It's the itinerary. The worst thing about travel are complex itineraries with delays and missed connections. A six or eight hour transoceanic flight is nothing if you don't have a immense fat guy next to you and you have a couple of books to read. It's the transcontinental itineraries that can get brutally long, if you are going to or from a second or third tier city and are flying cheap.
I routinely travel between a first tier city (Seattle) and two different second/third tier cities (Winston-Salem NC (flying into Regional rather than Frank Reynolds) and Jacksonville FL), I rarely have a problem even though virtually every trip routes me through either O'Hare or Hartsfield-Jackson. (The two busiest airports in the United States.) While my itinerary has been replaced in toto once, I've never missed a connection.
I suspect you report problems, while I report sucess, because I avoid the dirt cheap flights - they are dirt cheap for a reason. (I usually shoot for the just-below-midrange costs constrained by arrival and departure times. I avoid rush hours and red-eyes.)
So, just because Boeing has conceded that the aircraft is minimal it has to be the truth? There is no chance they are only saying this because they don't have one?
They are probably saying that because they have the most experience in the world with large aircraft. They have also been saying it for a couple of decades - it's one of the major reasons they put off for so long on investing the money in major upgrades to the 747.
Again remember: The 747 was late, the development much more expensive that planned and was suffering from major problems in the first years (mainly the inadequate engines). It still became a stunning success.
"They laughed at Columbus, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown".
Sure, the 747 overcame massive obstacles and became a stunning sucess. But the DC-10 didn't. Neither did the Comet.
I'm trying to keep this from being personal, but it's people like you who cause people like me to lose credibility when fighting for actual reasonable fair use.
I've been saying that off-and-on here on Slashdot for years. The biggest obstacle to obtaining actual reasonable fair use is assholes like the OP (who are in a majority on Slashdot) who define fair use as "mine, mine, mine" - like a petulant four year old.
1) CDs are of no greater value new at the $12-$15 price to him than they are used at the $6 price. This is the fulcrum of his entire argument.
Certainly - but where his argument fails is when he uses it as a justification to steal rather than as a reason for not buying the music. There is a vast difference between the two positions.
2) He found other means of getting songs and shows that he knows it isn't right but that he is also willing to spend money on them if they were delivered in a way that reflected the value he has set in his own purchasing already.
In other words, he is willing to steal - knowing it is wrong.
3) He proposed a reasonable system to meet his value with their product and that's a very helpful data point for any company. They try to set their prices at a place that will capture their core audience.
Sure - it's one data point. But you can't draw a curve through one point. The music industry has tens of millions of data points - the vast majority of which suggest that people are perfectly willing to pay higher prices than he is willing to do. The Slashdot community has a hard time dealing with this simple fact and the fact that they are a vanishingly small community.
If you're confused as to how the RIAA could be blamed for any of the reasons he stated, implied, or possibly could have had for his decisions, you really should hand over your Slashdot account to someone who actually reads this site. It is practically the primary theme of any music-related post.
You are absolutely correct - the theme of many music related posts is "I don't want to pay their prices, therefore it's ok for me to steal". The RIAA is not to be blamed for him choosing to steal, they didn't force or coerce him in any way. He made the personal decision to steal rather than to buy.
The US government/constitution had two things going for it that are now in the toilet. The first was an independent press to expose wrongdoing. Since giant corporations control the media what we get as "news" is now heavily filtered.
Here in the real world - we've never really had a truly independent press. They've always been beholden to their advertisers. The situation now for the mass media is truly better than it was - as little as thirty to forty years ago they were also much more heavily beholden to political interests than they are today. It's also worth noting that today's 'independent' press (blogs, websites) are in fact *much* more heavily slanted and filtered than the mass media has been at practically any time.
The second is the ability to vote out bad leaders. Since the political process is controlled by political parties that are two sides of the same coin, funded by the aforementioned giant corporations, we don't really get a choice as to who we elect or what the so-called "issues" are.
When I voted last year - I had a choice of multiple political parties, few of whom were 'two sides of the same coin'. Heck, for my State House representative, it wasn't a matter of choosing between the lesser of two evils, I had six evils to decide between.
Bottom line: as the western governments squabble over which corporation gets to screw the most people, the chinese are slowly and carefully assuming real power in the world.
Bottom line: What's really strangling this country is individual who are not only ignorant of history and politics - they seem proud of it.
Welcome to the dawn of the totalitarian era.
Anyone who thinks the US is even remotely totalitarian hasn't a clue, and likely hasn't a functioning brain cell. (As well as being a large part of the problem.)
In some cases it actually is free you know- I keep my router open so anyone can use it, because I feel its the right thing to do. I have unused resources, why shouldn't someone else get them?
The problem with that is - your unused resources end at the network jack of your router. Everything past that belongs to somebody else - and while you pay for acess to those resources, that does not imply that you can give them away for free to anyone who happens to drive by.
The little "(IANAL)" basically translates as "I am unqualified to tell you that 'You really screwed up when you wrote the letter to their lawyers.'" You don't know what the letter said.
You miss the point. It doesn't matter what the letter said. It never should have been sent - because, as you point out, the bill wasn't sent to him.
I can tell you're not an attorney because of all the things you didn't notice in the article. The client, not the Asker, is the one who received the shakedown notice. The client is the one with legal trouble and they are the ones in need of an attorney. The Asker may need one too, later, if the client (or anyone else) sends him an invoice, but the Asker hasn't received any threatening letters.
I can tell you a not a lawyer, and that you have no experience with business or the law. When the Client contacted the Friend who contacted the Asker - they were tossing the problem into his lap. He needed a lawyer right then, before taking any action - and especially before contacting Corbis or their law firm.
Your gloating suggestion that Asker has "bent over, dropped your pants and decided to forgo any lube" is a fine example of why people should be asking lawyers, not Slashdotters, what to do when they need legal advice.
And your statement is a fine example of ignorance. As soon as the Asker sent any letter to Corbis or their law firm - he was inserting himself into the middle of a potential litigation situation. Which is extraordinarily stupid to do without contacting a lawyer first.
I suspect I'm being more rational and realistic than you.
No, you are being ignorant of the law and legal processes - while taking others to task for doing just that.
One doesn't need to focus on every detail or spend a great deal of time on the action to be action based. The [short] story revolved around the action in the Battle Room, and kept returning to it. That makes it (IMO) action based.
As a designer I respect content rights and did not, would not, maliciously steal images.
Ah, but you would nicely steal their images? The fact is, you *did* steal their images. Not only that - but you matters worse by taking action on your own, *and* posting to ask Slashdot, when you should have consulted your lawyer *first*. (Mostly it seems in the vain hope that the problem will just 'go away' and you won't have to pay the price for your own actions.)
For a $50 book, I'd rather pay $4 in sales tax and 25 cents in gas than pay $5 for shipping and having to wait a week...
That's great if all you want is the latest craptacular fiction or self help bestseller. But for the kind of books I read (heavyweight nonfiction, generally very specialized), Amazon has been a godsend - because bricks and mortar stores rarely carry it. Sure, I can phone in and special order it - but why? Two minutes on the web, and UPS brings it right to my front door. (And Amazon often leads to me related books on the same topic - something a bricks and mortar store is seriously bad at outside of best sellers.)
What does it say about the current science fiction book market that the last four books I read and enjoyed were (in order) the last three of the original Dune books (not the prequels), and "The Light of Other Days" by Arthur C Clarke; an old-school writer? Everything else I've picked up has been terrible.
It says you are deluded as to the quality of SF in the 'old days'. I lived through 'em - and Sturgeon's Law applied then too.
Not sure if my memory is correct, but this was one of the first "blockbusters." Hollywood got the idea that they could make hundreds of millions of dollars per movie, so they started banking on this concept, especially during the summer.
Nope. Blockbusters got their real start with Jaws - making a hit book into a heavily hyped movie. (And the sucess of the movie Jaws came as a vast surprise - it was expected to make money, but not on the scale it did.) Even so, this was just a refinement of something that Hollywood had been doing for decades (Gone With the Wind), not something completely new.
Star Wars was just filler that nobody (at the executive level) much cared if it lived or died - so long as it didn't lose too much money. Just like TV has airtime to fill, movie screens are the same way - and if your company doesn't fill them, somebody else will. In fact, ultimately the only reason Star Wars got made at all is because George Lucas had cred from American Graffiti to spend.
The problem is, the [movie] industry didn't 'grow up' in the 1960's, nor did the literature. 2001 was, and is, an outlier on the charts. (And is, IMO, vastly overrated. While the SFX were incredible for the era, the storyline is but mundane at best.)
Once you remove that false assumption, the TFA's whole premise (and it's conclusion) falls to pieces. The pieces dissolve to dust when you compare the other films of the era to the films quoted - good SF has always been the minority, and generic archetypes the majority.
Twice in recent years (one still in living memory) we went over and save them from their own incompetence, even though it was not directly in our self interest to do so. (Though it was in accord with our principles.)
Whoa, wait a minute. Principles? The United States remained neutral in World War II until it got attacked by Japan. Ever heard of Pearl Harbor?
Yes, I've heard of Pearl Harbor. You, on the other hand, seem to be utterly ignorant of the political enviroment in the US in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor. Sentiment to intervene in Europe was already growing - as was US involvement in Europe. (US neutrality was a sham by 1939.)
Your ignorance is really appaling. I can't comprehend how someone can be a techie, which you'd think entails a respect for knowledge and the ability to tell facts apart from falsehoods, and yet spout bullshit about stuff that they've clearly never read about. It just blows my mind.
This has to be one of the single most laughable things I've seen written on Slashdot. *Especially* when it comes from someone as pathetically ignorant as yourself who seems to know zip point shit about WWII.
True, France didn't help the US in their war of independence out of the goodness of the king's heart. But the US intervention in WWII has nothing to do with benevolence either. Come on! Stalin begged the Allies to open a western front in 1942. He demanded it in 1943. In 1944 it was almost *irrelevant*, Allied victory was virtually assured by the Soviet onslaught. In simple terms: *the United States invaded Western Europe not to defeat Nazi Germany, but to prevent a Soviet Eurasia*. Not out of good will. Self-interest.
Someone who claims to know history should display a little better understanding of it. The 'Soviet onslaught' only occurred because they had someone providing with raw materials, machine tools, etc... etc... That someone was the US. If the US wanted to prevent a Soviet Eurasia - doing so would have been trivially easy, simply cease Lend-Lease to the USSR. Equally, Operation Overlord was not a creation of a moments work - it could hardly have beeen whistled up on short notice. In the real world, planning and preparation for Overlord took years.
Your implication that the US saved France in WWI is laughable and pathetic. The United States did not especially distinguish themselves in that war, they totally failed to learn from the British and French experience in the first 3 years of the war and repeated their mistakes to the same result. They fought for a very short period of time, in much smaller numbers than the cumulative war effort of either the UK or France. In the end, the US' entry in the war served one main purpose: to convince the German command that victory was impossible due to the Allies' superior strength of numbers. In any case, the French fought from beginning to end, had the most soldiers on the ground and suffered the most casualties among the Allies.
Ah yes - the US convinced Germany that it could not win, but somehow this did not contribute to actually winning the war and saving France. You are so busy spouting propaganda you don't even bother to think about what you write.
In WWII, France was crushed, no question. But I still haven't seen a convincing proposal of what could have been done to prevent the deep penetration of French territory by the German armored forces, short of best-case scenarios requiring virtual prescience from the BEF and French army.
Almost trivially easy to prevent being conquered. Spend the resources spent on the Maginot Line more wisely and don't spend twenty years ignoring your conventional forces. You'll still get deeply penetrated - but you won't be conquered with virtually no effort.
In 1939 the population of France stood at less than 42,000,000, that of the Nazi Germany at more than 76,000,000.
Raw population numbers are virtually meaningless. What matters is industrial capacity, military leadership and strategy, and will.
If Germany had held France, then that little island country off the coast would have fallen. The US would eventually fall as well.
Only in some fantasy world where Germany magically had all of it's infrastructure and political problems fixed - and a couple of decades passed so that it's industrial capacity reached anything close to that of the United States. You've read too much WWII propaganda
What's fascinating to me is the behavior of the explosion front. At first it seems counterintuitive for it to 'burrow' towards the surface and burst asymetrically. But when you stop and think about it, that is the behavior you should expect - the expansion is the direction of least resistance, into regions of lower pressure.
Now, speaking as a Brit, we've been bashing the French for a good thousand years or so (and they have been bashing us for at least as long). We see no reason to stop just because the Americans have started to join in (although, we do find that pretty funny, since the main reason that they are not still a colony of ours is that the French fought for their independence).
The French didn't fight for American Independence - they opened a new front in their war against the British. (As an American, I'm grateful they did, I just don't delude myself as to their motivations.) And that's what irk's many Americans - they fought for us in their own self interest. Twice in recent years (one still in living memory) we went over and save them from their own incompetence, even though it was not directly in our self interest to do so. (Though it was in accord with our principles.)
Most Americans (illogically) expect nations to act like individuals and be grateful for such actions.
I am totally blown away that so many people responded to this guy's question with anti-telecommuter FUD.
And responding with pro-telecommuting FUD (especially when you make the common mistake of generalizing from your personal and specific subjective impressions and situation) is better exactly how?
As an aerospace engineer, I'm glad they are reverting to the apollo 'stack' concept. It is safer than the shuttle, in theory,
An aerospace engineer should be aware that while the stack concept removes some failure modes that the Shuttle has - it adds several of it's very own. Starting right at launch, the LES can fail when needed. When you start the re-entry phase, you face the problem of dropping off the parts no longer needed. (You can either drop too early, or fail to drop on time. The Soyuz has had both happen.) Parachutes can fail to deploy and have no backups, and your landing braking system (rockets or airbags, NASA hasn't decided between them) can fail to operate. (Soyuz has had its braking rockets fail at least twice.) There are also the risks of landing off-target. (Again, something that has happened to Soyuz on multiple occasions.)
let's face it - the shuttle never reached its full potential as a 'space truck': dropping off and retrieving satellites. It only really efficiently used the payload bay during the construction (and continued construction) of ISS.
An aerospace engineer should be more cognizant of aerospace history. The Shuttle was intended from day one as the service vehicle for a space station. As the original Shuttle tended station was cancelled in 1972 - all the satellite/SpaceHab/etc... missions moved from being secondary missions to being primary placeholders while NASA waited for Congress to authorize a station.
The new system will compartmentalize equiptment from people, allowing for better scaling and efficiency. And better failure modes, using existing hardware with a proven track record (and failure modes that have been documented and corrected).
An aerospace engineer should be cognizant of well.. aerospace engineering.
There is no reason other than emotion to compartmentalize people and cargo. None. A rocket that cannot be trusted with people shouldn't be trusted with billion dollar cargoes. (And vice versa.) Furthermore - using two different boosters decreases efficiency as it requires duplicated ground support resources and many more warm bodies. Furthermore it increases costs and reduces safety by decreasing the flights rates for each booster. It would be considerably cheaper and safer to use just the Porklauncher V, ballasting it when used for crew launches, than the current plan. However, the current plan - by it's mandate to preserve jobs, is forbidden by law to be cheaper, safer, and more efficient.
Equally - the Porklauncher I and V have never used proven hardware, from day one the hardware required significant modifications. They not only don't have a track record - they introduce new failure modes. (For example, the Porklauncher I requires a roll control package. The Porklauncher V requires large amounts of new structure, and redesigning the amount of structure it 'reuses'.) This problem has only grown worse as the program is progessing, the amount of commonality decreases with each iteration of the design. (Current NASA thinking indicates that an entirely new SRM may be required - using 5 segments vice the current 4, for example.)
Because food is cheaper to import than produce locally so all the farms would go out of business. And you don't want to depend on other, potentially unstable, countries for food.
I don't see anything wrong with using these cheap food sources.
Of course not - because like most Slashdotters you don't see much beyond the end of your nose, nor think much beyond your next gaming session.
If they ever dried up we could always go back to growing our own food.
Right - all the farms that had vanished and all the machinery that had rusted and all the people who had gotten other jobs can leap back into production overnight. Oh, wait. This is the real world we are talking about, not SimFarm - it takes months to produce most crops.
A few decades ago I served on a submarine. The oxygen generator stopped working for a while, and for operational reasons we couldn't snorkel for fresh air. The percentage of oxygen dropped below the point where combustion is supported, so the smokers were out of luck. People's lungs respond to the partial pressure of oxygen in air, not the absolute percentage, so the crew including myself were fine, since we were only at about the equivalent of 10,000 feet (US units).
You might want to turn your dolphins in then son, or at least let us know who graped off your Atmosphere Control siggie. Fires burn just fine at 10K feet.
I always wondered wouldn't it be safer from a fire prevention standpoint to always operate like that.
Because reducing the concentration of Oxygen in the atmosphere to a level low enough to have a significant effect on a fire means lowering them to a level that requires serious acclimatization for the people breathing said air - which means a crew seriously impaired for the days it requires to acclimitize. (According to this page that could take up to a month.)
Slashdot Mirror
I routinely travel between a first tier city (Seattle) and two different second/third tier cities (Winston-Salem NC (flying into Regional rather than Frank Reynolds) and Jacksonville FL), I rarely have a problem even though virtually every trip routes me through either O'Hare or Hartsfield-Jackson. (The two busiest airports in the United States.) While my itinerary has been replaced in toto once, I've never missed a connection.
I suspect you report problems, while I report sucess, because I avoid the dirt cheap flights - they are dirt cheap for a reason. (I usually shoot for the just-below-midrange costs constrained by arrival and departure times. I avoid rush hours and red-eyes.)
They are probably saying that because they have the most experience in the world with large aircraft. They have also been saying it for a couple of decades - it's one of the major reasons they put off for so long on investing the money in major upgrades to the 747.
"They laughed at Columbus, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown".
Sure, the 747 overcame massive obstacles and became a stunning sucess. But the DC-10 didn't. Neither did the Comet.
They said that about the 747... Yet Tenerife didn't slow things down one bit.
I've been saying that off-and-on here on Slashdot for years. The biggest obstacle to obtaining actual reasonable fair use is assholes like the OP (who are in a majority on Slashdot) who define fair use as "mine, mine, mine" - like a petulant four year old.
Certainly - but where his argument fails is when he uses it as a justification to steal rather than as a reason for not buying the music. There is a vast difference between the two positions.
In other words, he is willing to steal - knowing it is wrong.
Sure - it's one data point. But you can't draw a curve through one point. The music industry has tens of millions of data points - the vast majority of which suggest that people are perfectly willing to pay higher prices than he is willing to do. The Slashdot community has a hard time dealing with this simple fact and the fact that they are a vanishingly small community.
You are absolutely correct - the theme of many music related posts is "I don't want to pay their prices, therefore it's ok for me to steal". The RIAA is not to be blamed for him choosing to steal, they didn't force or coerce him in any way. He made the personal decision to steal rather than to buy.
Here in the real world - we've never really had a truly independent press. They've always been beholden to their advertisers. The situation now for the mass media is truly better than it was - as little as thirty to forty years ago they were also much more heavily beholden to political interests than they are today. It's also worth noting that today's 'independent' press (blogs, websites) are in fact *much* more heavily slanted and filtered than the mass media has been at practically any time.
When I voted last year - I had a choice of multiple political parties, few of whom were 'two sides of the same coin'. Heck, for my State House representative, it wasn't a matter of choosing between the lesser of two evils, I had six evils to decide between.
Bottom line: What's really strangling this country is individual who are not only ignorant of history and politics - they seem proud of it.
Anyone who thinks the US is even remotely totalitarian hasn't a clue, and likely hasn't a functioning brain cell. (As well as being a large part of the problem.)
The problem with that is - your unused resources end at the network jack of your router. Everything past that belongs to somebody else - and while you pay for acess to those resources, that does not imply that you can give them away for free to anyone who happens to drive by.
You miss the point. It doesn't matter what the letter said. It never should have been sent - because, as you point out, the bill wasn't sent to him.
I can tell you a not a lawyer, and that you have no experience with business or the law. When the Client contacted the Friend who contacted the Asker - they were tossing the problem into his lap. He needed a lawyer right then, before taking any action - and especially before contacting Corbis or their law firm.
And your statement is a fine example of ignorance. As soon as the Asker sent any letter to Corbis or their law firm - he was inserting himself into the middle of a potential litigation situation. Which is extraordinarily stupid to do without contacting a lawyer first.
No, you are being ignorant of the law and legal processes - while taking others to task for doing just that.
One doesn't need to focus on every detail or spend a great deal of time on the action to be action based. The [short] story revolved around the action in the Battle Room, and kept returning to it. That makes it (IMO) action based.
Ah, but you would nicely steal their images? The fact is, you *did* steal their images. Not only that - but you matters worse by taking action on your own, *and* posting to ask Slashdot, when you should have consulted your lawyer *first*. (Mostly it seems in the vain hope that the problem will just 'go away' and you won't have to pay the price for your own actions.)
That's great if all you want is the latest craptacular fiction or self help bestseller. But for the kind of books I read (heavyweight nonfiction, generally very specialized), Amazon has been a godsend - because bricks and mortar stores rarely carry it. Sure, I can phone in and special order it - but why? Two minutes on the web, and UPS brings it right to my front door. (And Amazon often leads to me related books on the same topic - something a bricks and mortar store is seriously bad at outside of best sellers.)
It says you are deluded as to the quality of SF in the 'old days'. I lived through 'em - and Sturgeon's Law applied then too.
Which is a weird thing to worry about - as the original versions of Ender's Game (the short story and the novella) were almost nothing but action.
Nope. Blockbusters got their real start with Jaws - making a hit book into a heavily hyped movie. (And the sucess of the movie Jaws came as a vast surprise - it was expected to make money, but not on the scale it did.) Even so, this was just a refinement of something that Hollywood had been doing for decades (Gone With the Wind), not something completely new.
Star Wars was just filler that nobody (at the executive level) much cared if it lived or died - so long as it didn't lose too much money. Just like TV has airtime to fill, movie screens are the same way - and if your company doesn't fill them, somebody else will. In fact, ultimately the only reason Star Wars got made at all is because George Lucas had cred from American Graffiti to spend.
The problem is, the [movie] industry didn't 'grow up' in the 1960's, nor did the literature. 2001 was, and is, an outlier on the charts. (And is, IMO, vastly overrated. While the SFX were incredible for the era, the storyline is but mundane at best.)
Once you remove that false assumption, the TFA's whole premise (and it's conclusion) falls to pieces. The pieces dissolve to dust when you compare the other films of the era to the films quoted - good SF has always been the minority, and generic archetypes the majority.
Yes, I've heard of Pearl Harbor. You, on the other hand, seem to be utterly ignorant of the political enviroment in the US in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor. Sentiment to intervene in Europe was already growing - as was US involvement in Europe. (US neutrality was a sham by 1939.)
This has to be one of the single most laughable things I've seen written on Slashdot. *Especially* when it comes from someone as pathetically ignorant as yourself who seems to know zip point shit about WWII.
Someone who claims to know history should display a little better understanding of it. The 'Soviet onslaught' only occurred because they had someone providing with raw materials, machine tools, etc... etc... That someone was the US. If the US wanted to prevent a Soviet Eurasia - doing so would have been trivially easy, simply cease Lend-Lease to the USSR. Equally, Operation Overlord was not a creation of a moments work - it could hardly have beeen whistled up on short notice. In the real world, planning and preparation for Overlord took years.
Ah yes - the US convinced Germany that it could not win, but somehow this did not contribute to actually winning the war and saving France. You are so busy spouting propaganda you don't even bother to think about what you write.
Almost trivially easy to prevent being conquered. Spend the resources spent on the Maginot Line more wisely and don't spend twenty years ignoring your conventional forces. You'll still get deeply penetrated - but you won't be conquered with virtually no effort.
Raw population numbers are virtually meaningless. What matters is industrial capacity, military leadership and strategy, and will.
Only in some fantasy world where Germany magically had all of it's infrastructure and political problems fixed - and a couple of decades passed so that it's industrial capacity reached anything close to that of the United States. You've read too much WWII propaganda
What's fascinating to me is the behavior of the explosion front. At first it seems counterintuitive for it to 'burrow' towards the surface and burst asymetrically. But when you stop and think about it, that is the behavior you should expect - the expansion is the direction of least resistance, into regions of lower pressure.
The French didn't fight for American Independence - they opened a new front in their war against the British. (As an American, I'm grateful they did, I just don't delude myself as to their motivations.) And that's what irk's many Americans - they fought for us in their own self interest. Twice in recent years (one still in living memory) we went over and save them from their own incompetence, even though it was not directly in our self interest to do so. (Though it was in accord with our principles.)
Most Americans (illogically) expect nations to act like individuals and be grateful for such actions.
And responding with pro-telecommuting FUD (especially when you make the common mistake of generalizing from your personal and specific subjective impressions and situation) is better exactly how?
An aerospace engineer should be aware that while the stack concept removes some failure modes that the Shuttle has - it adds several of it's very own. Starting right at launch, the LES can fail when needed. When you start the re-entry phase, you face the problem of dropping off the parts no longer needed. (You can either drop too early, or fail to drop on time. The Soyuz has had both happen.) Parachutes can fail to deploy and have no backups, and your landing braking system (rockets or airbags, NASA hasn't decided between them) can fail to operate. (Soyuz has had its braking rockets fail at least twice.) There are also the risks of landing off-target. (Again, something that has happened to Soyuz on multiple occasions.)
An aerospace engineer should be more cognizant of aerospace history. The Shuttle was intended from day one as the service vehicle for a space station. As the original Shuttle tended station was cancelled in 1972 - all the satellite/SpaceHab/etc... missions moved from being secondary missions to being primary placeholders while NASA waited for Congress to authorize a station.
An aerospace engineer should be cognizant of well.. aerospace engineering.
There is no reason other than emotion to compartmentalize people and cargo. None. A rocket that cannot be trusted with people shouldn't be trusted with billion dollar cargoes. (And vice versa.) Furthermore - using two different boosters decreases efficiency as it requires duplicated ground support resources and many more warm bodies. Furthermore it increases costs and reduces safety by decreasing the flights rates for each booster. It would be considerably cheaper and safer to use just the Porklauncher V, ballasting it when used for crew launches, than the current plan. However, the current plan - by it's mandate to preserve jobs, is forbidden by law to be cheaper, safer, and more efficient.
Equally - the Porklauncher I and V have never used proven hardware, from day one the hardware required significant modifications. They not only don't have a track record - they introduce new failure modes. (For example, the Porklauncher I requires a roll control package. The Porklauncher V requires large amounts of new structure, and redesigning the amount of structure it 'reuses'.) This problem has only grown worse as the program is progessing, the amount of commonality decreases with each iteration of the design. (Current NASA thinking indicates that an entirely new SRM may be required - using 5 segments vice the current 4, for example.)
The primary goal of any organization is to survive and grow - it doesn't matter if the name on the door is Microsoft or Mozilla.
Of course not - because like most Slashdotters you don't see much beyond the end of your nose, nor think much beyond your next gaming session.
Right - all the farms that had vanished and all the machinery that had rusted and all the people who had gotten other jobs can leap back into production overnight. Oh, wait. This is the real world we are talking about, not SimFarm - it takes months to produce most crops.
You might want to turn your dolphins in then son, or at least let us know who graped off your Atmosphere Control siggie. Fires burn just fine at 10K feet.
Because reducing the concentration of Oxygen in the atmosphere to a level low enough to have a significant effect on a fire means lowering them to a level that requires serious acclimatization for the people breathing said air - which means a crew seriously impaired for the days it requires to acclimitize. (According to this page that could take up to a month.)