We (humanity as a whole) should by now have a much greater presense in space. The technology should have advanced to a far greater state than it has at time time. We are pretty much still stuck in the same place as we were in the late 1970's. The shuttles tech has seen little change from the 1970's tech that was in place when they were first drawn up.
One of the reasons we continue to stagnate is the insistence that we need some (always unspecified and handwaving) technology to make acess to space routine. We have the technology. We've had it since the late 60's.
What he haven't had is the will to discard the dead end path that boosters and spacecraft have taken and replace it the same standard methods that have worked time and again in virtually every other field of human economic behavior.
Galileo just announced the launch delay of Giove-B for good reasons: Giove-A is considered a success and Giove-B will be more useful later this year (september launch instead of spring). I like to call this "preemtive management": plan the second satellite now in case we need it and delay it if we don't , instead of, oops - we would need another satellite since the first one has failed.
That's not preemptive managment - it's spin control. GIOVE-A is the backup bird, GIOVE-B is the 'full meal deal'. What is now GIOVE-B was supposed to fly first and -A was a sop to critics of the pork inherent in the program. (-B was awared to the usual giants.)
What is now GIOVE-A was advertised as a cheaper alternative 'just in case' GIOVE-B went over schedule or overbudget. GIOVE-A was never expected to fly, let alone under budget and on schedule. When (unsurprisingly) the -B bird (built by the usual suspects) did in fact do both (go overschedule and overbudget) the -A bird (built by a small fringe company) was quietly elevated from 'backup' to 'pathfinder'.
Already, only one third of our US budget is deemed "discretionary" spending. That means if we nuked every social welfare program, education subsidy, stopped all subsidized construction, opened our border to illegals and terrorists, allowed interstate crime to go unchecked, disbanded the military, we would only be able to reduce the total tax burden by a third. The IRS would still have to collect taxes for everything that doesn't enhance our lives, which is interest on treasury debt, and financial obligations, like federal pensions and social security.
Unhappily - the facts don't support your rant. Social welfare programs are not in the discretionary portion of the budget - and in fact, they are the single biggest line item in the non-discretionary portion. It's truly frightening how much is hidden from view in the 'budget' - and how people actually do the research. Instead they prefer FUD to facts.
It may not even be able to do that. Bush cronies, for years, has been looking for ways to loot NASA's science budget (which barely cracks a few billion). But if they kill all space probe exploration, there will be quite a stink. (They're not killing manned programs, because it already helps their buds, like DeLay.) So, what does Bush do? He announces a NEW program to put man back on the moon and to Mars. Forget the fact the US does not have that kind of discretionary spending, like it did in the 1960's. Of course it costs more than probes. So, we take money away from exploring asteroids and Pluto, and put it into exploratory committees to organize a new space effort, and a CEV.
Unhappily - the facts don't support your rant. In reality, the science program funding has remained essentially stable. The 2006/2007 numbers are within 3% of the 2005 numbers - which varied little from the years before.
The science program that is being 'starved' accounts for 1/3 of NASA's budget, 1.5% of NASA's *total budget* is being reprogammed from science to VSE. But those numbers you'll never hear from the science side - because they reveal the truth. That the return they have generated for that 33% of the budget is shamefully low. That nearly every program has severe accounting problems. That the bid process for new missions is badly broken.
What has happened is that NASA went through the umanned program with a fine toothed comb and cut killed numerous projects that were already over budget, over schedule, *or both*. When the scientists and companies had their pork cut off - they stood back on the hind legs and howled. And the anti-Bush folks (who in the main care little for facts) have taken to repeating their FUD as fact.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of the current Administration, and I think the VSE is about the worst thing to happen to space exploration since the refactoring of the Apollo Program by Kennedy - but I prefer to base my conclusions on facts. Repeating FUD without understanding the facts makes you a tool of those who instigate the FUD.
And there's only one thing that can change this state of affairs: [overpriced launches] money. Lots and lots and lots of money invested in tech, tech, launch subsidies (to help build a self-sustaining industry), and more tech.
And it's this misguided view thats precisely why launch costs remain so expensive - that tech and money is the answer to everything. We have the technology. We've had the technology for forty years.
But the politics of the Space Race forced us down an evolutionary dead end.
Instead of developing rockets with large margins that could be built like Ford builds Explorers - we went the expensive, but faster, method of building what we have and spending billions (over the years) needlessly making payloads lighter. The secret to lowering costs is fly early, fly often. Mass production (and eventually reuseability) is the key to cheap spaceflight. Airplanes and air travel didn't become cheap because they went high tech - they became cheap because of mass production and high reliability. (Along with lowered maintenance costs.)
We've been throwing money and tech at the problem for decades and it doesn't work.
A Fourth of July launch with George Bush and American flags all over the last place? No problem. Unless the shuttle goes boom in a real bad way. That might put an end to the manned space program and going back to Moon and Mars. Don't want a repeat of the Challenger disaster, where that shuttle launch was supposed coincide with President Reagan's State of The Union address and a phone call to the first teacher in space.
An ongoing rumor (Challenger/Reagan) for which no shred of evidence has ever been found - and a lot of people have been looking quite hard for twenty years now. (And it's ridiculous on the face of it considering how often the launch was delayed.)
Spore is not black and white. Besides, given Will Wright's background, I don't think he will produce a failed game.
On one hand he has produced two sucesses (Sim City and The Sims) and a slew of derivative sequels... OTOH, he has a whole raftload of also-rans and failures, SimFarm, Sim Earth, Sim Health, Sim Isle...
Everything he has done in the past has been borderline amazing. He's one sharp cookie and although I don't think Spores will have the success of The Sims, it will still be at least as popular as his other Sim-type games.
That's damming with faint praise given the full track record. His greatest sucesses lie in creating endless sequels to already sucessful games.
Certainly they mitigate but they do not eliminate these problems. (I added the dictionary links because I see 'mitigate' too often misused as you do above.)
Thank you for the dictionary references but mitigate was exactly what I meant say.
Ah - I assumed that you meant that the prodecures you specified were actually useful.
In no way did I suggest they would eliminate the problem but, rather, would reduce the potential for having employees do bad things intentionally or not, e.g. mitigate.
Suggesting that additional measures beyond the touchie feelie ones your proposed are but 'fingers in the dike' suggests exactly that.
A big problem the newspapers will face online is that they no longer gain any power from their physical distribution networks. Everything will be defined by the content itself. It used to be if you wanted the paper delivered daily, you had to get A.) the local paper or B.) some big paper like the NY Times or USA Today. Now you can get any paper in the entire world daily and all for the same price (some for free). So which will you choose?
If history is any guide (and this includes recent history - I.E. blogs) people chose which they will read on the basis of bias. Their only care about content is that it not annoy them too badly.
If you're in a situation where you really have to worry that much about your own people, doesn't that just show that management has failed to provide a good working environment and create loyalty?
That assumes that the employees come to the company with a personal set of ethics that includes such concepts as loyalty in the first place. My personal experience is that's about one in a hundred employees at best.
Stealing money from the till, stealing insider information, gaming the quarterly sales to boost the stock price, etc., have always been an issue. If you employee human beings, these things will happen whether or not computers are used. Their actions don't even need to be illegal, simple carelessness can harm a company as much, or even more, than outright theft.
Careful screening during hiring, sufficient training and re-training during employment, as well as attentiveness are the keys to mitigating these problems.
Certainly they mitigate but they do not eliminate these problems. (I added the dictionary links because I see 'mitigate' too often misused as you do above.)
Restricting e-mail, firewalls, etc., are simply putting fingers in the dike.
No, they are the belt to the suspenders you listed.
A common trend I am seeing in these threads is the equating of "IT infrastructure policies to limit employee access" == "Treating employees like criminals".
Bank employees (at least the ones I know and talk to) definitely do not feel that they are treated like criminals, but most of them are not allowed into the vault at any time they like for any reason they would like. Similarly I would consider it a reasonable policy to specify IT polices to limit access to databases that contained confidential data.
Indeed. When I was in the Navy I was treated to everything folks are complaining about here, and far worse. Yet never in my life have I met or been privileged to work with a group so talented, hardworking or motivated. (I was in the sub service, so other YMMV.)
Really the argument that IT policies intended to limit access or specify accepted use for equipment is tantamount to treating you like a criminal is just an overreaction by technologically sophisticated people that resent the idea of being told that they can't do anything they want.
It's more likely that it's the end result of a permissive parenting. At least two generations have grown up without learning self control or learning that, there are limits ones actions - and you have to live with them even if you don't like them.
If you're a company that respects its employees, rewards them appropriately and values them, do you think internal threats are going to be such a large issue compared to the faceless megaopolies that most American companies have mutated into?
Actually - yes.
No matter how much you 'reward and values' your employees - human nature is such that at least one, if not more is going to be pissed about something. It could be the individual that convinced himself he was due a raise, and didn't get it. It could be the individual whose advances were spurned by a coworker. It could be the closet Klukker forced to work with a non-white. It could be any of a thousand and more reasons - or none. Maybe you just have an employee who is a congenital asshole.
Even a cursory glance at turncoats across the last fifty years shows that you can't predict who is going to 'go bad' - or why.
Given the text of the interview in the article, I'm guessing that he is not in this country, or at the very least that he's a non-native speaker. My logic: There is a line where the reporter is interviewing the 'kid'. He says the following:
why i did it? i've read an article on yahoo or smth like this
Aside from the obvious grammatical issues, the last word of the sentence is indicative of the fact that he may be a non-native speaker of English. A native speaker would likely use the word "that" instead of "this" when using the phrase "something like" in conjunction with an action taken in the past.
Given the general decline in grammar and language skills across the 'net... I'd put little credence to your hypothesis. Heck, everytime the issue comes up on/., you see numerous people *bragging* about how bad their language skills are and how little they care.
The practicality of sending a probe to the surface of a far-flung moon for remote experimentation or return payload for terrestrial experimentation aside, the worry with such a procedure would be contamination.
But why not just do something similar to the Mars rovers? Have a self-contained laboratory that can do all the necessary analysis there. It'd probably be a lot cheaper than trying to retrieve a sample and return it here, and you wouldn't have to worry about contamination, etc.
You don't have to worry about the contamination of Earth by another world, but you do have to worry about contaminating that world from Earth, and about contamination from Earth remaining in your self-contained laboratory.
As it turns out, it's hideously expensive and difficult to design such a system that is a) sensitive enough to be useful and b) rugged enough to survive sterilization prior to launch.
Maybe you meant it as a joke, but it is actually possible to get light on two sides of every room. See Joel's bionic office.
That article was written over two years ago about an office not yet entirely occupied. It would be very interesting to actually have a follow up on how well it works - rather than endless linking to the same stale article about how it might work out.
You must be on crack to believe that. Anyone who works in a job that requires any kind of concentration (software development being the most obvious example) will, given the opportunity, enter a state of "flow" where they are wholly committed to the work they're doing.
The thing is, getting into this state [flow] requires at least 20 minutes to a half an hour, and it can be very easily disturbed by outside distractions, such as noise, conversations, etc. And any break in ones concentration just requires another 20 minutes of recovery time.
Nope. When I was in the Navy, I could (and still can) enter flow by a simple act of will - and exit and reenter it equally as easily. But then, I worked very hard to gain that ability - because at Battle Stations you really had no other options. (Or even during refit when faced with a thorny troubleshooting problem.) It's a matter of discipline.
Many young Jedi wannabees claim that absolute privacy and silence is needed because they grew up without being forced to obtain an attention span, preferring instant gratification at need - they grow up to be adults lacking a vital skill.
Google's good at search. Really good. They've made a LOT of money with search, and "search" technologies are the kind of thing you can integrate into most any application, and cross-applications as well.
Google has made almost *no* money from search. They do however make scads and scads of money from the ads they place on their search pages - and elsewhere.
Google's current business model is based on serving up advertisements. Search, Gmail, Maps, etc... etc.. only serve as means to attract eyeballs to ads.
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What he haven't had is the will to discard the dead end path that boosters and spacecraft have taken and replace it the same standard methods that have worked time and again in virtually every other field of human economic behavior.
What is now GIOVE-A was advertised as a cheaper alternative 'just in case' GIOVE-B went over schedule or overbudget. GIOVE-A was never expected to fly, let alone under budget and on schedule. When (unsurprisingly) the -B bird (built by the usual suspects) did in fact do both (go overschedule and overbudget) the -A bird (built by a small fringe company) was quietly elevated from 'backup' to 'pathfinder'.
Unhappily - the facts don't support your rant. In reality, the science program funding has remained essentially stable. The 2006/2007 numbers are within 3% of the 2005 numbers - which varied little from the years before.
The science program that is being 'starved' accounts for 1/3 of NASA's budget, 1.5% of NASA's *total budget* is being reprogammed from science to VSE. But those numbers you'll never hear from the science side - because they reveal the truth. That the return they have generated for that 33% of the budget is shamefully low. That nearly every program has severe accounting problems. That the bid process for new missions is badly broken.
What has happened is that NASA went through the umanned program with a fine toothed comb and cut killed numerous projects that were already over budget, over schedule, *or both*. When the scientists and companies had their pork cut off - they stood back on the hind legs and howled. And the anti-Bush folks (who in the main care little for facts) have taken to repeating their FUD as fact.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of the current Administration, and I think the VSE is about the worst thing to happen to space exploration since the refactoring of the Apollo Program by Kennedy - but I prefer to base my conclusions on facts. Repeating FUD without understanding the facts makes you a tool of those who instigate the FUD.
But the politics of the Space Race forced us down an evolutionary dead end.
Instead of developing rockets with large margins that could be built like Ford builds Explorers - we went the expensive, but faster, method of building what we have and spending billions (over the years) needlessly making payloads lighter. The secret to lowering costs is fly early, fly often. Mass production (and eventually reuseability) is the key to cheap spaceflight. Airplanes and air travel didn't become cheap because they went high tech - they became cheap because of mass production and high reliability. (Along with lowered maintenance costs.)
We've been throwing money and tech at the problem for decades and it doesn't work.
No matter how much you 'reward and values' your employees - human nature is such that at least one, if not more is going to be pissed about something. It could be the individual that convinced himself he was due a raise, and didn't get it. It could be the individual whose advances were spurned by a coworker. It could be the closet Klukker forced to work with a non-white. It could be any of a thousand and more reasons - or none. Maybe you just have an employee who is a congenital asshole.
Even a cursory glance at turncoats across the last fifty years shows that you can't predict who is going to 'go bad' - or why.
The fault is not in our stars Horatio, but in ourselves.
What few remember is the true cause of the loss of the MCO, a low budget leading to insufficient analysis of the trajectory.
As it turns out, it's hideously expensive and difficult to design such a system that is a) sensitive enough to be useful and b) rugged enough to survive sterilization prior to launch.
Many young Jedi wannabees claim that absolute privacy and silence is needed because they grew up without being forced to obtain an attention span, preferring instant gratification at need - they grow up to be adults lacking a vital skill.
Google's current business model is based on serving up advertisements. Search, Gmail, Maps, etc... etc.. only serve as means to attract eyeballs to ads.