And in order to protect myself from the repercussions of HMS's illegal and immoral activities, I am carefully considering my legal options, including notifying the appropriate authorities.
That my friend is a threat. Period.
He said "you shouldn't do that, and it's my ethical responsibility to report it to the authorities if you don't stop it."
Certainly he said that - the problem is that he went beyond that and threatened legal action and announced he would no longer perform his assigned duties.
One aspect of the recent tragedy was that those astronauts died on nothing more than a glorified taxi run.
Guess what 99% of the voyages of oceanographic ships or geological expeditions are? Glorified taxi runs. These runs are the reality of workaday science and exploration.
NASA and Star Trek have badly mislead generations into believing that unless it isn't Boldly Going - it isn't exploration.
Compared to the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, the Shuttle program is very safe.
Thats a nonsensical statement - since all manned flights *combined* (including the Russian ones) don't constitute a large enough statistical universe to make valid judgement about their safety or lack thereof.
As an employee, loyal to the company, you are supposed to have internal recourse available to bring illegal activity to the attention of your seniors, and all the way up the chain if you direct supervisor won't listen.
Had that been what he did - you'd have a point. But it's not. He threatened (personal) legal action against the company and announced his refusal to continue working on his assigned project. If you actually read the memo he submitted - it paints a very different picture from the sob story at the head of this discussion.
Anyway, it's obvious from this that Chip's company doesn't have good internal reporting mechanisms.
A completely groundless assumption. Again, try actually reading the memo - it has a whole raft of adressees, and no discussion or indication that any attempt to bring this to the attention of anyone had been made beforehand.
Retain, and have a very long chat with a very good lawyer before you threaten your bosses with police action.
While this is sound advice, it doesn't necessarily follow from this story.
He said he made an internal report of unethical and possibly illegal behaviour.
Try reading his letter rather than the sob story at the head of this discussion - a very different picture emerges. He made an internal report in which he threatened personal legal action against the company and announced that he would no longer performed his assigned work.
IANAL, and I know this varies by state, but this kind of retribution and harassment for filing a complaint may be very illegal,
Regardless, no one deserves this treatment for stating their beliefs the company is doing something wrong.
That's just the problem - he didn't file a complaint. He didn't make his views known. He made threats open and veiled against the company. He's further hurt himself by posting those threats and information on the companies internal practices to the web - something no company will take lightly.
If I were running that company, and someone with acess to my core codebase (especially so when the acess is external) was making threats, I'd do the same thing - shut 'em down *now* before they have a chance to do any damage or further breach confidentiality.
But this is Slashdot - where the geek is automagically right and the company automatically wrong.
Where the Navy has a record of every piece of plumbing that's ever been changed on any of their reactors, NASA didn't have hardly anything.
Which is in some ways an unfair comparison. The Navy has fifty years of operating nuclear submarines, and over a century of operating submarines in general. NASA has had barely twenty years of operating the Shuttle at a low optempo the Submarine Service hasn't seen since before WWI.
And even so, sub standard piping went into the Nautilus - piping that could have causes a massive radiological incident plus almost certainly LOCV. The substandard piping was only discovered because some leftover pipe was use to make a steam heating system for the visitors grandstand at some ceremony or another - and burst.
Think - when are the two times the Shuttle has been dsestroyed? Challenger, when NASA bosses decided that freezing temps were fine, because they had a propoganda coup going with the school teacher, even though engineers were screming at them, left, right and center, to postpone the launch and check for damage.
Completely false. The engineers were complicit in the accident - because they decided that since the back-up O-rings had never burned through, the Shuttle was safe to launch. Shortly before the Challenger launch they started to get uncomfortable - and when management asked for documentation the engineers hemmed and hawed because they'd have to admit their previous work was flawed. The engineers have changed their story since then - but an examination of contemporary documents tells a different tale.
Columbia was lost - when? During NASA's other attempt at a propoganda coup, with getting an Israeli into space. Engineers wanted images of the wing, to check for damage. The intelligence agencies even offered to produce the pictures for free. But the NASA bosses - again - put the risk of bad publicity as being more important than the risk of a disaster.
Again - completely false. Engineers asked for images, management said: Ok, put your request in writing. The engineers declined to so do.
Two losses, two times the engineers the backed away from the plate.
I don't agree with the NASA bosses deciding that they should overrule the safety monitors, because the safety monitors' chief objection is that NASA bosses keep overruling things they shouldn't.
There is no evidence that the NASA 'bosses' have overridden the safety monitors. None. Challenger was lost because the engineers didn't catch the growing problem with the O-rings. Columbia was lost because the engineers decided that ice and foam damage were acceptable maintenance issues.
In both cases the systems were failing to meet the specifications. (No leakage, no foam or ice shedding.) And in both cases the engineers told management that everything was OK. (And in both cases management overrode the engineers and directed further study to fix the problems the engineers said weren't problems.)
In both cases managment should probably have stopped flying until a fix was in - bad on them. But in both cases the engineers said the problems were minor and fixable.
Each Energia flight threw away the 4 main H2O2 engines and 4 Kerosene/O2 boosters none of which was reused. Compare this to the shuttle where the SRB motor casings and the SSME's can be used many times.
Sure. And overhauling them after each flight has turned out to cost far more than building new single-use engines.
Completely incorrect. They stopped overhauling them after each flight about 1989 or so, and they stopped pulling them for inspection after each flight in about 1994.
Yes, it [Buran] was an aerodynamical copy out of stolen blueprints - so they saved a ton of wind tunnel testing and other stuff,
Um... No. There are significant differences between the moldline of the Shuttle and that of Buran - most noticeably in the wing/body blend and in the leading edge of the wing.
but the innards were all russian tech, and they make good solid space tech.
Yah - so solid that their safety record is not noticeably different from NASA's on the manned side of the house, and is decidely inferior in the reliability department over on the unmanned side.
Richard M. Nixon initialized the shuttle program on January 5, 1972.
Actually - the Shuttle program is older than that. Nixon gave the go-ahead to buy (build) the design we have now, the earliest studies started in 1968.
And you ignore the fact that regardless of the energy source, ethanol is *still* a net sink of energy. *Regardless of the energy source*.
Of course it is. It is called "entropy". All conversion of energe from one form to another results in a net "loss", as some of the energy is lost.
I know what entropy is - and I also know how to do math, and what energy conversion efficiencies usually are.
You on the other hand only know the word 'entropy' and toss it around to make yourself look smart. You've failed.
There's a considerable difference between the usually minor losses in most state changes - and the six-fold loss in the manufacture of ethanol. I.E. for every unit of energy extracted from ethanol - seven units of energy were used to produce it. For hydrogen, the number is closer to 1.25 units consumed to produce 1 unit at the end user.
The real question is not whether or not there is a net energy loss, it is wether that energy that was lost is renewable or not. Solar and Wind power is renewable.
Renewable or not - those forms of power cost money and have impacts on the enviroment. It matters very much whether or not their production is used efficiently. Seven acres of solar panels to produce x amount of ethanol vice one and change acres to produce x amount of hydrogen - there is a significant difference there. (Not to mention that ethanol production also requires something that hydrogen does not - pesticides which persist in the enviroment.)
Grow the fuck up and learn what the fuck you are talking about before calling someone else flawed.
Passenger rail in the US is pretty much screwed and has been since we made the decision to go with highways instead
I think that depends on where you are. Out west, in Colorado, where I live there is a big interest in it. In 2003 voters approved a 4.7 Billion dollar initiative to extend the light-rail system well outside of the Denver area.
That's short distance commuter rail - not passenger rail. The two are not equivalent, not even remotely.
Amtrak is the inter-state railway system in the USA and is supposed to be equivalent to the inter-prefecture system in Japan. Yet, why does Amtrak refuse to use bullet trains?
Two reasons:
1- Amtrack doesn't have any long distance straight trackage that connects cities the way that Shinkansen does. (Most of the existing bullet train track was laid down in the 50's and 60's when labor was cheap and enviromental regulations essentially non-existent.)
2- Almost none of the trackage Amtrak uses is owned by them in the first place - and the owners therof refuse to spend billions to support a high speed train when their own trains travel at a fifth of that speed. (Freight trains are hard on trackage - and maintenance is expensive as it is. Shinkansen partially avoids this problem by running on dedicated lines. See #1 above.)
The result is that traveling between states usually takes several days. Imagine trying to spend several days locked in a train.
You are 'locked in' to a space that consists of multiple cars (as much as 15-20 on popular routes). There are several lounges, public observation areas, a bar, a dining room, etc... It's much more spacious than you seem to believe. Once you drop the 'me me me satisfy me get me there *now*' attiude so prevalent - it's quite a pleasant way to travel.
Amtrak has been a money-losing operation since day #1. For some reason, the American politicians just cannot determine why Amtrak remains unprofitable. How can anyone be so ignorant that he cannot see the reason?
You are ignorant as well - so are most people on this issue.
Here's a little known fact about rail travel in the US. Passenger rail, with one exception, has never been profitable in the US. Never. Not even in the days of fast direct service like the Coast Starlight or the Empire Builder... The one exception among Class I railroads (systems having over 1 million dollars US gross passenger revenue) was the Long Island Railroad - which had a lock in the commuter and weekender traffic between Long Island and New York.
The big roads ran their passenger service at a loss for decades because they believed that well run passenger service provided advertisement for their freight services.
Does any American politician even know the phrase, "Japanese bullet train"? The answer to Amtrak's problems is staring the American government in the face, and no one is adovating the right solution.
The Bullet Train works because it connects a large number of fairly close and very dense urban centers. (It's *not* a commuter line.) There is no equivalent in the US, not even in the BosWash corridor.
A bit of trivia - Shinkansen doesn't mean 'bullet train' or any other marketdroid speak - it means simply New Train Line.
"Taking grain apart, fermenting it, distilling it and extruding it uses a lot of fossil energy," he said. "We are grasping at the solution that is by far the least efficient.".
He ignores the fact that, if we wanted to, we *could* arrange the production chain so that it was not dependent on fossil fuel. You could build your farming and fermentation facilities to use solar or hydro power, for example.
And you ignore the fact that regardless of the energy source, ethanol is *still* a net sink of energy. *Regardless of the energy source*.
That's not to mention the other enviromental effects - from fertilizers and pesticides, as well as from the need to dispose of the solid and liquid wastes generated. But ethanol has strong backers across the political spectrum, and there is thus little incentive to look at it honestly.
If you want to be an artist, you need to think about making art, not making something "cool" that someone will want to buy. Don't sell out like that.
ROTFL. It's only very recently that art was created other than for sale. The result of the change (over the last century and some) has been an explosion of crap - and the creation on an incestous art 'community' who all agree how on wonderful Art's new clothes are.
At least camping is an option. I live on the East Coast, and real darkness is many hours away.
For those unfamiliar with the East Coast (of the US), the above poster is exaggerating - quite a bit. I can think of half a dozen places on the East Coast where real darkness is no more than two hours away, and usually less. (I suspect the parent lives somewhere in BosWash and confuses that with the rest of the Coast.)
You can show them the train tracks illusion on a piece of paper and they will be less receptive to it than a flatlander would be. Which speaks to the issues I raised not at all. Apples and oranges.
Additionally, I wrote a college term paper about this illusion and in my research I found the illusion [of a large moon near the horizon] to be less pronounced in denizens of mountainous areas who have less exposure to things like train tracks that extend straight into the horizon. Without that frame of reference, they are less likely to think of objects near the horizon as necessarily being very away.
Except your thesis seems to fail by inspection - because you are comparing apples to oranges. Denizens of mountainous areas often don't see the horizon at all - their line of sight to it is blocked by said mountains. By the time the moon rises to a point where it is visible to them, it's long been above the horizon, and thus is past the point where the illusion occurs.
A more interesting comparison would be between island and coastal peoples and inland peoples - because the two groups have very different horizons.
Science-fiction fans make a slight distinction between the terms "SF" and "Sci-fi" which you don't seem to be aware of.
Science-fiction fans make that distinction, science-fiction fanboys don't. The latter (who seem to make up the bulk of modern fans) are mostly unware of any science fiction that a) hasn't been made into a movie or b) was published before the cyperpunk revolution. I.E. the vast bulk of the classics of the genre. They are astonished to learn the SF predates Star Trek (TOS) let alone William Gibson, and the the bulk of the genre never was on a best seller list, let alone on the screen (small or silver). They've read the stuff pushed on them by Barnes & Nobel, but they've never really read science fiction.
[The book being reviewd] definitely skips discussion on the the Lord of the Rings trilogy--a tragic omission in light of its popular and Oscar-winning performance that brought SF/Fantasy to Hollywood legitimacy.
Sadly, the LOTR trilogy did no such thing - it rode on the legitimacy built by the Star Wars series, the Terminator series, and others. It came to be not just because SF was seen to be legitimate, but because it had legions of fanboys who would drool over it's presence on the screen and tons of possibilities for marketing tie-ins.
This book was written by someone that doesn't appear to read or watch much in the way of SF beyond what they see at the movies.
Which is unsurprising given that the book is about SF movies after all.
The book as a whole, particularly with its monotonous small text and a complete lack of the simplest illustrations or even eye-catching chapter header graphics, feels like a dry collegiate dissertation written by someone who could give a damn about the subject matter and just needs a passing grade.
Out here in the real world very, very, few books have either illustrations or eye-catching chapter graphics.
Maybe I'm wrong or not as enlightened
I think you are both - as main thrust of your criticism of the book seems to be that the author does not agree with your interpretation and does not seem to be a gushing fanboy. The bulk of your presentation isn't about the book, but about establishing your opinion and your fannish 'cred' to the readers of your review.
With all this talk of going to Mar people should really pay more attention to Robert Zubrin. If you haven't read his book, I suggest you do so. He has shown that it is possible to get a mission to the actual planet (not the moons) relatively safely using the same kind of technology that we used to get to the moon in the 1960s.
Umm... No. Zubrin has a very bad habit of treating technologies that are still mostly paper as if they were well tested and proven and quite ready to deploy into the field. I can see where his handwaving could lead you to believe that the technologies and systems are of the 'same kind' as used in the 60's means they are proved etc... But the trick likes in the details of the meaning of 'the same kind'. I.E. the stuff he proposes to use to go to Mars resembles the stuff used in the 60's in the same way a modern desktop is the 'same kind' as 60's mainframe. But unlike a modern desktop - Zubrin's technology is mostly vaporware.
(Of course, with what we have now, it would be "easier" and safer", and those are in quotes merely because I am appreciative of the difficult and danger.)
What would be easier and safer? Going to the moon now? No. Going to Mars now as opposed to the 60's or when Zubrin wrote his books? No.
We (as humans, not just as specific country-people) need to recapture our pioneering spirit, and get someone to Mars. What we'll learn and accomplish will far outweigh the danger. Imagine if people had been too initimidated to round the horn of Africa, cross the Atlantic ocean, or go to moon! It's time we got that adventurous spirit back, and applied it planet-wide.
We (as humans) have never had a pioneering spirit to recapture. As a race we are mostly an extremely conservative lot that places much faith in the old ways and regards the new with deep distrust.
It would be great if we could verify Moore's law through some simple stats using the histrical data from this Top500 list.
That would be nearly impossible - Moore's Law applies to individual IC chips only, and the various machines contain wildly verying numbers of chips/cpu's/etc...
Slashdot Mirror
NASA and Star Trek have badly mislead generations into believing that unless it isn't Boldly Going - it isn't exploration.
If I were running that company, and someone with acess to my core codebase (especially so when the acess is external) was making threats, I'd do the same thing - shut 'em down *now* before they have a chance to do any damage or further breach confidentiality.
But this is Slashdot - where the geek is automagically right and the company automatically wrong.
And even so, sub standard piping went into the Nautilus - piping that could have causes a massive radiological incident plus almost certainly LOCV. The substandard piping was only discovered because some leftover pipe was use to make a steam heating system for the visitors grandstand at some ceremony or another - and burst.
Two losses, two times the engineers the backed away from the plate.
There is no evidence that the NASA 'bosses' have overridden the safety monitors. None. Challenger was lost because the engineers didn't catch the growing problem with the O-rings. Columbia was lost because the engineers decided that ice and foam damage were acceptable maintenance issues.In both cases the systems were failing to meet the specifications. (No leakage, no foam or ice shedding.) And in both cases the engineers told management that everything was OK. (And in both cases management overrode the engineers and directed further study to fix the problems the engineers said weren't problems.)
In both cases managment should probably have stopped flying until a fix was in - bad on them. But in both cases the engineers said the problems were minor and fixable.
You on the other hand only know the word 'entropy' and toss it around to make yourself look smart. You've failed.
There's a considerable difference between the usually minor losses in most state changes - and the six-fold loss in the manufacture of ethanol. I.E. for every unit of energy extracted from ethanol - seven units of energy were used to produce it. For hydrogen, the number is closer to 1.25 units consumed to produce 1 unit at the end user.
Renewable or not - those forms of power cost money and have impacts on the enviroment. It matters very much whether or not their production is used efficiently. Seven acres of solar panels to produce x amount of ethanol vice one and change acres to produce x amount of hydrogen - there is a significant difference there. (Not to mention that ethanol production also requires something that hydrogen does not - pesticides which persist in the enviroment.)Grow the fuck up and learn what the fuck you are talking about before calling someone else flawed.
- 1- Amtrack doesn't have any long distance straight trackage that connects cities the way that Shinkansen does. (Most of the existing bullet train track was laid down in the 50's and 60's when labor was cheap and enviromental regulations essentially non-existent.)
- 2- Almost none of the trackage Amtrak uses is owned by them in the first place - and the owners therof refuse to spend billions to support a high speed train when their own trains travel at a fifth of that speed. (Freight trains are hard on trackage - and maintenance is expensive as it is. Shinkansen partially avoids this problem by running on dedicated lines. See #1 above.)
You are 'locked in' to a space that consists of multiple cars (as much as 15-20 on popular routes). There are several lounges, public observation areas, a bar, a dining room, etc... It's much more spacious than you seem to believe. Once you drop the 'me me me satisfy me get me there *now*' attiude so prevalent - it's quite a pleasant way to travel.You are ignorant as well - so are most people on this issue.Here's a little known fact about rail travel in the US. Passenger rail, with one exception, has never been profitable in the US. Never. Not even in the days of fast direct service like the Coast Starlight or the Empire Builder... The one exception among Class I railroads (systems having over 1 million dollars US gross passenger revenue) was the Long Island Railroad - which had a lock in the commuter and weekender traffic between Long Island and New York.
The big roads ran their passenger service at a loss for decades because they believed that well run passenger service provided advertisement for their freight services.
The Bullet Train works because it connects a large number of fairly close and very dense urban centers. (It's *not* a commuter line.) There is no equivalent in the US, not even in the BosWash corridor.A bit of trivia - Shinkansen doesn't mean 'bullet train' or any other marketdroid speak - it means simply New Train Line.
That's not to mention the other enviromental effects - from fertilizers and pesticides, as well as from the need to dispose of the solid and liquid wastes generated. But ethanol has strong backers across the political spectrum, and there is thus little incentive to look at it honestly.
You can show them the train tracks illusion on a piece of paper and they will be less receptive to it than a flatlander would be. Which speaks to the issues I raised not at all. Apples and oranges.
A more interesting comparison would be between island and coastal peoples and inland peoples - because the two groups have very different horizons.