX exchange your phone line connects to? (There aren't nearly as many as there are phone companies.) You get to pick which reservoir the water in your tap comes from? You get to pick which manufacturer develops the components in your car? (The car manufacturer probably didn't.) Do you choose the Operating System your bank uses? (Indirect business that involves your money is still business that involves your money.) In fact, what was the last thing you had genuine free choice (not forced in any way, shape or form) both directly and at the first level of indirection?
Ok, I am never flying on a Boeing again. Or any other aircraft. And given that modern computers on cars now use regular ethernet and unsecure protocols (see the papers on successful methods for injecting false commands to the engine and braking systems), I'm going to stay clear of the roads as well. Hell, just get me a Dyson Sphere on some star in some remote galaxy - and a wormhole so I can continue reading Slashdot. Gotta have Slashdot.
Ok, then we have our definite conclusion. The egg, no matter how "egg" is interpreted for this question, most definitely came first. With chickens being that late on (just as a frame of reference, humans developed agriculture 20,000 years ago, had permanent settlements 10,000 years ago and had the horse and cart 5,000 years ago), there is simply no other answer to this question.
I really don't know why philosophers don't come to Slashdot more often - we'd solve so many of their problems so much faster than they do.
Oy! Dark Elves aren't supposed to make sensible comments.
Anyways, the way secure OS kernels are generally written is to move the critical functions into a "security kernel". Only that security kernel needs to be proven correct. Flaws in the rest of the OS cannot cause vulnerabilities. Well, in theory. But once that security kernel is written, then the expensive part of the development is done. It's proven complete and correct, so you should almost never have to touch the security kernel again. That component can be treated independently of the rest of the system, as that is how it is developed (and maintained). The cost of the rest of the OS can be covered by the sales of the unsecure versions (regular Solaris, regular IRIX, etc).
The utilities and userspace facilities that then get added onto that need to be audited as they get developed, and that's where the big big expense is. Not much I can see that can fix that, aside from OpenBSD-like auditing of the whole lot. Ensuring all libraries validated all inputs and that the system malloc enforced memory bounds would probably be helpful, as it would limit the exploit potential of bugs elsewhere that did exist.
But here we run into the crux of the issue. I really can't think of too many times you'd want to compile programs on a secure system that is running hardware. Nor can I think of too many times you'd want said system to provide much in the way of shell scripting or standard Unix utilities. In short, all you really want on such a box is a kernel, a skeleton system, and the applications you want to run that are supplied by some third-party.
So the only legitimate expensive component that these companies need is the security module. Which won't be cheap. But it also won't be as costly as having to pay for a complete OS as though nothing was getting reused and everything was going to get used. Neither of those is valid.
The DoE has managed the energy policy for decades. Since the Federal Reserve is selected by Congress, they've run the banking system for forever. Since the FDA controls the supply of meds and the CDC controls the demand, they've also had control of the parts of the health care system that really matter.
At the end of the day, though, corrupt politicians can be replaced. Corrupt businessmen cannot. It is not the fault of the system that voters deliberately and knowingly keep picking corrupt politicians to replace other corrupt politicians, that is purely the fault of the electorate. Indeed, even if they are being bribed, it is still their fault. They chose to accept the bribe and they chose to return the favour. The electorate needs to accept personal responsibility for the flaws in government because the electorate selected it.
(I would be greatly in favour of a change in the rules which allowed class-action lawsuits against voting districts that vote to re-elect any politician where that politician is later convicted of a serious crime and where it can be proven in court beyond reasonable doubt that the majority of people in that voting district re-elected that politician with the intent that said crime take place. The restrictions I'm suggesting are such that you'd almost never get such a case, but if there's no other way of getting voters to accept responsibility for where they cast their vote, anything that discourages abuse of the ballot box for personal gain has to be a good thing.)
What we've got here is the worst of both worlds, reducing the effectiveness of both robotic and manned spaceflight, with no meaningful budget to pay for either. Adding one more Shuttle flight won't bridge any gap whatsoever, but to get an alternative launch vehicle any time soon is going to require ploughing in ten times the resources that had been allocated to the task. The new capsule plus the extra shuttle launch will, however, bleed cash away from other projects, making them far less likely to yield useful results. Thus, what you get is a lot of money wasted with no possibility of return, all for the sake of helping out some poor rocket provider who is running out of death merchants to sell to.
This is worse than bailing out the banks. At least the government was honest enough to say that it was the banks they were giving the money to. It was dishonest about everything else, sure, but at least there was at least one bullet point you could claim was sincere. In this case, there is a clearly defined effort to obscure who is getting the money and why. Perhaps because nobody is going to believe that this rocket vendor is too big to fail.
NASA gets nothing from this compromise. Let us understand that right from the start. NASA will lose. The only way NASA can win is if they get sane objectives AND the backing to make those objectives possible. Almost anything could be made "sane", if it were clearly stated and adequately funded and was likely to remain adequately funded from start to finish and was not going to be tortured into oblivion for political reasons. (The Space Shuttle should have been twice as good as it was, and even the Russians had a better space shuttle, but it was crippled in order to serve the selfish desires of politicians who put their popularity over not only the space program itself but also over the lives of those who would put that program into action.)
Power stations (including nuke ones) use SCADA for control systems. Not the kind of stuff you really want to be infected with malware. Sure, the odds of anything really nasty happening is slim (it does happen though - the main Japanese nuke power station has accidentally vented radioactive material into the air in the not-too-distant past). The most likely event is a shutdown, followed by a blackout of a region. If there's a cascading effect, it might even take out a whole State until they reload the computers from backup tapes. Uhhh, they DO have backup tapes, right...?
It bothers me that insecure OS' are being used for any kind of control system. Microsoft is only partly to blame, though. The high cost of real-time and "trusted" Operating Systems (which would have been far better choices) is also responsible. If a mission-critical industry genuinely couldn't afford mission-critical OS' for mission-critical components, something somewhere got SERIOUSLY messed up. (You'd want a real-time OS for components that need a specific response time, and trusted OS' for components that interfaced with stupid operators and the outside world and therefore needed the higher level of security.)
It's unclear if manufacturers would have been permitted to offer a special deal, though, for such organizations on what amounts to an emergency basis. There would be all kinds of anti-competitive rules invoked. It would have required special dispensation by the legislature, plus approval by "Homeland Insecurity", to eliminate such dangers on a legal basis. Even then, it's unclear if such laws would have held much sway with the Supreme Court makeup as it stands. Basically kicking Microsoft out of an entire sector of industry would run very counter to free-market ideals no matter what the potential consequence. The judges are so old that they're very unlikely to ever see the consequences of their decisions so why should they give a flying f*** if there are any?
(I'm not saying those ideals are necessarily wrong in the market, or necessarily wrong in general, but when you try to mix them with a large dose of complacency, a larger dose of greed and a huge dollop of obscurity+secrecy, there isn't a free market for those ideals to operate in anyway. Trying to make those ideals work in a context they were never designed for is where you get problems.)
If the reliability of an embedded system is 1, and the reliability of a Windows system is i, then the modulus of the reliability of the two systems is the same.
Meh. That depends on exactly where chickens fit into the evolutionary tree of birds. We know it's fairly early on, but I don't know if anyone knows how early. This is critical as avians lay hard eggs exclusively (to the best of my knowledge) so the mutation occurred at a common ancestor. The later that chickens appear, or the further to the side of the tree, the less likely it is that chickens evolved first. If chickens lie directly on the trunk of the tree, then it's a different story. It would then be possible for a pre-existing chicken (or proto-chicken) to have obtained the egg-hardening mutation in life.
However, and I said this in the prior post, most in-life mutations on the kind of scale involved cause cancer. Gene therapy has demonstrated that it is possible for whole-body mutations to occur without causing cancer, but even then it took several revisions of the technique. The sheer improbability of a living chicken mutating to carry the necessary adaptations is such that although it cannot be dismissed entirely, it can be said to be so utterly improbable that it falls in the category of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs".
So you and I have come to the same conclusion, albeit by different paths, that the egg must have come first - and probably by a long way. Far as I'm concerned, that's good enough. Science is not a democracy, but it's also not oblivious to the fact that if all serious logical analysis reaches the same conclusion regardless of the starting point or the methodology, then the conclusion is more likely correct than not.
Yes, I remember watching. I'd only recently got the Space Shuttle handbook NASA had published and was comparing the sequence of steps the book gave versus the actual launch. MaxQ was with engines at 102%, whereas the handbook stated this should be 100%. Up until they identified the actual cause, I remember wondering if the extra stress had caused something to break.
Not long after, when they'd recovered the front section, I recall reading that they had found that the environmental controls had been altered after the break-up and before colliding with the ocean (hence the conclusion by NASA that the explosion had been survived by at least one of the crew). I do not know if they ever determined when those adjustments were made, or whether they were able to confirm they'd been made consciously versus being struck by an unconscious/dead crew member.
The theory that someone could have potentially bailed out rests on the premise that NASA's assessment at the time had indeed been correct and that the adjustment was made subsequent to the section the crew were in reaching apogee and that this section of the shuttle remained both high enough and at a low enough velocity for this new technique to have been useful. That is a LOT of assumptions and only one of them has to be incorrect for the whole idea to fall over for that specific case.
Regardless, you are absolutely correct in saying that this is a great piece of equipment to have. That and the experience/information obtained may very well have all kinds of influences, ranging from what we consider to be survivable through to what we consider to be hobbyist freefall. (To me, the ideal would be to pack the guy with motion and pressure sensors along with a device that can record the information at decent resolution for the entire descent provided it was not done to the point where it would increase the risk unduly. They probably will have some monitoring, or it wouldn't help NASA much, but the one thing you absolutely do not want is for the engineers to come back and say that too few parameters were being tracked for them to do anything with the results.)
Although I was posting long before I registered, I refrained from registering because I was uncomfortable with registering on Internet sites at that time. We'd probably have ended up with very similar 3-digit UIDs, but no idea whose would be the lower. Not that it matters at the 3-digit level - or even at the 4-digit level given how few old-timers are left.
It has to be the egg that was first, since we know chickens evolved from dinosaurs, so the creature with this mutation to form a hard-shell egg came from a soft-shell egg. (The question doesn't require the egg to be of a specific kind, so this is legit.) Since this egg and no other is the egg that matters, we can disregard all other eggs. They are not chicken-related. The mutation did not arise later in birth. (Well, it could have, I suppose - retroviruses CAN cause mutations in living creatures, it just generally causes cancer rather than mutant powers or egg-hardening ingredients. However, unless you can find a retrovirus that carries the necessary gene modifications, I am going to stick to saying the egg was first.)
The Government is a trillion or so dollars in debt. I'd say that means they've spent a trillion more dollars than they've taken in. That's a trillion green reasons for thinking your maths is off.
True, but we know that there were survivors from the initial explosion of the fuel tank on Challenger. If they had been in a position to bail out, there is still no guarantee they would have survived any internal injuries received at that point, or debris impacts after bailing out, but it is within the bounds of possibility that the death toll on that specific tragedy would not have been quite so great.
The other possibility to consider is what happens if any future manned mission is stranded in space, with damage too great for repairs and no possibility of rescue within the time the capsule or whatever can remain in orbit. I seem to remember a case of a Russian astronaut being (temporarily) stranded in space after a malfunction, with NASA being incapable of offering help due to the time it would take to launch a rescue. The ability to descend safely would only require that the vehicle decelerate sufficiently. Even if that meant dropping like a stone immediately after, so long as the astronaut could get out in time, that would be no big deal.
We don't need no copy 'striction We don't need no tort control No two tier chasm in the network Lawyer! Leave them kids alone! All in all, it's just another boss with some gall.
I would prefer the neighbor to be lazy in all areas other than their specialty. It allows them to progress further in their specialty. Which is why, when society moved from everyone being hunter/gatherers to having some agriculturalists, some thinkers and some doers, you saw the rate of technology advancement accelerate by two or three orders of magnitude. The same happened when society improved to the point where guilds and universities furthered people's ability to move their resources away from having to do everything to doing only their areas of interest. The Age of Enlightenment broke down some of the factionalism that resulted, which is good, and added the generalists you need, but all further progress has happened because self-reliance is increasingly an obsolete and retrograde notion.
And, yes, specialty is something insects use extensively. It is why they are actually far more successful than humans at any kind of social level. The reason insects fail is that they fail to also include generalists. You have to have both to maximize progress. However, you cannot have true universalists. Those do not, never have, and never will, exist.
If by the "real world" you mean the countries that have survived collapse (such as Germany), where Keynsian economics has avoided virtually all trace of recession, then we already have the data. Mind you, countries that have chosen NOT to apply such methods (such as Greece at one extreme, the US and the UK at the other extreme), have suffered disastrously so we have the data for those as well.
Your point is therefore.... what, precisely? That you'd rather put your religion over and above measurable results?
(Belief does not require faith. Scientists tend to believe in repeatable, observable results. Scientists do not worship those results, they merely believe they exist and are correct. You, however, have religion in that you are opting for a path in which results are neither repeated nor observed, merely dictated as happening. The Tories in England talked of the "green shoots of recovery" at the end of the Reagan/Thatcher era on the grounds that their religion demanded such shoots should be there. They weren't.)
Slashdot Mirror
Unions are first recorded in history around 300BC, became institutions around 1100 AD and were exercising collective bargaining and other union activities before 1349. (In contrast, laissez-faire does not get any use in economics outside of France until 1774.)
I'm just...curious as to what you imagine unions as doing for those 2074 years. Clearly it wasn't spending money on campaigns (a rather crass American invention that didn't spring up until much later). Nor was it much to do with the subversion of the free market or, indeed, force.
(In other words, don't blame Unionism if American unions happen to be corrupt - assuming they even are. If American unions are indeed corrupt, you still have to go back to the people who compose them, and that means people like you. You don't just get the system you deserve, you create it with your own hands in full knowledge of what you are doing. Don't blame the end result for not being what you'd like, it was you who made it that way.)
Since you clearly did not understand what I wrote, I will rephrase. Free choice requires that there be an ability to choose between non-identical options at both the initial point and at the first level beyond. The number of choices is immaterial so long as it remains above 1 after eliminating false options, duplicates and synonymous choices, and irrational choices. (An irrational choice would be one that no reasonable/rational person would consider a valid option in the context of whatever the situation is. Thus, jumping off a bridge is not a rational way of getting Internet access although it is arguably a choice of sorts. A monopolist could not offer that as proof of choice.) The first level matters because a choice of middlemen for the same product doesn't mean you have a useful choice. And that is where we probably differ. To me, if the choice has no impact on what happens, if you can point to no non-transient difference, then you have done nothing. If all roads lead to Rome then you have chosen nothing.
There's nothing a corrupt businessman can do? Oh, so you get to pick which power stations power the grid in your area? Thought not. You get to pick which PBX exchange your phone line connects to? (There aren't nearly as many as there are phone companies.) You get to pick which reservoir the water in your tap comes from? You get to pick which manufacturer develops the components in your car? (The car manufacturer probably didn't.) Do you choose the Operating System your bank uses? (Indirect business that involves your money is still business that involves your money.) In fact, what was the last thing you had genuine free choice (not forced in any way, shape or form) both directly and at the first level of indirection?
When I worked at NASA, there were certainly nuts on the loose.
Ok, I am never flying on a Boeing again. Or any other aircraft. And given that modern computers on cars now use regular ethernet and unsecure protocols (see the papers on successful methods for injecting false commands to the engine and braking systems), I'm going to stay clear of the roads as well. Hell, just get me a Dyson Sphere on some star in some remote galaxy - and a wormhole so I can continue reading Slashdot. Gotta have Slashdot.
Ok, then we have our definite conclusion. The egg, no matter how "egg" is interpreted for this question, most definitely came first. With chickens being that late on (just as a frame of reference, humans developed agriculture 20,000 years ago, had permanent settlements 10,000 years ago and had the horse and cart 5,000 years ago), there is simply no other answer to this question.
I really don't know why philosophers don't come to Slashdot more often - we'd solve so many of their problems so much faster than they do.
Oy! Dark Elves aren't supposed to make sensible comments.
Anyways, the way secure OS kernels are generally written is to move the critical functions into a "security kernel". Only that security kernel needs to be proven correct. Flaws in the rest of the OS cannot cause vulnerabilities. Well, in theory. But once that security kernel is written, then the expensive part of the development is done. It's proven complete and correct, so you should almost never have to touch the security kernel again. That component can be treated independently of the rest of the system, as that is how it is developed (and maintained). The cost of the rest of the OS can be covered by the sales of the unsecure versions (regular Solaris, regular IRIX, etc).
The utilities and userspace facilities that then get added onto that need to be audited as they get developed, and that's where the big big expense is. Not much I can see that can fix that, aside from OpenBSD-like auditing of the whole lot. Ensuring all libraries validated all inputs and that the system malloc enforced memory bounds would probably be helpful, as it would limit the exploit potential of bugs elsewhere that did exist.
But here we run into the crux of the issue. I really can't think of too many times you'd want to compile programs on a secure system that is running hardware. Nor can I think of too many times you'd want said system to provide much in the way of shell scripting or standard Unix utilities. In short, all you really want on such a box is a kernel, a skeleton system, and the applications you want to run that are supplied by some third-party.
So the only legitimate expensive component that these companies need is the security module. Which won't be cheap. But it also won't be as costly as having to pay for a complete OS as though nothing was getting reused and everything was going to get used. Neither of those is valid.
The DoE has managed the energy policy for decades. Since the Federal Reserve is selected by Congress, they've run the banking system for forever. Since the FDA controls the supply of meds and the CDC controls the demand, they've also had control of the parts of the health care system that really matter.
At the end of the day, though, corrupt politicians can be replaced. Corrupt businessmen cannot. It is not the fault of the system that voters deliberately and knowingly keep picking corrupt politicians to replace other corrupt politicians, that is purely the fault of the electorate. Indeed, even if they are being bribed, it is still their fault. They chose to accept the bribe and they chose to return the favour. The electorate needs to accept personal responsibility for the flaws in government because the electorate selected it.
(I would be greatly in favour of a change in the rules which allowed class-action lawsuits against voting districts that vote to re-elect any politician where that politician is later convicted of a serious crime and where it can be proven in court beyond reasonable doubt that the majority of people in that voting district re-elected that politician with the intent that said crime take place. The restrictions I'm suggesting are such that you'd almost never get such a case, but if there's no other way of getting voters to accept responsibility for where they cast their vote, anything that discourages abuse of the ballot box for personal gain has to be a good thing.)
But you have to learn to think like a Congress-person
Errr, maybe the word you are looking for is "bribe"?
What we've got here is the worst of both worlds, reducing the effectiveness of both robotic and manned spaceflight, with no meaningful budget to pay for either. Adding one more Shuttle flight won't bridge any gap whatsoever, but to get an alternative launch vehicle any time soon is going to require ploughing in ten times the resources that had been allocated to the task. The new capsule plus the extra shuttle launch will, however, bleed cash away from other projects, making them far less likely to yield useful results. Thus, what you get is a lot of money wasted with no possibility of return, all for the sake of helping out some poor rocket provider who is running out of death merchants to sell to.
This is worse than bailing out the banks. At least the government was honest enough to say that it was the banks they were giving the money to. It was dishonest about everything else, sure, but at least there was at least one bullet point you could claim was sincere. In this case, there is a clearly defined effort to obscure who is getting the money and why. Perhaps because nobody is going to believe that this rocket vendor is too big to fail.
NASA gets nothing from this compromise. Let us understand that right from the start. NASA will lose. The only way NASA can win is if they get sane objectives AND the backing to make those objectives possible. Almost anything could be made "sane", if it were clearly stated and adequately funded and was likely to remain adequately funded from start to finish and was not going to be tortured into oblivion for political reasons. (The Space Shuttle should have been twice as good as it was, and even the Russians had a better space shuttle, but it was crippled in order to serve the selfish desires of politicians who put their popularity over not only the space program itself but also over the lives of those who would put that program into action.)
Power stations (including nuke ones) use SCADA for control systems. Not the kind of stuff you really want to be infected with malware. Sure, the odds of anything really nasty happening is slim (it does happen though - the main Japanese nuke power station has accidentally vented radioactive material into the air in the not-too-distant past). The most likely event is a shutdown, followed by a blackout of a region. If there's a cascading effect, it might even take out a whole State until they reload the computers from backup tapes. Uhhh, they DO have backup tapes, right...?
It bothers me that insecure OS' are being used for any kind of control system. Microsoft is only partly to blame, though. The high cost of real-time and "trusted" Operating Systems (which would have been far better choices) is also responsible. If a mission-critical industry genuinely couldn't afford mission-critical OS' for mission-critical components, something somewhere got SERIOUSLY messed up. (You'd want a real-time OS for components that need a specific response time, and trusted OS' for components that interfaced with stupid operators and the outside world and therefore needed the higher level of security.)
It's unclear if manufacturers would have been permitted to offer a special deal, though, for such organizations on what amounts to an emergency basis. There would be all kinds of anti-competitive rules invoked. It would have required special dispensation by the legislature, plus approval by "Homeland Insecurity", to eliminate such dangers on a legal basis. Even then, it's unclear if such laws would have held much sway with the Supreme Court makeup as it stands. Basically kicking Microsoft out of an entire sector of industry would run very counter to free-market ideals no matter what the potential consequence. The judges are so old that they're very unlikely to ever see the consequences of their decisions so why should they give a flying f*** if there are any?
(I'm not saying those ideals are necessarily wrong in the market, or necessarily wrong in general, but when you try to mix them with a large dose of complacency, a larger dose of greed and a huge dollop of obscurity+secrecy, there isn't a free market for those ideals to operate in anyway. Trying to make those ideals work in a context they were never designed for is where you get problems.)
If the reliability of an embedded system is 1, and the reliability of a Windows system is i, then the modulus of the reliability of the two systems is the same.
Meh. That depends on exactly where chickens fit into the evolutionary tree of birds. We know it's fairly early on, but I don't know if anyone knows how early. This is critical as avians lay hard eggs exclusively (to the best of my knowledge) so the mutation occurred at a common ancestor. The later that chickens appear, or the further to the side of the tree, the less likely it is that chickens evolved first. If chickens lie directly on the trunk of the tree, then it's a different story. It would then be possible for a pre-existing chicken (or proto-chicken) to have obtained the egg-hardening mutation in life.
However, and I said this in the prior post, most in-life mutations on the kind of scale involved cause cancer. Gene therapy has demonstrated that it is possible for whole-body mutations to occur without causing cancer, but even then it took several revisions of the technique. The sheer improbability of a living chicken mutating to carry the necessary adaptations is such that although it cannot be dismissed entirely, it can be said to be so utterly improbable that it falls in the category of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs".
So you and I have come to the same conclusion, albeit by different paths, that the egg must have come first - and probably by a long way. Far as I'm concerned, that's good enough. Science is not a democracy, but it's also not oblivious to the fact that if all serious logical analysis reaches the same conclusion regardless of the starting point or the methodology, then the conclusion is more likely correct than not.
Yes, I remember watching. I'd only recently got the Space Shuttle handbook NASA had published and was comparing the sequence of steps the book gave versus the actual launch. MaxQ was with engines at 102%, whereas the handbook stated this should be 100%. Up until they identified the actual cause, I remember wondering if the extra stress had caused something to break.
Not long after, when they'd recovered the front section, I recall reading that they had found that the environmental controls had been altered after the break-up and before colliding with the ocean (hence the conclusion by NASA that the explosion had been survived by at least one of the crew). I do not know if they ever determined when those adjustments were made, or whether they were able to confirm they'd been made consciously versus being struck by an unconscious/dead crew member.
The theory that someone could have potentially bailed out rests on the premise that NASA's assessment at the time had indeed been correct and that the adjustment was made subsequent to the section the crew were in reaching apogee and that this section of the shuttle remained both high enough and at a low enough velocity for this new technique to have been useful. That is a LOT of assumptions and only one of them has to be incorrect for the whole idea to fall over for that specific case.
Regardless, you are absolutely correct in saying that this is a great piece of equipment to have. That and the experience/information obtained may very well have all kinds of influences, ranging from what we consider to be survivable through to what we consider to be hobbyist freefall. (To me, the ideal would be to pack the guy with motion and pressure sensors along with a device that can record the information at decent resolution for the entire descent provided it was not done to the point where it would increase the risk unduly. They probably will have some monitoring, or it wouldn't help NASA much, but the one thing you absolutely do not want is for the engineers to come back and say that too few parameters were being tracked for them to do anything with the results.)
Although I was posting long before I registered, I refrained from registering because I was uncomfortable with registering on Internet sites at that time. We'd probably have ended up with very similar 3-digit UIDs, but no idea whose would be the lower. Not that it matters at the 3-digit level - or even at the 4-digit level given how few old-timers are left.
Hmmm. Ok, I would have to agree on your points there.
It has to be the egg that was first, since we know chickens evolved from dinosaurs, so the creature with this mutation to form a hard-shell egg came from a soft-shell egg. (The question doesn't require the egg to be of a specific kind, so this is legit.) Since this egg and no other is the egg that matters, we can disregard all other eggs. They are not chicken-related. The mutation did not arise later in birth. (Well, it could have, I suppose - retroviruses CAN cause mutations in living creatures, it just generally causes cancer rather than mutant powers or egg-hardening ingredients. However, unless you can find a retrovirus that carries the necessary gene modifications, I am going to stick to saying the egg was first.)
The Government is a trillion or so dollars in debt. I'd say that means they've spent a trillion more dollars than they've taken in. That's a trillion green reasons for thinking your maths is off.
This is the Matrix and there is no spoon.
True, but we know that there were survivors from the initial explosion of the fuel tank on Challenger. If they had been in a position to bail out, there is still no guarantee they would have survived any internal injuries received at that point, or debris impacts after bailing out, but it is within the bounds of possibility that the death toll on that specific tragedy would not have been quite so great.
The other possibility to consider is what happens if any future manned mission is stranded in space, with damage too great for repairs and no possibility of rescue within the time the capsule or whatever can remain in orbit. I seem to remember a case of a Russian astronaut being (temporarily) stranded in space after a malfunction, with NASA being incapable of offering help due to the time it would take to launch a rescue. The ability to descend safely would only require that the vehicle decelerate sufficiently. Even if that meant dropping like a stone immediately after, so long as the astronaut could get out in time, that would be no big deal.
Please bear in mind that the 1920s involved machine guns, really bad nicknames, dreadful musicals and even worse Hollywood blockbusters.
We don't need no copy 'striction
We don't need no tort control
No two tier chasm in the network
Lawyer! Leave them kids alone!
All in all, it's just another boss with some gall.
Well, that depends on whether I am still me when undead.
I would prefer the neighbor to be lazy in all areas other than their specialty. It allows them to progress further in their specialty. Which is why, when society moved from everyone being hunter/gatherers to having some agriculturalists, some thinkers and some doers, you saw the rate of technology advancement accelerate by two or three orders of magnitude. The same happened when society improved to the point where guilds and universities furthered people's ability to move their resources away from having to do everything to doing only their areas of interest. The Age of Enlightenment broke down some of the factionalism that resulted, which is good, and added the generalists you need, but all further progress has happened because self-reliance is increasingly an obsolete and retrograde notion.
And, yes, specialty is something insects use extensively. It is why they are actually far more successful than humans at any kind of social level. The reason insects fail is that they fail to also include generalists. You have to have both to maximize progress. However, you cannot have true universalists. Those do not, never have, and never will, exist.
If by the "real world" you mean the countries that have survived collapse (such as Germany), where Keynsian economics has avoided virtually all trace of recession, then we already have the data. Mind you, countries that have chosen NOT to apply such methods (such as Greece at one extreme, the US and the UK at the other extreme), have suffered disastrously so we have the data for those as well.
Your point is therefore.... what, precisely? That you'd rather put your religion over and above measurable results?
(Belief does not require faith. Scientists tend to believe in repeatable, observable results. Scientists do not worship those results, they merely believe they exist and are correct. You, however, have religion in that you are opting for a path in which results are neither repeated nor observed, merely dictated as happening. The Tories in England talked of the "green shoots of recovery" at the end of the Reagan/Thatcher era on the grounds that their religion demanded such shoots should be there. They weren't.)