First, the "holy war" stance is adopted by someone who lists their Web site as "www.ihateapple.com"? Pardon me for saying this, but, "Pot, meet kettle."
Does Taco want/. to be print media? I doubt it. That means a lot of things, and I think Taco doesn't want to meet those "standards", if you call them that. I know that I don't consider TOTK.com Sports, which I run, or NASA Watch, which I really enjoy reading, to be "print media", but it doesn't hurt either in my opinion.
But the best thing is that Taco's comments made me read this blurb, and in reading it, I've come to realize more clearly the problems with DNS. That's enough for me.
Anyone seeking to know what good investigative reporting is about should read this article. I haven't seen stuff like this since, well, I did investigative reporting. I wasn't this good, but I didn't have Grant Gross's resources, either. [I was at a crappy radio station that just wanted local news...but I still did more hard reporting than our news director did.] --
Yep. I figure that the pressure of making it into the program would be much higher than the pressure of everyone reading thier logs too. In retro, I should have been more clear as my thinking of crew tends to be inclusive of Terran based support staff. The logs being up daily may put undue pressure on the ground crew (who have to face the press when they go home and see the latest 'disaster/glitch' on the news). Your point still stands: they(individually) probably don't care per se.
Hell, even the ground crew are too busy to care. I want in on ops when our payload is up, but that's because I live off of stress. Actually, the ops panel for our payload should be pretty calm, but those five seconds of panic will be great...=)
As far as a buffer, I see your point. I think information overload--see Katz's feature on "The Regulon" from yesterday--will keep the panic level down some. We're too time-constrained to get too badly off about it. =)
What is this? People replying to threads with intelligent comments? What's wrong here? =)
Maybe the log files shouldn't be public on the day they are posted. I think the ideal solution would be some kind of delay, say a few days or weeks, this will diminish the pressure cooker effect that the daily posting may have on the crew. There has to be some kind of solution there that doesn't start the conspiracy theorists (CT's)off on a tangent as to why we can't see them today etc. I think we should be able to see them uncensored though as blacking out sections are just fuel for the CT's.
You have a point here, but I gotta tell you, folks, the crew is way too damned busy to worry about what us Earthbound types are thinking. If you don't have a radio link to them and you aren't a good friend of family, they could really just not care. =)
The CT's will exist whether the logs are open or not. Delaying it could hurt us in the end, although most people with the knowledge to help out if they've seen the logs are still in the business or are retired and know that they'll be called if the need arises.
It has an odd tendency to grow some sort of algae. I've never had it really well-explained to me, but I'll ask around the office. The silver-plating apparently spurs on the growth. [Be happy to bow to someone on/. with much better knowledge than I--I'm just a poor dumb aero. =)]
Would you refer me to the docs on that?
U.S. President John F. Kennedy spoke before Congress on May 25, 1961, saying:
"I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space, and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish."
NASA PAO has a nice history on Apollo. [Yeah, the same PAO I'm still hacked with. =)] As most folks should know, Apollo 11 landed on the moon 07/20/1969--about six weeks after my parents were married. =) --
When the Challenger blew up, it was bound to happen, politics, bureaucracy, and expenditure took over the system. Yet, each astronaut, and their families, on board the craft knew the risks, knew what they were getting in to. It still didn't stop them. I like to think that perhaps they knew what could be acheived and understood the big picture.
FWIW, the original predicted "major failure" rate for STS was 2% at design finalization. We've had slightly less than 1%, depending on how you define "major failure". [I haven't seen any of the other big things as "major", but worrisome, yeah.]
Oh, and the Russian space agency is the Russian Space Agency. =)
I wouldn't put the Apollo gang even in the same ballpark as this. Part of it is the general media atmosphere now that loves a failure to get eyeballs. The Apollo team was given a TON of respect and their failures and screwups weren't trumpeted across the front page. A failure or a setback was 'par for the course' when you're doing something brand new that's never been done before. Nor for every little thing that went wrong were they hauled up in front of congres to justify themselves. They were allowed to do their job.
Ever read Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff? If I had a dollar for every time I've re-read Our rockets always blow up--which they did some of the time--I'd have paid for school by now.
I think examining the failures is good. NASA isn't a bunch of rocket gods. They foul up. We all do. No need to deify it. I think we've gotten very complacent about spaceflight--I had a friend on alt.books.tom-clancy once tell me that rocket science shouldn't be that hard, since we've done all the work before. Mmmmhmmmm.
Guess what: no one has built a space station like this before. Yeah, Mir is modular, but ISS will be bigger and have more end-users than Mir ever did. This is new stuff. It's an engineering marvel alone to get it built and working, much less any of the science that will come out of it. We're going to all learn a lot of lessons about space-based construction techniques--techniques that should help us build future spacecraft in LEO so that they can be modularly built.
Fine by me. I want people to think about this. I'm not
saying that I'm right--hell, I'm an engineer and I should be
wrong some of the time, because otherwise peer review is useless
to me...
There is also a point about 'airing dirty
laundry'. Now I DO NOT agree with just sealing all the logs in a
vault and only those on a need to know can look at them. But at
the same time the world isn't perfect. Glitches happen. You you
want your neighbors to be able to know EVERY detail of your life?
No - of course not. At some point freedom of information becomes
an actual hinderance to getting the job done because of all the
second guessing and 'monday morning quarterbacks' that are out
there. For some jobs, it is important from getting from A->Z, not
every last stupid little detail (and foulup) that took you to get
there.
MMQ's? Most people who would have such an attitude don't have
enough technical knowledge to complain. Outside of the areas
that I work in, I know that I sure as hell don't. Something
could happen to the station bus, and I'd be like, "Ummm, okay."
Now, fsck up EXPRESS Rack or the Vacuuem Exhaust System/Waste Gas
System, and I'd know.
You develop payloads for the spacestation right?
When you deliver your payload do you document every foulup, screw
up, bad design decision, backtrack, and everything else that went
wrong during the project? I doubt it. You produce the final
thing, the specs, how it has passed the requirements, etc etc.
Why doesn't NASA get the same treatment?
Actually, we do. The process of building space flight
hardware demands it. You build something to spec and
drawings. You test it. It fails--and let me tell you, no matter
how well you design the thing in the beginning, it will fail. [I
know, I design tests to break things. I usually piss off the
design team.] You document how and why it failed
for two reasons:
A lessons-learned thing. Spaceflight hardware is still a new
business, because we use new materials, have new acoustic and
service life requirements, etc. We're still learning how
materials act in space over long duration, and that strikes out
things you might normally use. [Silver-plated wire, for
instance, is a big no-no, but you wouldn't know that unless it
was documented.
When stuff fails, you sometimes have to change the specs to
reality. This is a design compromise just like anything else.
There are people--usually within NASA or some foreign space
agency--that want to know why, and for good reason, things have
changed. Those changes cost money--big money, because building a
computer to go into space is much different than just one to sit
on your desk. Structurally it's different, you have huge thermal
management problems [no convection because of no gravity], etc.
The things you find in testing--i.e., that heat sink should draw
enough heat, but it doesn't--have to be documented so workarounds
can happen.
So yeah, that's why you open up everything. It's also why you
document everything. The other thing to think about here is
quantity. Ten of something is a lot in space stuff. We
have four work STS orbiters. We've had five operational. Each
is very different, although they were derived from the same
initial design.
Saying this is 'tax dollars' or 'international' is
just a cop out. People can't do their best work when the work
under a magnifying glass.
Tell that to the guys who worked on Apollo, eh? They had an
unrealistic deadline and met it with four months and eleven days
to spare.
(I personally do my BEST work when i have a boss i
don't see for weeks at a time. It's the micromanagement types
that want a status every 12 minutes that kill productivity).
Micromanagement can be a huge problem. NASA has cut
management back too far in some areas and not enough in others.
The communication pathways stink. Happens on the commercial
side, too--our payload's commercial [the first commercial one,
actually, so we're breaking new ground all the time...].
The federal legislative bodies tend to be punitive in reacting to NASA shortcomings. The attitude seems to be "You cost us a lot of money, we don't get a lot of immediately practical returns, so if you screw up you're history". Instead, the attitude could be "You're very expensive, but we value the eventual returns. Due to the complexity of your work, we will tolerate some mistakes. But if we see the same mistakes a second or (heaven forbid) a third time, then expect a management shakedown".
Yep. Personally, I've given up on watching STS launches. Why? If it blows up while I watch, I'll freak. I figure the next time we lose astronauts will be our last, because we're too namby-pamby these days to realize that it will eventually hit the fan, folks.
I wish some of the old, dead test pilots from the Edwards days were around now to blather to Congress. They walked uphill both ways to work in the snow, barefoot, AND THEY LIKED IT! =)
I want to let you all know why I submitted this. It's important, and I think you'll agree if you think about it.
We bitch here all the time about open source, free as in [speech|love|beer|money from a wrecked Brinks truck], etc., but we do this with the computing industry for the most part. When it's not about computing, it's about us as consumers.
Guess what: we are all consumers of the U.S. space program, whether or not we're Americans. I work on an international payload for ISS, one that has potential benefits that will help us all in medicine, optics, etc. Countless medical and science advances have come from space-related endeavors.
We want freedom of information. We want knowledge. We crave knowledge. Getting access to the ship's log is cool three ways:
It's just like watching [name your favorite spaceship-based sci-fi show here], only it's real.
We know what's going on with our money.
Knowledge of what we're doing up there can inspire plenty of kids into the space program.
I find that, all too often, people my age [early 20's] are going into aerospace for money and for a desire to keep things like STS 51-L [Challenger] from happening again. These aren't socially positive things, really. We should be in this to innovate, not maintain the status quo. NASA is doing a great job of the latter at this point, as humans remain parked in LEO except for those nice little day trips to the moon.
Keith Cowing is going to file FOIA's to get access to the logs. I think we here on/. should do something similar. Write your Congresscritter--they just got elected, remember? Write Bush, whether you voted for him or not, and tell him to get off his duff, select a NASA Administrator, and make damned sure that it's someone that will believe in opening up information to the public. And, if you're not an American, pester your local politicos--remember, this is the International Space Station.
End of rant. I am highly pissed at NASA PAO, but like that's new or somethin'. It's not like it's a national security interest anymore, boys...
...at TOTK.com Sports. We don't make money off of TOTK. We haven't run many ads to speak of--only Web ones with really bad CPM rates because of the dearth of banner ads, which is fine, because they suck--because we think they distract from content.
I asked readers once--online and offline, since some of them are local people--what they thought of ads. They aren't opposed to them, because they know we have to pay the bills. All well and good, but the ads will just be ignored, and where have we added value? Nowhere. But we wouldn't mind running relevant ads in our emails--be fine by us. But when we do get someone relevant, they either never reply or think we charge too much. Gah!
Because I continue to spend more time on this--instead of the rest of my so-called life--and because we're adding new technology along the way, we've decided to do a trial period idea, something I wouldn't mind feedback on. The idea is this:
Content that is newer than N weeks is free for viewing on the Web. That way, you can see what we have before you choose to subscribe.
Subscribing to email releases is free for N weeks, and we tell you that up front. This allows you time to get to know our content well--people will read what they willingly push themselves to read, and email is the best way to let consumers push themselves content--and decide whether you like it enough. [Hopefully, you do. =]
Becoming a paid subscriber would give you the ability to customize how we do things highly--columns only from this writer or on that sport or in that ezine, whatever--and allow you unlimited access to the archives.
Be happy to see what people have to say. Email or reply...I'll see it either way.
...it's the administration in most cases, or namby-pamby "student leaders".
As a student leader myself, this sickens me. Personally, I'm a WASP male from a mainline Christian church. That hasn't stopped me from denonuncing those in our SGA who would seek to deny the rights of students with differing viewpoints. If such a proposal as described by this article showed up at UAH, I would be on it like white on rice, and I would transfer if it held.
If something ludicrous like this is going on at your school, you have a right to complain about it. Pester your student government representatives--they usually don't hear directly from students and are easily swayed with good logic. Flood your student newspaper--most of them are staffed by liberal idealists who will be sympathetic to your cause and should believe in the cause of free speech.
Most importantly, do anything you can to make your voice heard. Colleges and universities have three customers: the private sector, their monetary donors, and the students. In serving the students, they serve the other two customers well. In failing to serve the students, they will go bankrupt--morally and fiscally.
Okay, we give up. Even though we ran this story a few months ago, it seems that Reuters has picked it up and slathered it all over the world, and now everyone is submitting this New! Improved! Palm Pilot Robot.
So what? Ignore the submissions. Isn't that what the system is for? It's not "news" if it's not new.
That's the kind of racism I'm talking about. The automatic assumption that black == less competent.
But I'm betting that you've noted that the way you fight this type of racism--the personal, prejudice-based sort--is person by person. It's like the old saw about saving starfish: you saved that one.
It's the same way with me when I work hoops camps with inner city kids--they don't think a short fat white guy can ball. I can, to a certain degree, and once they realize that, they have fun with me. I'll ignore the fact, though, that the kids routinely beat me off the dribble.
For an interesting insight into how perceptions can be shattered, read Jon Entine's book Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It. After I finish with our back-end coding project, I'm going to review a sports book a month at TOTK.com Sports. Entine's book is first on my list.
I've appreciated all the comments from my black friends here on/. on this issue. I think they're making the white folks think on this some. -g- Growing up in Mississippi, I've seen racism, and it ain't pretty. But I saw it in Ohio, too, and it was more oppressive there [in Dayton's suburbs] because of the paucity of non-Europeans.
The only beef that I have ever had with AA has been the fact that it is only a temporary solution. AA attempts to fix the end-product of generations of discrimination by giving opportunity to the disadvantaged after the fact. This is fine to an extent, but at some point, you have to accept two things:
Because not all areas of the country are homogeneous in economic terms, the quality of education will vary greatly across regional areas as well as other "normal" demographics.
The stigma of AA and quotas are that the [disadvantaged minority] are unable to compete otherwise.
As with any problem, it is much better to fix root causes than to try to make amends on end products. If you start building code and watch bugs from the beginning, you build better code. As a society, we should work to build better people by providing quality education along the entire educational track, focusing on improving standards and giving assistance to the youngest among us, regardless of socioeconomic status.
And yeah, there's racism in sports, people. Consider Scot Pollard's hair and Allen Iverson's. With Pollard, most folks think, "Dude, this guy's got style." With the Answer, most folks think, "Dude, this guy's a thug." Yet we don't know diddly shit about either one really.
I've been wont to whack Freenet in my own mind, but I had a revelation while reading Ian's piece: to have a good open-source project--that is, one that is downloaded and worked on by many good coders--you have to do a lot of promotion for it. Attracting the critical mass of coders as well as users is a process that doesn't happen overnight.
If you're trying to do something really unique or complex--as Freenet is attempting to do--you have to get a lot of very good people interested in it. Then they have to see where you're going and add their ideas or help change the direction a wee bit.
I liken it to a ship with an unbelievably large steering wheel: you need more than one person to turn it. In fact, you need several strong people to turn it. And all you do when you're waiting for enough people to help you turn it is risk the naysayers saying, "They'll never turn it."
I don't see the "market" for Freenet, but I don't know that I would have seen the market for recorded music 140 years ago, either. I don't have the code-fu to help them out, so I'm not even going to get involved--until they're ready for me to be.
My dad was the first Certified Quality Manager in the state of Mississippi, as cert'd by the American Society for Quality. Certified Quality Engineers had already proven the standard [my dad had his CQE and was teaching CQE review courses], and CQM got some acceptance on that.
I guess the benefit will be the initial graduates and any subsequent certifications that follow. You'd want to make sure that one level of cert is respected before adding more, but the additions have a value added by those that they're built on.
Recommending to a 15-yr old that he sleep more, or take time for a girlfriend is an utter waste of time. At his age, or even through to college, spending more than 30-minutes to 1-hr on a girlfriend each day is crazy. Prioritize - work now, fun later. Much later.
Perhaps my mood is bad, but why is this 3, Funny? 3, Insightful is more like it. =)
Actually, while you're young, you should learn to ration sleep. Attending MSMS forced me to ratchet down to five hours or so plus power naps. College actually got easier--mainly because I got lazy because scholarships are paying for it and my parents and I aren't--so my sleep schedule stretched back to a "normal" amount. Now that I'm doing everything at once, those valuable techniques I learned as a kid come in wonderfully handy.
Most good engineering school have a lot of support for grad students, so jumping to industry will just slow you down.
I'd argue that it varies with the discipline and the employment environment. I'm an AE and I work at a NASA subcontractor. It makes economic sense for me to work there and go to grad school [or would if I were done with my u-grad yet, but I advise students and cow-orkers alike].
With my Research Assistantships and Teaching Assistantships, I haven't paid a dime to go to grad school and I've been here four years. The student salaries are enough for rent, too, so I haven't had to get any loans. I am a traditional engineer, by the way. I'm getting a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering.
EE is easier to do that in right now, and traditionally has been. AE is a bit harder because you have to be close to a school where the AE department has what you want. AE one place may be civ aviation and low-speed aerodynamics; others, it may be propulsion. But it's great that you're getting a Ph.D. in EE--we need those people and that research!
A big problem with industry paying for your master's degree is that they usually don't give you a raise after you finish big enough to compensate what you could have gotten with a Master's in the first place. And you can't just quit, because then you have to pay back some of the fees they paid you!
Depends on the industry, I guess. There are a couple of local companies--AdTran is one--where I haven't seen the raise matter any whether you did it on your dime, theirs, or some research money. Yeah, you're tied to the employer, and that's the one downside to it.
What's really good is going to school on a civil servant job. A friend of mine is getting his Ph.D. in Engineering Management that way, and he'll get a year off--with pay and benefits--to do his thesis work, and they pay for all the schooling before then. And they call it training or whatever it has to be called for you not to have to be taxed on it.
The truism that NYT is the standard bearer for print media still holds, I believe, so consider this from the article linked in the blurb:
Clearly, the Pentium 4 is all about the future. For example, the chip can understand 144 new audiovisual software instructions -- in fact, it can process several of them in a single gulp.
Unfortunately, that powerful acceleration technique will lie untapped until Windows programs are rewritten to take advantage of it. [emphasis mine]
Case in point that the open-source movement hasn't gone far enough in educating the reporters. Sure, blather technobabble all you want at them, and they'll glaze as surely as I have today here at work. But to get them to preach your stuff, you've got to make them understand that Windows isn't the only solution out there.
Slashdot Mirror
First, the "holy war" stance is adopted by someone who lists their Web site as "www.ihateapple.com"? Pardon me for saying this, but, "Pot, meet kettle."
Does Taco want /. to be print media? I doubt it. That means a lot of things, and I think Taco doesn't want to meet those "standards", if you call them that. I know that I don't consider TOTK.com Sports, which I run, or NASA Watch, which I really enjoy reading, to be "print media", but it doesn't hurt either in my opinion.
But the best thing is that Taco's comments made me read this blurb, and in reading it, I've come to realize more clearly the problems with DNS. That's enough for me.
We're not all mindless Taco ditto-heads, ya know.
--
Yeah, the only scoring attempts will be [insert player here] trying to hook up with Britney Spears before she hits the stage at halftime.
--
Evidently Keanu Reeves heard about this and said, "Yet another shameless use of our ground-breaking technology. I'm sick of all these parodies."
Told that Trent "Lame Duck" Dilfer and Kerry "Lame Drunk" Collins would be the starting quarterbacks in Super Bowl XXXV, Reeves said, "Whooooa."
--
Anyone seeking to know what good investigative reporting is about should read this article. I haven't seen stuff like this since, well, I did investigative reporting. I wasn't this good, but I didn't have Grant Gross's resources, either. [I was at a crappy radio station that just wanted local news...but I still did more hard reporting than our news director did.]
--
Hell, even the ground crew are too busy to care. I want in on ops when our payload is up, but that's because I live off of stress. Actually, the ops panel for our payload should be pretty calm, but those five seconds of panic will be great...=)
As far as a buffer, I see your point. I think information overload--see Katz's feature on "The Regulon" from yesterday--will keep the panic level down some. We're too time-constrained to get too badly off about it. =)
What is this? People replying to threads with intelligent comments? What's wrong here? =)
--
You have a point here, but I gotta tell you, folks, the crew is way too damned busy to worry about what us Earthbound types are thinking. If you don't have a radio link to them and you aren't a good friend of family, they could really just not care. =)
The CT's will exist whether the logs are open or not. Delaying it could hurt us in the end, although most people with the knowledge to help out if they've seen the logs are still in the business or are retired and know that they'll be called if the need arises.
--
It has an odd tendency to grow some sort of algae. I've never had it really well-explained to me, but I'll ask around the office. The silver-plating apparently spurs on the growth. [Be happy to bow to someone on /. with much better knowledge than I--I'm just a poor dumb aero. =)]
U.S. President John F. Kennedy spoke before Congress on May 25, 1961, saying:
-- President John F. Kennedy, speech to U.S. Congress, May 25, 1961.
NASA PAO has a nice history on Apollo. [Yeah, the same PAO I'm still hacked with. =)] As most folks should know, Apollo 11 landed on the moon 07/20/1969--about six weeks after my parents were married. =)
--
FWIW, the original predicted "major failure" rate for STS was 2% at design finalization. We've had slightly less than 1%, depending on how you define "major failure". [I haven't seen any of the other big things as "major", but worrisome, yeah.]
Oh, and the Russian space agency is the Russian Space Agency. =)
--
Ever read Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff? If I had a dollar for every time I've re-read Our rockets always blow up--which they did some of the time--I'd have paid for school by now.
I think examining the failures is good. NASA isn't a bunch of rocket gods. They foul up. We all do. No need to deify it. I think we've gotten very complacent about spaceflight--I had a friend on alt.books.tom-clancy once tell me that rocket science shouldn't be that hard, since we've done all the work before. Mmmmhmmmm.
Guess what: no one has built a space station like this before. Yeah, Mir is modular, but ISS will be bigger and have more end-users than Mir ever did. This is new stuff. It's an engineering marvel alone to get it built and working, much less any of the science that will come out of it. We're going to all learn a lot of lessons about space-based construction techniques--techniques that should help us build future spacecraft in LEO so that they can be modularly built.
--
Nah. No Windows on the *control* systems. There are Windows laptops that are used in controlling some of the rack-level stuff.
--
Fine by me. I want people to think about this. I'm not saying that I'm right--hell, I'm an engineer and I should be wrong some of the time, because otherwise peer review is useless to me...
MMQ's? Most people who would have such an attitude don't have enough technical knowledge to complain. Outside of the areas that I work in, I know that I sure as hell don't. Something could happen to the station bus, and I'd be like, "Ummm, okay." Now, fsck up EXPRESS Rack or the Vacuuem Exhaust System/Waste Gas System, and I'd know.
Actually, we do. The process of building space flight hardware demands it. You build something to spec and drawings. You test it. It fails--and let me tell you, no matter how well you design the thing in the beginning, it will fail. [I know, I design tests to break things. I usually piss off the design team.] You document how and why it failed for two reasons:
So yeah, that's why you open up everything. It's also why you document everything. The other thing to think about here is quantity. Ten of something is a lot in space stuff. We have four work STS orbiters. We've had five operational. Each is very different, although they were derived from the same initial design.
Tell that to the guys who worked on Apollo, eh? They had an unrealistic deadline and met it with four months and eleven days to spare.
Micromanagement can be a huge problem. NASA has cut management back too far in some areas and not enough in others. The communication pathways stink. Happens on the commercial side, too--our payload's commercial [the first commercial one, actually, so we're breaking new ground all the time...].
--
Yep. Personally, I've given up on watching STS launches. Why? If it blows up while I watch, I'll freak. I figure the next time we lose astronauts will be our last, because we're too namby-pamby these days to realize that it will eventually hit the fan, folks.
I wish some of the old, dead test pilots from the Edwards days were around now to blather to Congress. They walked uphill both ways to work in the snow, barefoot, AND THEY LIKED IT! =)
--
I want to let you all know why I submitted this. It's important, and I think you'll agree if you think about it.
We bitch here all the time about open source, free as in [speech|love|beer|money from a wrecked Brinks truck], etc., but we do this with the computing industry for the most part. When it's not about computing, it's about us as consumers.
Guess what: we are all consumers of the U.S. space program, whether or not we're Americans. I work on an international payload for ISS, one that has potential benefits that will help us all in medicine, optics, etc. Countless medical and science advances have come from space-related endeavors.
We want freedom of information. We want knowledge. We crave knowledge. Getting access to the ship's log is cool three ways:
I find that, all too often, people my age [early 20's] are going into aerospace for money and for a desire to keep things like STS 51-L [Challenger] from happening again. These aren't socially positive things, really. We should be in this to innovate, not maintain the status quo. NASA is doing a great job of the latter at this point, as humans remain parked in LEO except for those nice little day trips to the moon.
Keith Cowing is going to file FOIA's to get access to the logs. I think we here on /. should do something similar. Write your Congresscritter--they just got elected, remember? Write Bush, whether you voted for him or not, and tell him to get off his duff, select a NASA Administrator, and make damned sure that it's someone that will believe in opening up information to the public. And, if you're not an American, pester your local politicos--remember, this is the International Space Station.
End of rant. I am highly pissed at NASA PAO, but like that's new or somethin'. It's not like it's a national security interest anymore, boys...
--
...at TOTK.com Sports. We don't make money off of TOTK. We haven't run many ads to speak of--only Web ones with really bad CPM rates because of the dearth of banner ads, which is fine, because they suck--because we think they distract from content.
I asked readers once--online and offline, since some of them are local people--what they thought of ads. They aren't opposed to them, because they know we have to pay the bills. All well and good, but the ads will just be ignored, and where have we added value? Nowhere. But we wouldn't mind running relevant ads in our emails--be fine by us. But when we do get someone relevant, they either never reply or think we charge too much. Gah!
Because I continue to spend more time on this--instead of the rest of my so-called life--and because we're adding new technology along the way, we've decided to do a trial period idea, something I wouldn't mind feedback on. The idea is this:
Be happy to see what people have to say. Email or reply...I'll see it either way.
--
...it's the administration in most cases, or namby-pamby "student leaders".
As a student leader myself, this sickens me. Personally, I'm a WASP male from a mainline Christian church. That hasn't stopped me from denonuncing those in our SGA who would seek to deny the rights of students with differing viewpoints. If such a proposal as described by this article showed up at UAH, I would be on it like white on rice, and I would transfer if it held.
If something ludicrous like this is going on at your school, you have a right to complain about it. Pester your student government representatives--they usually don't hear directly from students and are easily swayed with good logic. Flood your student newspaper--most of them are staffed by liberal idealists who will be sympathetic to your cause and should believe in the cause of free speech.
Most importantly, do anything you can to make your voice heard. Colleges and universities have three customers: the private sector, their monetary donors, and the students. In serving the students, they serve the other two customers well. In failing to serve the students, they will go bankrupt--morally and fiscally.
--
Awww, come on. Now, if you're wanting to enter some annual "Obfuscated Privacy Policy" contest, that's fine. But why do that? -g-
Lawyuhs...the original obfuscators of clarity.
--
So what? Ignore the submissions. Isn't that what the system is for? It's not "news" if it's not new.
--
But I'm betting that you've noted that the way you fight this type of racism--the personal, prejudice-based sort--is person by person. It's like the old saw about saving starfish: you saved that one.
It's the same way with me when I work hoops camps with inner city kids--they don't think a short fat white guy can ball. I can, to a certain degree, and once they realize that, they have fun with me. I'll ignore the fact, though, that the kids routinely beat me off the dribble.
--
For an interesting insight into how perceptions can be shattered, read Jon Entine's book Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It. After I finish with our back-end coding project, I'm going to review a sports book a month at TOTK.com Sports. Entine's book is first on my list.
I've appreciated all the comments from my black friends here on /. on this issue. I think they're making the white folks think on this some. -g- Growing up in Mississippi, I've seen racism, and it ain't pretty. But I saw it in Ohio, too, and it was more oppressive there [in Dayton's suburbs] because of the paucity of non-Europeans.
The only beef that I have ever had with AA has been the fact that it is only a temporary solution. AA attempts to fix the end-product of generations of discrimination by giving opportunity to the disadvantaged after the fact. This is fine to an extent, but at some point, you have to accept two things:
As with any problem, it is much better to fix root causes than to try to make amends on end products. If you start building code and watch bugs from the beginning, you build better code. As a society, we should work to build better people by providing quality education along the entire educational track, focusing on improving standards and giving assistance to the youngest among us, regardless of socioeconomic status.
And yeah, there's racism in sports, people. Consider Scot Pollard's hair and Allen Iverson's. With Pollard, most folks think, "Dude, this guy's got style." With the Answer, most folks think, "Dude, this guy's a thug." Yet we don't know diddly shit about either one really.
--
Learn from AJ from User Friendly: when communicating with her online, it's "I love you", not "ILOVEYOU". =)
--
I've been wont to whack Freenet in my own mind, but I had a revelation while reading Ian's piece: to have a good open-source project--that is, one that is downloaded and worked on by many good coders--you have to do a lot of promotion for it. Attracting the critical mass of coders as well as users is a process that doesn't happen overnight.
If you're trying to do something really unique or complex--as Freenet is attempting to do--you have to get a lot of very good people interested in it. Then they have to see where you're going and add their ideas or help change the direction a wee bit.
I liken it to a ship with an unbelievably large steering wheel: you need more than one person to turn it. In fact, you need several strong people to turn it. And all you do when you're waiting for enough people to help you turn it is risk the naysayers saying, "They'll never turn it."
I don't see the "market" for Freenet, but I don't know that I would have seen the market for recorded music 140 years ago, either. I don't have the code-fu to help them out, so I'm not even going to get involved--until they're ready for me to be.
--
My dad was the first Certified Quality Manager in the state of Mississippi, as cert'd by the American Society for Quality. Certified Quality Engineers had already proven the standard [my dad had his CQE and was teaching CQE review courses], and CQM got some acceptance on that.
I guess the benefit will be the initial graduates and any subsequent certifications that follow. You'd want to make sure that one level of cert is respected before adding more, but the additions have a value added by those that they're built on.
--
Perhaps my mood is bad, but why is this 3, Funny? 3, Insightful is more like it. =)
Actually, while you're young, you should learn to ration sleep. Attending MSMS forced me to ratchet down to five hours or so plus power naps. College actually got easier--mainly because I got lazy because scholarships are paying for it and my parents and I aren't--so my sleep schedule stretched back to a "normal" amount. Now that I'm doing everything at once, those valuable techniques I learned as a kid come in wonderfully handy.
--
I'd argue that it varies with the discipline and the employment environment. I'm an AE and I work at a NASA subcontractor. It makes economic sense for me to work there and go to grad school [or would if I were done with my u-grad yet, but I advise students and cow-orkers alike].
EE is easier to do that in right now, and traditionally has been. AE is a bit harder because you have to be close to a school where the AE department has what you want. AE one place may be civ aviation and low-speed aerodynamics; others, it may be propulsion. But it's great that you're getting a Ph.D. in EE--we need those people and that research!
Depends on the industry, I guess. There are a couple of local companies--AdTran is one--where I haven't seen the raise matter any whether you did it on your dime, theirs, or some research money. Yeah, you're tied to the employer, and that's the one downside to it.
What's really good is going to school on a civil servant job. A friend of mine is getting his Ph.D. in Engineering Management that way, and he'll get a year off--with pay and benefits--to do his thesis work, and they pay for all the schooling before then. And they call it training or whatever it has to be called for you not to have to be taxed on it.
--
The truism that NYT is the standard bearer for print media still holds, I believe, so consider this from the article linked in the blurb:
Case in point that the open-source movement hasn't gone far enough in educating the reporters. Sure, blather technobabble all you want at them, and they'll glaze as surely as I have today here at work. But to get them to preach your stuff, you've got to make them understand that Windows isn't the only solution out there.
--