The advantage of WP isn't that it's right all the time, it's that it is (through the tireless effort of zillions of people on five-minute breaks) self-correcting.
In theory.
When the AP screwed up their Ken Lay story, it took overnight before a retraction was posted. WP's story is screwed up for 5-20 minutes at a time.
Sure there is a handful on controversial and/or current articles that get fixed that fast. But for each of those articles, there are dozens more which remain broken for months or weeks. (The canonical example - one that Wikipedia supporters never seem to mention, is of course the Siegenthaler Affair.) I have in my watchlist over two dozen pages that I know to be incorrect - that have lain untouched for as much as a year.
Since when does the SEC launch "informal" investigations, and more importantly, since when does the SEC acknowledge that they're investigating any company?
Since roughly about.025 seconds after the ink dried on the legislation creating the SEC.
The SEC is a bit like the Spanish Inquisition (NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition!), in that you don't know they're investigating you until they come knocking on your door with subpoenas and start carting aways boxes full of corporate financial documents.
I don't know where you got that impression - as it certainly isn't supported if you regularly follow business news.
This is a maliciously motivated, willful misunderstanding of how software development is performed. The "offensive" data was disconnected from the main game, but not fully removed. The reason it wasn't removed is because, when you're that close to a drop-dead ship date, you don't suddenly start yanking out huge wads of data and code because that will invalidate all your testing to date, and you'll have to re-test the entire damned game, which you don't have time for.
Which of course raises the question - if the code was not intended to be in the game (Take-Two had to know it exceeded their target rating), what was it doing commited to the main branch in the first place?
So they did the next best thing -- they severed all the connections to it. In the annals of software engineering, this is considered, "good enough."
If there truly were no connections to it - it could have safely been removed *without* retesting. (And that what Take-Two did is considered "good enough" - then it shows just how shoddy development practices in software engineering really is.)
The facts of the matter don't support any other conclusions than Take-Two (which encouraged mods), knowingly left that code in place for modders to find.
Anyway, point is that calling someone *did* work. People overseas called NZ and the word spread *fast*. I don't know whether it was fast enough to be useful, but there's something in there thats useful. Dont call people here - broadcast the news on the internet and news. *Someone* listening will know people in the affected area and the mass phone calls will start.
That's very nice - but about as relevant as rice sales in Antartica.
The nations surrounding the Indian Ocean by and large *aren't* nations with well developed communications and transportation as in NZ.
Also Popular Mechanics ran an article on this like 4 months ago. In fact it was on the cover of that issue.
I was trying to remember where I somewhat recently read about this technology and thank you for reminding me that it was in Popular Mechanics.
*yawn*. Wind powered freighters are one of a dozen or so techs that Popular ['Science'|'Mechanics'] has been flogging on a regular basis for years. It's appearance in Popular Mechanics is essentially irrelevant to the real prospects of the technology.
Re:al Quaeda, witches, devil-worshippers and gangs
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Gangs on the Internet
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· Score: 1
When one lists things together, one often implies an association. In this case, it certainly is not intended to show contrast.
You are utterly correct. And in this instance the association is "subcultures with unique argot" - not "subcultures that threaten society".
Read my statement carefully. I said "threat to society," which differs from threat to you or your community.
And my community - and others threatened by gangs are not part of society?
If you are wondering why, consider laws banning the use of recreational drugs. Outlawing goods the general population demands always brings rise to illicit trade, such as with prohibition and mafias. Our socieity simultaneously outlaws drugs, enforces the ban, then demands those very same drugs. It is this schizophrenic behavior that contributes directly to the formation of gangs, as the presence of a sufficiently large demand produces a supply.
A more stunning bit of ignorance I have never encountered. Gangs predate the drug issue in America by a wide margin - and even today gangs are not solely about drugs. Many aren't about drugs at all. (Though the uniformed may believe otherwise.)
is that you have to walk a backpack onto a subway train, whereas you can drive a truck into a tunnel. The payload in the latter case can be orders of magnitude larger.
And, as Timothy McVeigh demonstrated - even a crude shaping of the explosion can vastly magnify the effect of the blast.
From TFA:
One counter-terrorism source told the Daily News it was doubtful a plot to blow it up would be feasible, saying huge amounts of explosives and a detailed knowledge of blast effect would be necessary.
A few hundred pounds of explosive (well within the capacity of your average mini-van, let alone something equally common and larger), crudely formed into a shaped charge, would suffice to severerly damage the inner lining of the tunnel. (As well as killing and maiming for a considerable distance - a lot of people at rush hour!) IIRC various telephone and data lines also run within the tunnel - they too could be damaged.
This would force the shutdown of the tunnel for months of inspection and repair. The direct costs alone would be a considerable bill. The knock-on emotional and economic effects are incalculable.
One need not destroy something utterly to have a vast effect.
Re:al Quaeda, witches, devil-worshippers and gangs
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Gangs on the Internet
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· Score: 1
Wow, does this guy have an ax to grind. What does an imaginary network of terrorists, practitioners of a polytheistic nature religion, angst-filled teenagers, and small cliques of violent street thugs have in common?
What do they have in common? No more and no less than the police officer in TFA stated: They are unique subcultures with unique slang, argot, terminology, etc... Understanding the same takes time and effort.
(Though the usual Slashdot handwaving panic mongers have spent no time trying to read and understand what TFA said - instead (and as usual) jumping to conclusions about what they think he said and meant.)
None of them are a threat to society but provide a convenient fantasy for people obsessed with some silly notion of an epic battle of Good versus Evil.
Try living in an area dominated by gang bangers and wannabees and your attitude will change abruptly I warrant.
People like this scare me more than a few scattered street gangs.
Street gangs are niether few nor scattered - but the handwavers and head-in-the-sand types prefer to believe their fantasies over reality.
I considered attending - but the entry fee (approx U$3 at current exchange rates) is far too steep to justify, considering I get the real thing for 'free'.
I think that Google does keep its apps competitive. That is why they do not need to keep throwing cash at marketing.
You may think what you want - what you think does not alter reality. Reality is that in every market except search, they hold a minority of the market.
GMail, for example, still has features that are unmatched by its competitors. POP3 forwarding, threading, integrated optional chat client, etc.
And that's just the problem. These things impress the geeks - because they are kewl and l33t and something no one else has. OTOH, the general public could care less. Numbers don't lie - GMail is a distant third behind Yahoo! and Hotmail.
It shouldn't be up to the FIA to decide, the teams should make their own decisions, whether that be choosing a Microsoft OS or another.
That's a great political slogan - but it flies in the face of reality. The FIA, and many other racing supervisory bodies, routinely specify how the cars are built in order to ensure the playing field is reasonably level.
1. About tyranny, monarchy and non-representative rule: While they do make for some emotional arguments, let's remember that England was a parliamentary monarchy at the time.
England was a parliamentary monarchy - America was virtually a feudal estate.
but let's remember that that parliament _did_ repel some taxes (e.g., the stamp act) when the colonists protested them. So how much more representation _do_ you want, if even being able to repel laws and taxes isn't enough for you?
Check the records of Parliament in that era... You'll find no Member for any colony, city, or town in America. No Member, no representation.
Comparing it to India is pretty much bullshit, since India was under foreign occupation. The american colonies were British citizens, no less favoured than those in the UK.
That's whole point of the no representation clause - the Crown claimed that the colonists were British citizens but refused to grant them the same rights a British Citizens living in England. Thus the Revolution actually started as a Civil War - with the colonists interested in nothing else but being treated as the British citizens they thought themselves as. When the Crown and Parliament insisted on treating them as serfs - the Civil War became a Revolution.
Taxes. Ah-ha. Now we're getting somewhere. I hope you do, however, understand that an average citizen in the colonies paid insignifficant taxes compared to the citizens back home in the UK. As in, IIRC somewhere between 20 to 30 times less per capita. It also didn't help that the colonists threatened any tax collectors with tarring and feathering.
That's nothing more than smoke and mirrors. At issue was never the amount of taxes, but the arbitrary and uneven way in which they were imposed. (In particular they were imposed in such a manner as to unfairly penalize American industry and shipping and to render it little more than a captive market for UK mercantile interests.
No, it can't. Redstone could only launch an astronaut on a very short suborbital hop. A substantially larger rocket is needed to get a human into orbit.
Ok, so the Redstone's no good anymore. But why scrap Gemini? That was good enough for orbital flight.
For the same reason most folks scrap their little roadsters when they have kids. Like Gemini, they are cool, sporty, and 'good enough' to get around town in - but that's about it. Once you want to actually *do* anything in orbit, you need docking capability to provide shirtsleeve transfers, you need room for passengers in addition to the pilot and his backup, etc... etc...
Why scrap the Saturn? That was good for going to the moon, and it could have "retired" as a heavy-lift cargo vehicle.
Because there was no need for heavy lift capability - it was too expensive for all but the largest of cargoes, and the largest of cargoes were too expensive for anyone to be interested in building.
Even if they didn't have the money to maintain 2 concurrent launch systems, they could have released the plans to private industry, so that these "tried and true" vehicles could be put to commercial use.
That would have worked - had there been any commercial use for these 'tried and true'[1] system. But there wasnt.
[1] They actually weren't. *Together* the Gemini and Apollo flight hours don't add up to the hours a typical new aircraft gets in the development and testing phase alone.
Well the "new" data that made the Thiokol engineers (not NASA engineers, BTW) say it was unsafe to fly was the weather report which said Florida was going to have freezing temperatures over the night. It was the fact that NASA wanted to launch on a day that was FAR colder than any previous shuttle launches, that made those engineers have their "eleventh hour" call to not launch.
That's *new conditions* - not new data. The data that NASA and Thiokol had, was interpreted to mean that O-ring failures were not clearly correlated to temperature. (Which we now know to have been a failure to understand the real cause of blow by - which is joint rotation.) *This* is what lead management into it's misunderstanding - they'd been told there was no correlation - and now, without supporting evidence, the engineers were claiming it was.
Unfortunately, their reasons were mainly intuitive ones (as opposed to hard data saying the O-Rings had been tested at those cold temperatures, and they were likely to fail), and the hasty presentation by the engineers, to both Thiokol and NASA management, was uncompelling. In fact, famously, it was NASA management that convinced the Thiokol management to ignore their own engineers intuition, based on a perceived lack of evidence.
It wasn't a percieved lack of evidence - it was a perception that the evidence didn't support the claim. A key and important difference.
The cause of the failure was joint rotation - there was blowby even at temperatures that were within the nominal spec, not faulty O-rings.
This is starting to get into word play.
No, it's not wordplay - it's vital to understanding the whole sequence of events.
Even if you assume the joint rotation was the largest part of what caused the o-rings to fail, I would still say that the o-ring's failure is what caused the mission failure. Joint rotation, after all, was present in all other flights, and SRB tests, and to my knowledge there's no reason to expect that there was more extensive joint rotation on Challenger than had previously been experienced.
It's not an assumption - it's a fact. What killed Challenger was that the joint rotated and allowed hot gas past the primary O-ring. Period. The condition was made worse by the low temperatures - but it was not caused by the low temperatures. (It could have happened on earlier flights at higher and in spec temperatures, and nearly did on several.) That's why niether the engineers or the managers could clearly see the problem - because there were *two* problems (poor joint design and poor seal design) that conspired to produce *one* failure indication.
(It's been a while since I read the Roger's report, but I don't remember anything.)
The Rodgers Commission only touches on the joint rotation issue. Do keep in mind that report is twenty years old - a great deal of thinking and re-examination has gone on in the interim.
Complete o-ring failure was never present previously.
So? Thresher dove to test depth dozens of times with a time bomb in her piping - all it took was once. Shuttles flew 25 times before Challenger - many suffering some degree of blow by. The O-ring could have failed on STS-1, or on STS-100, it's only a matter of luck that Challenger's number came up that day.
Even then it still seems to me like the sane thing to do is stop the launch until you can understand what _are_ they trying to say, how did this new interpretation come to pass, and maybe ask some other engineers to look at that new interpretation and get a competent opinion of it.
That's true in a 'sane' world - which sounds like a 'perfect' world. In the real, and decidely imperfect world - it's quite different.
Basically I don't think that any engineer worth his salt would do something like that based on "my horoscope said 'don't launch any shuttles today'" or similar. If they did change their mind or interpretation, there must be some scientific reason there. That it's not "articulate" in management gibberish is pretty irrelevant there.
'Articulate' isn't management gibberish - it's a perfectly reasonable English world with a widely accepted meaning.
Also bear in mind that "new data" can actually come in a variety of forms and shapes. I can take the same measurements and reach a different conclusion, because now I've read a different theory about how to apply those. The measurements are the same, but the new data there is the new set of rules or formulas or some anecdotal evidence about some other case where in similar conditions something went wrong or whatever.
Very true - but having nothing to do with the situation under discussion.
The shuttle was part of Reagan's gambit to goad the Soviets into bankrupting themselves trying to keep up with our military spending in the 80s. That's why high-tech and expensive was chosen over cheap and reliable.
The problem with this theory is that shuttle studies started twenty years before Reagan took office and the Shuttle program was created nine years before he took office.
Problem is, the war it was designed to fight has been over for a couple of decades, so we should have went back to cheap and reliable a long time ago.
The problem with that theory is we can't go back to a state that never existed in the first place. To 'go back' we need heavy lift cargo launchers (never cheap or reliable) and lighter boosters with capsules (again, never cheap or reliable).
they could not offer a coherent case for changing their stance
Besides the clear evidence that blow-by increased at lower temperatures within the range that they were familiar, that there was one shuttle flight already that had come dangerously close to having the ring burned entirely away, and the 28 degree point being well outside the area they knew about?
The problem is the engineers had supported the position that "even though the primary o-ring is burning - the secondary is holding, so were are OK to fly". (Despite the fact that the spec said "there shall be no blow by, period".) It wasn't until the eleventh hour that they changed their stance and became concerned about the secondary O-ring - without being able to (in managements eyes) justify and articulate that concern. The key insight to understanding the attitude of management is to remember the evidence as presented by the engineers prior to the Challenger's launch campaign *wasn't* as clear as it is presented ex post facto with 20-20 hindsight. (Edward Tufte and the Rogers Commission examine this failure of presentation, communication, and understanding at some length.)
That's the key to understanding (not condoning!) the whole decision process - first, the engineers failed to clearly communicate the issue (contrary to urban legend version that has arisen over the last twenty plus years); and second, that management had become conditioned to thinking of the Shuttle as an operational vehicle vice an experimental one. This lead the managers to believe that since they had flown with this problem, and that since the problem was understood by the engineers (which it wasn't[1]), that it was an acceptable risk to continue to fly.
[1] The cause of the failure isn't clearly articulated even today. The cause of the failure was joint rotation - there was blowby even at temperatures that were within the nominal spec, not faulty O-rings.
So your claim is that no engineers at NASA had ever expressed concern about the O-rings except a few days before launch.
No, my claim is that they elevated the level of concern from "this is not right but acceptably safe to fly" to "this is unsafe and we should not fly" until a few days before launch - without any new data that could (to managements eyes) justify the new conclusion.
So, well, I won't argue a your point B for lack of enough data, but point A leaves me scratching my head in disbelief. So someone decided that those engineers aren't trustworthy... because they changed their mind? Seems like a pretty weird attitude. I definitely expected that at NASA even management would be a bit more open-minded than that. They're pretty much one continuous experiment and using experimental equipment, so it's exactly the kind of thing that should be _expected_.
The issue is more complex than simply "changing their mind".
If they had new data - you'd be correct, the managers would have been insane to have launched Challenger. But they *didn't* have new data - they had a new interpretation, which is what makes point B crucial to understanding the whole issue. They were taking the same data that lead to conclusion 'black' and now claiming it supported conclusion 'white' - but were unable to articulate and justify their change in stance.
Does anybody at NASA have a working memory? Don't they remember the results of the Challenger inquest, wherein plenty of evidence of engineers saying "DON'T LAUNCH! BAAAAD!" was ignored?
Even if they do have a working memory - they won't remember that, as there was no such evidence. There was a small number of engineers who tried to say "Don't launch" at the eleventh hour - but they weren't trusted because a) this represented a near complete reversal of their previous stance and b) they could not offer a coherent case for changing their stance. Management failed, I grant, in continuing to fly despite dodgy O-ring behavior - but their decision did not occur in a vacuum.
This is yet another advantage of simpler capsule systems. The abort modes for those are all extremely simple and reliable compared to the Shuttle's. You fire the escape tower, get away from the rockets, ride down and open the parachutes when you get to the right altitude.
In history there have been two aborts of capsule systems, (specifically Soyuz). In the first, the abort system wasn't fired at the first warning of a fire in the booster (on the pad), but was delayed until almost too late. (Less than a second before the booster exploded.) In the second case, the first stage failed to seperate after burnout - and again the abort system delayed the escape. Two attempts, two near failure. Extremely simple and reliable huh?
As long as the weather isn't so horrible that it sinks the capsule in the ocean, everything should be pretty much fine.
I take it you've never actually attempted a personnel transfer at sea in even a minor sea state? It won't take much of a sea to be lower than that which would sink the capsule - but still pose significant dangers and problems.
I have converted a large number of people over to ubuntu on their pc after scaring theim with the latest MS fud about not having WGA on there to spy on you they will get viruses and trojans ant other things instantly.
I have been having some success convincing people to move away from Microsoft's buggy bloatware by oh-so-casually mentioning how MS installs spyware (WGA) on their computers.
It's astonishing that you have to lie to get people to switch.
What makes this so amusing to me is that I don't even consider myself a Linux geek...yet.
You may not consider yourself that - but your behavior (willingness to lie and mislead) speaks much.
If MS would offer whitebox builders the same price that they offer to the big OEMs like Dell and Gateway, they'd probably see a lot less for-profit piracy.
That's an interesting argument - "it's not the whitebox vendors fault that they cheat and steal and behave dishonestly, evil Microsoft holds a gun to their heads and forces them!".
As it stands, the small shops can put together good quality hardware and come out slightly ahead of the big companies, but the moment they add in software (including Windows and Office), they end up being forced to offer the complete system at a very uncompetitive price.
Any time I encounter a small shop trying to compete with the big boys on price - I run from them as fast as I can go. Trying to compete on price is a flashing sign ten meters high "WARNING: THE PROPRIETORS OF THIS SHOP ARE CLUELESS".
Slashdot Mirror
In theory.
Sure there is a handful on controversial and/or current articles that get fixed that fast. But for each of those articles, there are dozens more which remain broken for months or weeks. (The canonical example - one that Wikipedia supporters never seem to mention, is of course the Siegenthaler Affair.) I have in my watchlist over two dozen pages that I know to be incorrect - that have lain untouched for as much as a year.
Since roughly about
I don't know where you got that impression - as it certainly isn't supported if you regularly follow business news.
Which of course raises the question - if the code was not intended to be in the game (Take-Two had to know it exceeded their target rating), what was it doing commited to the main branch in the first place?
If there truly were no connections to it - it could have safely been removed *without* retesting. (And that what Take-Two did is considered "good enough" - then it shows just how shoddy development practices in software engineering really is.)
The facts of the matter don't support any other conclusions than Take-Two (which encouraged mods), knowingly left that code in place for modders to find.
That's very nice - but about as relevant as rice sales in Antartica.
The nations surrounding the Indian Ocean by and large *aren't* nations with well developed communications and transportation as in NZ.
*yawn*. Wind powered freighters are one of a dozen or so techs that Popular ['Science'|'Mechanics'] has been flogging on a regular basis for years. It's appearance in Popular Mechanics is essentially irrelevant to the real prospects of the technology.
You are utterly correct. And in this instance the association is "subcultures with unique argot" - not "subcultures that threaten society".
And my community - and others threatened by gangs are not part of society?
A more stunning bit of ignorance I have never encountered. Gangs predate the drug issue in America by a wide margin - and even today gangs are not solely about drugs. Many aren't about drugs at all. (Though the uniformed may believe otherwise.)
And, as Timothy McVeigh demonstrated - even a crude shaping of the explosion can vastly magnify the effect of the blast.
From TFA:
A few hundred pounds of explosive (well within the capacity of your average mini-van, let alone something equally common and larger), crudely formed into a shaped charge, would suffice to severerly damage the inner lining of the tunnel. (As well as killing and maiming for a considerable distance - a lot of people at rush hour!) IIRC various telephone and data lines also run within the tunnel - they too could be damaged.
This would force the shutdown of the tunnel for months of inspection and repair. The direct costs alone would be a considerable bill. The knock-on emotional and economic effects are incalculable.
One need not destroy something utterly to have a vast effect.
What do they have in common? No more and no less than the police officer in TFA stated: They are unique subcultures with unique slang, argot, terminology, etc... Understanding the same takes time and effort.
(Though the usual Slashdot handwaving panic mongers have spent no time trying to read and understand what TFA said - instead (and as usual) jumping to conclusions about what they think he said and meant.)
Try living in an area dominated by gang bangers and wannabees and your attitude will change abruptly I warrant.
Street gangs are niether few nor scattered - but the handwavers and head-in-the-sand types prefer to believe their fantasies over reality.
I considered attending - but the entry fee (approx U$3 at current exchange rates) is far too steep to justify, considering I get the real thing for 'free'.
You may think what you want - what you think does not alter reality. Reality is that in every market except search, they hold a minority of the market.
And that's just the problem. These things impress the geeks - because they are kewl and l33t and something no one else has. OTOH, the general public could care less. Numbers don't lie - GMail is a distant third behind Yahoo! and Hotmail.
That's a great political slogan - but it flies in the face of reality. The FIA, and many other racing supervisory bodies, routinely specify how the cars are built in order to ensure the playing field is reasonably level.
England was a parliamentary monarchy - America was virtually a feudal estate.
Check the records of Parliament in that era... You'll find no Member for any colony, city, or town in America. No Member, no representation.
That's whole point of the no representation clause - the Crown claimed that the colonists were British citizens but refused to grant them the same rights a British Citizens living in England. Thus the Revolution actually started as a Civil War - with the colonists interested in nothing else but being treated as the British citizens they thought themselves as. When the Crown and Parliament insisted on treating them as serfs - the Civil War became a Revolution.
That's nothing more than smoke and mirrors. At issue was never the amount of taxes, but the arbitrary and uneven way in which they were imposed. (In particular they were imposed in such a manner as to unfairly penalize American industry and shipping and to render it little more than a captive market for UK mercantile interests.
For the same reason most folks scrap their little roadsters when they have kids. Like Gemini, they are cool, sporty, and 'good enough' to get around town in - but that's about it. Once you want to actually *do* anything in orbit, you need docking capability to provide shirtsleeve transfers, you need room for passengers in addition to the pilot and his backup, etc... etc...
Because there was no need for heavy lift capability - it was too expensive for all but the largest of cargoes, and the largest of cargoes were too expensive for anyone to be interested in building.
That would have worked - had there been any commercial use for these 'tried and true'[1] system. But there wasnt.
[1] They actually weren't. *Together* the Gemini and Apollo flight hours don't add up to the hours a typical new aircraft gets in the development and testing phase alone.
Actually each and every stage on the Saturn V was insulated.
Insulation means heat flow is *reduced*, not *stopped*.
It wasn't a percieved lack of evidence - it was a perception that the evidence didn't support the claim. A key and important difference.
No, it's not wordplay - it's vital to understanding the whole sequence of events.
It's not an assumption - it's a fact. What killed Challenger was that the joint rotated and allowed hot gas past the primary O-ring. Period. The condition was made worse by the low temperatures - but it was not caused by the low temperatures. (It could have happened on earlier flights at higher and in spec temperatures, and nearly did on several.) That's why niether the engineers or the managers could clearly see the problem - because there were *two* problems (poor joint design and poor seal design) that conspired to produce *one* failure indication.
The Rodgers Commission only touches on the joint rotation issue. Do keep in mind that report is twenty years old - a great deal of thinking and re-examination has gone on in the interim.
So? Thresher dove to test depth dozens of times with a time bomb in her piping - all it took was once. Shuttles flew 25 times before Challenger - many suffering some degree of blow by. The O-ring could have failed on STS-1, or on STS-100, it's only a matter of luck that Challenger's number came up that day.
That's true in a 'sane' world - which sounds like a 'perfect' world. In the real, and decidely imperfect world - it's quite different.
'Articulate' isn't management gibberish - it's a perfectly reasonable English world with a widely accepted meaning.
Very true - but having nothing to do with the situation under discussion.
The problem with this theory is that shuttle studies started twenty years before Reagan took office and the Shuttle program was created nine years before he took office.
The problem with that theory is we can't go back to a state that never existed in the first place. To 'go back' we need heavy lift cargo launchers (never cheap or reliable) and lighter boosters with capsules (again, never cheap or reliable).
The problem is the engineers had supported the position that "even though the primary o-ring is burning - the secondary is holding, so were are OK to fly". (Despite the fact that the spec said "there shall be no blow by, period".) It wasn't until the eleventh hour that they changed their stance and became concerned about the secondary O-ring - without being able to (in managements eyes) justify and articulate that concern. The key insight to understanding the attitude of management is to remember the evidence as presented by the engineers prior to the Challenger's launch campaign *wasn't* as clear as it is presented ex post facto with 20-20 hindsight. (Edward Tufte and the Rogers Commission examine this failure of presentation, communication, and understanding at some length.)
That's the key to understanding (not condoning!) the whole decision process - first, the engineers failed to clearly communicate the issue (contrary to urban legend version that has arisen over the last twenty plus years); and second, that management had become conditioned to thinking of the Shuttle as an operational vehicle vice an experimental one. This lead the managers to believe that since they had flown with this problem, and that since the problem was understood by the engineers (which it wasn't[1]), that it was an acceptable risk to continue to fly.
[1] The cause of the failure isn't clearly articulated even today. The cause of the failure was joint rotation - there was blowby even at temperatures that were within the nominal spec, not faulty O-rings.
No, my claim is that they elevated the level of concern from "this is not right but acceptably safe to fly" to "this is unsafe and we should not fly" until a few days before launch - without any new data that could (to managements eyes) justify the new conclusion.
The issue is more complex than simply "changing their mind".
If they had new data - you'd be correct, the managers would have been insane to have launched Challenger. But they *didn't* have new data - they had a new interpretation, which is what makes point B crucial to understanding the whole issue. They were taking the same data that lead to conclusion 'black' and now claiming it supported conclusion 'white' - but were unable to articulate and justify their change in stance.
Even if they do have a working memory - they won't remember that, as there was no such evidence. There was a small number of engineers who tried to say "Don't launch" at the eleventh hour - but they weren't trusted because a) this represented a near complete reversal of their previous stance and b) they could not offer a coherent case for changing their stance. Management failed, I grant, in continuing to fly despite dodgy O-ring behavior - but their decision did not occur in a vacuum.
In history there have been two aborts of capsule systems, (specifically Soyuz). In the first, the abort system wasn't fired at the first warning of a fire in the booster (on the pad), but was delayed until almost too late. (Less than a second before the booster exploded.) In the second case, the first stage failed to seperate after burnout - and again the abort system delayed the escape. Two attempts, two near failure. Extremely simple and reliable huh?
I take it you've never actually attempted a personnel transfer at sea in even a minor sea state? It won't take much of a sea to be lower than that which would sink the capsule - but still pose significant dangers and problems.
It's astonishing that you have to lie to get people to switch.
You may not consider yourself that - but your behavior (willingness to lie and mislead) speaks much.
That's an interesting argument - "it's not the whitebox vendors fault that they cheat and steal and behave dishonestly, evil Microsoft holds a gun to their heads and forces them!".
Any time I encounter a small shop trying to compete with the big boys on price - I run from them as fast as I can go. Trying to compete on price is a flashing sign ten meters high "WARNING: THE PROPRIETORS OF THIS SHOP ARE CLUELESS".