ObDisclosure: yes, I am a Christian. No, I am not an Intelligent Design or Creation Science advocate. I object to both ID and CS on theological grounds rather than scientific ones, for reasons I hope will be clear.
There is NO NEED for intelligent design.
On the contrary: if there was no need for the idea of intelligent design (note that I didn't call it a theory), nobody would've come up with it. It's pretty well-understood that there are a large number of fundamental constants which are balanced just perfectly to allow complex systems to arise in the Universe. This creates a question: how did this perfect balance come to be? Some people feel the need to have an answer, and for these people, ID fills a genuine need.
On the other hand, ID isn't science. Science is concerned with empirical observations and testable hypotheses. You can't empirically test God. Theologically speaking, we can't test God because he exists on such a level beyond us that we can't conceive of a test. (There are many other theological problems with testing God, but leave those alone for now.) And scientifically speaking, God defies all attempts at making testable hypotheses. So either way, you're screwed by introducing ID into a scientific curriculum. If you want to believe in ID, great; just please don't call it science.
Interestingly, the Catholic Church doesn't believe in ID except in a very abstract way. The Catholic Church has, amazingly enough, learned from Galileo and Copernicus and all the rest. Many times in the past the Church said such-and-such a physical phenomenon is the direct handiwork of God, only to have it shown that it's not God's direct handiwork anyway. At that point, what do you do? Redefine God so that "well, God's still directly handling the other things, just not that"? And what happens when natural processes are discovered for the other things?
The Catholic Church has become so cognizant of this that they've assigned it a name: the God Of The Gaps. If every unexplainable instance is attributed to God, the Catholic theology goes, then whenever a previously unexplainable instance is discovered to have an explanation, God's glory is diminished by the explaining.
ID is a God Of The Gaps argument. We don't understand how the finely-balanced nature of the cosmos is possible, therefore God must have done it... well, what happens if/when we discover there's a natural phenomenon behind it?
Re: why I object to ID and CS on theological grounds instead of scientific ones... ID and CS are both theological models of the world. As such, they can't be refuted with science. They stand entirely apart from it.
Strangely, many of the world's preeminent CompSci institutions disagree one hundred and ten percent. At MIT, the CompSci curriculum begins with--and throughout remains heavy influenced by--Scheme. Why? Because hardware changes. Because the things you learn about computers by programming in C are really limited (not every computer is a register-based machine). Because learning how a specific computer works doesn't teach you bupkis about how computation works.
For that you need a formal model of computation. There are two principal formal models of computation: there's the Turing Machine and there's the Lambda Calculus. We don't have very many languages with explicit support for Turingisms. On the other hand, we've got several languages with explicit support for Lambda--from LISP and Scheme to ML and... etc., etc., etc.
First learn about computation. Then learn about how to apply computational theory to a specific architecture.
That's the way MIT, Stanford, et al. are teaching CompSci nowadays. That's the way I was taught CompSci at the university level--our Intro to CS course was taught in Pascal (yes, I went to college that long ago), mainly because of demands that students learn something "practical" in CS141, but as soon as you got past Intro it was heavy on functional languages and lambda.
Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. The Special Theory only relates mass with spacetime distortion; the General Theory has the mass-energy equivalence.
If you know the name of the governing equation that relates gravitational force to electromagnetic energy density please tell me because I would be fascinated to read about it.
E = mc**2. Or, E / c**2 = m.
Or, g = (E1/c**2)*(E2/c**2) / d**2.
Googling for "energy distorts spacetime" returns a couple of references. Try http://blueox.uoregon.edu/~karen/astro123/lectures/lec08.html for starters.
http://www.exodusproject.com/GravWave.htm
also quotes the famous GR maxim, "Mass-energy tells spacetime how to curve; spacetime tells mass-energy how to move."
There is no difference between mass and energy from a relativity perspective.
Warning: my physics is several years out of date. That said... every singularity is its own antisingularity. That is to say, you cannot tell a difference between a black hole formed by conventional matter collapse and a black hole formed by antimatter collapse.
If a matter singularity and an antimatter singularity collided, we don't know what would happen. For all we know, mutant space hamsters fly out of their nether orifices. It all happens inside the event horizon; we can't see it, can't experience it, it's totally forbidden from interacting with us in any way.
On the other hand, conservation of mass-energy is upheld. So even if all the mass gets transformed into energy (highly speculative, since we can't know what happens!), that energy will forever be contained within the event horizon; the Einsteinian geodesics all loop back upon themselves. So you've got a huge energy discharge traveling forever within a very narrow, confined space.
It's not just mass which distorts space-time and creates the appearance of gravity. Energy can do the exact same thing. So if the entire mass gets converted into a singularity--there's no big deal; it's still a black hole by virtue of how much energy is compressed into that space.
Again: my physics is several years out of date, and this is all IIRC.
Re:Tonight on Slashdot: more socialist propaganda.
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Saving the Net
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I really don't know how so many people can blast the RIAA, Microsoft, and other big corporations for being able to buy their way into anything
The exact same way I can blast the Klan for being racists, while in the same breath saying that it's a very good thing that we've got free speech. Liberty is a double-edged sword; yes, people are going to use it irresponsibly. The existence of irresponsible uses of liberty does not give one single shred of credibility to "oh, let's do away with liberty" arguments.
I'm offended by people telling me to go out and get a better job, go to school, stop whining, whatever.
Grow up. If you're going to whine about only making $7,000 a year, then either do something about it or learn to live with it. Either way, nobody wants to hear it. I didn't go bitching to you when I was homeless, did I? What do you want from us--"oh, dear, you're only making $7K, so I guess that means your arguments against economic liberty have extra weight..."?
If you don't want people to tell you to stop whining, then don't whine. I'm unemployed. I whine to my best friend, yeah... but I don't whine to you. And if I start whining to you, I'd appreciate it if you'd tell me those two magic words: "grow up."
If people only paid taxes on what they used, we'd be in a sore state.
Straw man argument. Not even Milton Friedman (a far-right-wing Nobel economist) believes this. The Friedmanic belief is that people should pay taxes based on what services and protections they enjoy. We all receive the benefit of a 911 service, of a police force, of a fire department, etc., therefore we all pay into it.
Nobody is arguing that we should only pay taxes on what we use.
The only thing the federal government does for me is military action (which I don't support currently) and deliver my mail (badly), but I pay federal income tax.
At $7,000, you're not paying Federal income tax except in a transient sense--you're well below the cutoff line, so you get every dime back. I agree that it's still offensive to see that long succession of nickels and dimes stream out of your paycheck even if you'll get them back later--but let's not say you're paying Federal income tax, because most likely you're not.
Where do I fit another job?
Welcome to the world of economics. Economics is not the study of money; it's the study of how to allocate finite resources to best serve infinite needs. Time is the classical example of a finite resource.
Needless to say, I am living on a razor-thin margin, and would welcome things like universal health care and government-funded schooling
In other words, you'd love it if someone else were to pay for your health care and education. Isn't that the definition of greed?
Tonight on Slashdot: more socialist propaganda.
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Saving the Net
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· Score: 2, Insightful
How greedy is it to sit and contemplate whether you are going to have steak or lobster tonite, or whether your kids are going to a private boarding school in connecticut or massachusetts, when there are other people down the street who can barely afford to eat ramen and have no hope of going to college based on their socio-economic background?
It's not greedy at all. Take my father as an example--he was born dirt-poor in the sticks of small-town Iowa. He's worked 60-hour weeks ever since he was fifteen years old, save for his law school days, when he was only working 40s so he could "concentrate on school". Once in his life he took a two-week vacation--for his honeymoon--but other than that, he's only taken a maximum of ten days. He joined the Army partially to help cover his college debts; and today he's a respected, esteemed, semi-retired member of the bar... and wealthy.
So. How greedy is it for Dad, who's worked 60-hour weeks for the last fifty years, to say "you know, I want to eat lobster tonight"? I think the man's entitled to it. Of course, you, who know how to spend Dad's money better than he does, and who obviously know how hard Dad has worked for it, have different ideas of what Dad is entitled to.
There's that word, "entitlement". Oooh. Bogeyman. The left thinks the right is allergic to it, that the right wants to shut down all entitlements. Nothing is further from the truth. Conservatives believe there are very few entitlements; the rest is just wishful thinking of the way the world should be.
You're entitled to liberty--entitled to make your own decisions for yourself, not having them imposed upon you by the government. This includes the liberty of making your own economic decisions.
You're entitled to work as hard as you like, or as little as you like. Nobody's cracking a whip over your shoulders. Don't want to work? Don't have to work. Want to work hard? You can work hard.
You're entitled to the fruits of your labors. What you build with your own two hands, you're entitled to own. And you can trade this entitlement--remember the "entitled to economic liberty" thing?--in a fair marketplace; if you want to take RIAA's money and give them the fruits of your labor, you can. The government's not forcing you to do it, nor is it forcing you not to do it.
Those are entitlements, and they all stem from the same basic entitlement: human beings are entitled to political and economic liberty. Everything else that gets swept under the rubric of "entitlement" is just people desperately wishing the world was otherwise than it was.
You have no entitlement to take my money out of my pocket to engage in your own private "redistribution of wealth" schemes. That's not liberty; that's tyranny. That's you making these decisions for me. You can try it if you like, but expect to get socked in the jaw. I don't give a damn about the money; money is a whore. I give a damn about your attempt at turning me into your slave.
If you make $500,000/yr and the government wants 30%, you aren't starving.
In the dot-com boom I was getting paid $100,000 a year. By your logic I was living on easy street, right? The reality is I got evicted from my apartment and was homeless in my car for a few days. Let's look at the math:
From a starting salary of $100,000, take away $50,000 right off the top between California and Federal income taxes. Wham--presto--gone.
From the $50,000 left, take away $36,000 for rent. I was living in a one-bedroom garret in San Francisco and property values were so overinflated that I was paying $3,000 a month just in rent.
From the $14,000 left, take away $3,000 for utilities. California power crisis is a bitch, don't you know.
From the $11,000 left, take away $6,000 for car payments on a five-year-old used car.
From the $5,000 left... that's what you have to live on for a year. That has to put gas in the car, that has to put money
Definitely Zork. Great cover art, but the in-game graphics sucked. . . . . .
(For the humor-impaired: Zork was an early Infocom text-only adventure game, and was incredibly fun. Zork is probably older than most of the people who are reading this, which makes me feel thirty-one flavors of Geezer.)
Yes and no. Yes, neutrinos are created in many kinds of nuclear reactions, and yes, they do travel at lightspeed with some awe-inspiring ability to travel clear through anything, and yes, they could be used for SETI; but no, nobody's going to be using them for SETI.
The reason for this is any civilization advanced enough to have fission--much less fusion, MAM, quark-gluon conversion or other exotic energies--is first going to progress through a much lower-tech level, during which point their civilization is going to glow like a supernova in certain bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. (Earth, for instance, far outshines the Sun in several wavelengths.)
Rather than peek at the cosmos with a neutrino telescope to see the (relatively small) signatures of an individual fusion reactor here or there, it makes more sense to look at the cosmos with radio-astronomy tools to look for planets that are brighter than stars. Find one like that, and dollars to donuts says it's got intelligent life.
To give you an idea of just how quiet the cosmos is... if you were to stand on Pluto and turn on a cell phone, you'd create a radio signal so loud it would drown out literally everything in the night sky (at least on its band). It's quiet out there.
IANAL, but I've got a good grounding in legalese. So let me try and translate it into clear English. As far as legalese goes, BTW, this stuff is pretty clear.
"Commercial e-mail" means an electronic communication between two or more computers which tries to get you to buy, lease or exchange things (goods, services, property, or basically anything else of value).
It's pretty clear to me that donations are exempted; there's no sale, no lease, and no exchange of goods/services. Likewise, political messages are exempt; no sale, no lease, no exchange of goods/services.
While it's true that there have been several foam impacts before, NASA never (to the best of my knowledge) said wings had been breached before. Breaches are amazingly lethal conditions, and NASA takes them very seriously; when any tile gets deteriorated by more than 0.04 inches, it gets completely replaced.
NASA's line about why they didn't throw a fit over the foam has always been "well, it never caused any problems before..."
Now it turns out it did cause problems before and came within a whisker of losing Atlantis. In a fair world, it would mean the jobs of several NASA bureaucrats--not just for not paying attention to foam-strike problems, but for lying to Lehman's committee, to Congress, and to the American people about how there had never before been any foam-strike problems.
From this AP story you can read that one of the astronauts on board the Atlantis when it had the wing-breach found out about the wing-breach when she was contacted by the AP for a comment. Not only had NASA covered up the wing-breach--they weren't even informing astronauts of the risks.
The poster's absolutely correct. With very few exceptions (like, say, Louisiana), every court decision creates binding precedent throughout its jurisdiction. A panel decision possesses almost as much precedential value as an en banc decision; the only difference is an en banc hearing can overturn a panel decision, while a panel decision cannot overturn an en banc decision.
As a matter of practice, en bancs are almost superfluous. Looking at the statistics for the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, they hand down unanimous panel decisions 97% of the time. This is for a court which is stocked almost straight 50/50 with appointees from hardcore Republicans and hardcore Democrats.
Only 3% of the time is a panel decision split; and less than 10% of the split decisions are sufficiently "interesting" (in a legal sense of the word) to warrant an en banc hearing.
If anyone's interested I can get statistics for the other circuits as well--I only know the 8th Circuit stats off the top of my head, though.
Highly dependent on the circumstances. If you shoot a burglar who's carrying a weapon (even a holstered one), most DAs won't bat an eyelash: the guy was armed, your action was reasonable, the death certificate gets listed as a homicide and it gets processed as justifiable self-defense.
In Iowa, "self-defense" doesn't necessarily mean responding to an attack. Preemptive attack is acceptable, provided you're acting in response to a perception of a clear and present danger. If the bad guy's unarmed and only wanted your TV set, but he was sneaking into your bedroom and you had a reasonable fear he was going to kill you, you're safe. If the bad guy's unarmed and he's sneaking out your back door with your TV set, you can be successfully prosecuted if you attack, since there's no clear and present threat.
Here in Iowa, we have Castle Doctrine both on the criminal lawbooks and the civil lawbooks. It's a lovely little bit of law: if you're found to have been acting in self-defense (either by the DA refusing to file charges, or by being acquitted in court of criminal charges stemming from the shooting), you're totally immune from all civil litigation surrounding the act.
In other words, if I shoot the intruder in a clear case of home defense, his estate can't file a lawsuit.
It's a great law, and I wish more states adopted it.
Re:A rant on smart guns.
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Science Faction
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Why do homeowners need to be careful about shooting intruders?
It's people like you who give gunowners like me a bad name. YOU NEED TO BE CAREFUL BECAUSE YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT TAKING A HUMAN LIFE, YOU DOORKNOB. This isn't something wherein you can say "whoops, my goof, sorry Frank, sure we've been friends for 30 years and sure your car broke down and sure you thought we were out of town and sure you came in using the house key we gave you 20 years ago, and sure you just wanted to use the phone. Tough shit. You were fair game."
Before you go about shooting someone, you need to damn well make certain--and I mean certain--that they pose a clear and present threat to your life, your family's life, or some innocent person's life. If you don't do this, then you're not an armed citizen, you're a thug with a gun.
Would a gun camera help cut down on reckless shooting? I think so, yes, because it would allow accountability. If a homeowner was shooting at an unidentified shadow, the camera would show that, and the homeowner could be held accountable for it.
We are talking about police that operate in the urban enviroment, it worries me that police could be so careless with their guns that they might accidently find a puddle of mud and drop it in.
One of the officers I shoot with recently had a drunk puke on him. Not "a little got on his shoes", instead "as I was hauling this guy up and away from the bar, he leaned in towards me like he needed support and just let loose all down my uniform".
Or what about if a drunk driver goes off the road and winds up half-submerged in a river? Officers don't say "well, hell, I guess I'd better remove my firearm and put it down right over here" before wading in. They go straight in without wasting time like that--so their firearms had damn well better be able to fire after being totally submerged in water.
Being a police officer is a messy, messy job. On a good day you'll just run the risk of drunks puking on you. On a bad day you run the risk of having to wrestle a suspect to the ground, and that tends to be a very dirty thing. You ever seen how dirty a seven-year-old gets while wrestling outside? Now imagine it's between two grown men, one of whom is actively trying to kill the other.
Policing is not a sedentary job, and it's not a clean one.
First, I really don't mean to be rude here, so please forgive me if I come across that way.
A smart gun weapon system which defaults to allowing someone to fire is pretty much useless. It's a matter of only a second or two to drop the gun in a mud puddle, or to remove the battery, or whatever, at which point you've circumvented the access control altogether.
If you're going to use technology to control access to something, it almost always needs to default to no access.
A rant on smart guns.
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Science Faction
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Ask cops sometime what they think of smart gun technologies. Of all the cops I've asked, they all hate the idea. Admittedly, my sample isn't representative; the cops I know are all ones I see at the local shooting range.
Their opinion comes down to basically guns need to be kept as simple as possible. That's been the major direction firearms technology has been taking for the last 50+ years; not making more complex weapons but simpler and cheaper weapons. A modern Glock handgun is cheaper, more reliable, and (most astonishingly!) has fewer moving parts than a revolver of 50 years ago. A modern SIG-Sauer is cheaper, more reliable, and has fewer moving parts than a 1908 Luger.
This trend--towards weapons which have fewer moving parts, fewer breakable parts, and are thus cheaper to manufacture and more reliable--has been overwhelmingly welcomed by shooters. It's been so welcomed that I don't know a single shooter who doesn't welcome it, and I've been shooting for 20 years. In fact, the only people I've ever seen advocate adding complexity to weapons are people who neither shoot for sport nor carry a weapon as part of their daily job.
What happens as soon as you add a fingerprint-recognition system to a firearm?
Well, first, you've got some kind of optical reader... how well does the optical reader work if you drop your gun in a mud puddle? I've dropped an M1911A1 in a bucket of mud before, pulled it out, given it two shakes to dislodge mud from the barrel, and gone through 21 rounds (three magazines) without a failure. I was spattered with mud and the gun was literally steaming by the end of it, but it fired perfectly--zero failures. Could I repeat that kind of reliability experiment with a fingerprint-reading gun? No? Okay, great. Your new smartgun is now less reliable in the face of hostile environments (like mud, water, etc.) than a pistol first designed in the early 1900s.
The next thing you need is some kind integrated circuit controller and wires between it and the optical reader. Do you know why there's been such a push towards simpler and simpler firearms designs? Because when you fire a semiautomatic pistol, parts of it are subjected to internal stresses of hundreds of G-forces and tens of thousands of pounds per square inch. It's not uncommon to have bullets loaded to generate 50,000 pounds per square inch. Take hundreds of G-forces and repeated exposure to huge overpressures and you get an environment which is very, very hostile to everything; the fewer moving parts you have, the fewer parts which can break. Can wires and integrated circuits be built which handle these things? Sure. An example would be the Army's Copperhead artillery system, which uses artillery shells with built-in integrated circuits. The question isn't "can we do it", though: the question is "do we want to be totally dependent on the circuit". If a load of Copperheads doesn't work, the artillery crew can just fall back on conventional high-explosive warheads--they're back in action almost immediately. If your smart gun doesn't work, you're best off throwing the gun at the bad guy. Big difference.
Third thing you need is a battery, because ICs don't run on nothing. Great. So now do you not only have to make sure that your gun is loaded, that a round is chambered, that all safeties are disengaged, you now also have to make sure that your battery hasn't run out? Most cops--the majority of them--shoot very rarely. They don't inspect their guns very often. They go to the range once a year (or however often their department requires that they qualify) and then they forget about the gun the other 364 days. You ever had a power outage and then discovered the batteries in your flashlight are out? Do you really want the same thing happening to your firearm when the bad guy is shooting at you, your life is on the line, and all you want to do is get home safely to your wife and kids?
... Also, take a look at how many cops are shot by criminals with their
The UNKNOWN-UNKNOWN problem was first explained to me about ten years ago by a Marine Corps gunnery sergeant who'd been around the block a few dozen times, and learned what he called UNKNOWN-UNKNOWN the hard way. I.e., the UNKNOWN-UNKNOWN left him in a hospital for seven months having his spine and pelvis reassembled.
Let's put it into terms that you'd understand. Let's say you're a CompSci student at a university and you have an exam coming up.
There are things which you know, and you know that you know them. You know C++, which the prof is using in the course. You know the language, and you are aware of the fact that you know. If you KNOW-KNOW something, and you're correct in your assessment, you're sitting in the catbird seat.
Just slightly worse are the things you don't know, but of which you're aware that you're lacking. You know that the lambda calculus exists; you know you don't know beans about it. No problem! If you see a lambda question on the exam, you'll be able to just skip it and come back to it at the end, to maybe see if you can make heads or tails of it. A KNOWN-UNKNOWN is nothing to be afraid of. Minimized, sure... but you can deal with known unknowns. You can even plan for them.
Where people screw themselves over are the places where they don't know beans, and they aren't aware that they're ignorant. Let's say that you're ignorant about generic programming. You've never heard of it before. Don't know beans about it. So when the prof tells you that your exam will cover the entire C++ language, you don't mind--you know C++, right?
Except... you don't. And up until you see the funky template notation on the test, you're completely in the dark as to just how ignorant you are. You'll probably charge headlong at the problem because... well, sure, it looks kind of strange, but you know C++, right? And since you don't know generics, and you're unaware of just how ignorant you are, you'll waste half an hour getting absolutely nowhere on a generics question. You can't plan for UNKNOWN-UNKNOWNs. You can't plan for them because you don't know they're going to happen, because they come totally out of left field (usually as the result of totally botching your KNOWN-KNOWNs). If you had any forewarning, then you could've been prepared, right?
What you want to mock as illogical and sophomoric is actually a fairly deep rumination on what it means to know something. Try Kant's Critique of Pure Reason if you want to see this general idea presented in great detail and in mind-boggling length.
Or, if you'd rather have the Cliff's Notes version, try Mark Twain's reduction of Kant: "What gets people in trouble ain't so much the things they don't know as it is the things they do know that just ain't so."
C++ is an abomination. 13 Years after the standard there STILL is not a single compiler that implements the language correctly.
As be-fan has (correctly) pointed out, it's only been five years since the standard was published. Several compiler suites are within epsilon of complete conformance (GCC 3.x, Intel 7.1), and last I heard the latest iteration of Kai C++ (they got bought out, but I forget by whom) even supports the export keyword. So yes, there are compilers which implement the language correctly, for reasonable definitions of "correctly".
Secondly--of course C++ is a mess. C++ was specifically designed to be a mess. It was designed to be a mess because the Committee knows the problem set is a mess. C++ has direct support for procedural, object-oriented and functional programming, when pretty much every other language out there tells you to pick one and stick with it[*]. C++ has generics and the Standard Template Library, which is so breathtakingly cool that it's hard to explain to people who don't understand it just why it's so great.
C++ is an abomination? Sure. Most of us C++ programmers will happily admit that it's an abomination. But if you're willing to make the (significant!) investment in learning C++, and learning it well, then it can pay enormous dividends.
My favorite two languages, incidentally, are C++ and the LISPs (Scheme particularly).
[*] Admittedly, you can make Scheme act like anything you like, but Scheme doesn't natively support OO. If you want OO, you've got to hang a bag on the side.
It's been a few years since I took my college German classes, but if I recall correctly from that class, Germany has some very strong laws meant to protect the good names of people, companies and organizations. If I go about talking trash about you, your company, firm or organization, you have the right to present me with an Abmahnung. It's not a "cease and desist" letter, it's a "put up or shut up" letter.
What the Abmahnung does is creates a legal obligation for me to present evidence to prove my claims--or else I'm legally enjoined from continuing my trash-talking, under penalty of a very hefty fine.
So no, LinuxTag hasn't just sent SCO a nastygram. They've sent SCO a nastygram with teeth. From here on out in Germany, SCO has three choices: they can either prove it and keep talking, they can keep talking and pay a huge fine, or they can shut up.
ObWarning: it's been a while since I took my college German studies, and even longer since I was a foreign exchange student in Germany (where my host father was a German prosecutor). This is all based on my best recollection.
Re:stun guns are not that effective
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Shocking Clothing
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Minor correction--his name is Masaad Ayoob, and he goes by "Mas".
No, I didn't miss the point with respect to the Proton-M. It puts 48,000 pounds of cargo into orbit at a cost of $2,000 per pound. The Shuttle puts 58,000 pounds into orbit at a cost of $7,700 per pound. That just means we're spending three times as much as we need to be when we could be buying our ELVs from Russia.
I agree that a totally different launch solution is needed. But the Proton-M is worth noting and comparing the Shuttle to, if only to show how incredibly, mind-bogglingly atrocious a launch vehicle the Shuttle is. It costs three times as much and has a one-in-fifty chance of snuffing out seven human lives? No thanks.
It's a lousy design for getting into the atmosphere. One, the winged design adds absolutely nothing but weight. Sure, it makes certain polar orbits easier, but there's no scientific or military need for the Shuttle to launch into a polar orbit. Two, the winged design means that it lands like an airplane. This is great, except for the fact it lands at 220mph (a DC-3 lands at 130mph), its brakes have to bleed off three times as much kinetic energy as a DC-3's, the DC-3's brakes haven't been exposed to the blistering heat, chilling cold and annihilating vacuum of space, and if for some reason the landing gear fails to deploy the Shuttle, since it can't just punch the engines and make another pass, does a 220mph crash into the asphalt.
Sure. Great. The Shuttle is a great idea for re-entry, if you want to put your trust in a couple of thousand interconnected, interdependent systems, the failure of any one of which will totally doom you.
By comparison, a purely ballistic entry is easy. Do you have the right angle? The right velocity? Is your heat shield intact? Do your parachutes work? Great: go for it.
Slashdot Mirror
ObDisclosure: yes, I am a Christian. No, I am not an Intelligent Design or Creation Science advocate. I object to both ID and CS on theological grounds rather than scientific ones, for reasons I hope will be clear.
There is NO NEED for intelligent design.
On the contrary: if there was no need for the idea of intelligent design (note that I didn't call it a theory), nobody would've come up with it. It's pretty well-understood that there are a large number of fundamental constants which are balanced just perfectly to allow complex systems to arise in the Universe. This creates a question: how did this perfect balance come to be? Some people feel the need to have an answer, and for these people, ID fills a genuine need.
On the other hand, ID isn't science. Science is concerned with empirical observations and testable hypotheses. You can't empirically test God. Theologically speaking, we can't test God because he exists on such a level beyond us that we can't conceive of a test. (There are many other theological problems with testing God, but leave those alone for now.) And scientifically speaking, God defies all attempts at making testable hypotheses. So either way, you're screwed by introducing ID into a scientific curriculum. If you want to believe in ID, great; just please don't call it science.
Interestingly, the Catholic Church doesn't believe in ID except in a very abstract way. The Catholic Church has, amazingly enough, learned from Galileo and Copernicus and all the rest. Many times in the past the Church said such-and-such a physical phenomenon is the direct handiwork of God, only to have it shown that it's not God's direct handiwork anyway. At that point, what do you do? Redefine God so that "well, God's still directly handling the other things, just not that"? And what happens when natural processes are discovered for the other things?
The Catholic Church has become so cognizant of this that they've assigned it a name: the God Of The Gaps. If every unexplainable instance is attributed to God, the Catholic theology goes, then whenever a previously unexplainable instance is discovered to have an explanation, God's glory is diminished by the explaining.
ID is a God Of The Gaps argument. We don't understand how the finely-balanced nature of the cosmos is possible, therefore God must have done it... well, what happens if/when we discover there's a natural phenomenon behind it?
Re: why I object to ID and CS on theological grounds instead of scientific ones... ID and CS are both theological models of the world. As such, they can't be refuted with science. They stand entirely apart from it.
Strangely, many of the world's preeminent CompSci institutions disagree one hundred and ten percent. At MIT, the CompSci curriculum begins with--and throughout remains heavy influenced by--Scheme. Why? Because hardware changes. Because the things you learn about computers by programming in C are really limited (not every computer is a register-based machine). Because learning how a specific computer works doesn't teach you bupkis about how computation works.
... etc., etc., etc.
For that you need a formal model of computation. There are two principal formal models of computation: there's the Turing Machine and there's the Lambda Calculus. We don't have very many languages with explicit support for Turingisms. On the other hand, we've got several languages with explicit support for Lambda--from LISP and Scheme to ML and
First learn about computation. Then learn about how to apply computational theory to a specific architecture.
That's the way MIT, Stanford, et al. are teaching CompSci nowadays. That's the way I was taught CompSci at the university level--our Intro to CS course was taught in Pascal (yes, I went to college that long ago), mainly because of demands that students learn something "practical" in CS141, but as soon as you got past Intro it was heavy on functional languages and lambda.
I wholeheartedly endorse it.
I would like to see references for this.
s /lec08.html for starters.
Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. The Special Theory only relates mass with spacetime distortion; the General Theory has the mass-energy equivalence.
If you know the name of the governing equation that relates gravitational force to electromagnetic energy density please tell me because I would be fascinated to read about it.
E = mc**2. Or, E / c**2 = m.
Or, g = (E1/c**2)*(E2/c**2) / d**2.
Googling for "energy distorts spacetime" returns a couple of references. Try http://blueox.uoregon.edu/~karen/astro123/lecture
http://www.exodusproject.com/GravWave.htm
also quotes the famous GR maxim, "Mass-energy tells spacetime how to curve; spacetime tells mass-energy how to move."
There is no difference between mass and energy from a relativity perspective.
Warning: my physics is several years out of date. That said... every singularity is its own antisingularity. That is to say, you cannot tell a difference between a black hole formed by conventional matter collapse and a black hole formed by antimatter collapse.
If a matter singularity and an antimatter singularity collided, we don't know what would happen. For all we know, mutant space hamsters fly out of their nether orifices. It all happens inside the event horizon; we can't see it, can't experience it, it's totally forbidden from interacting with us in any way.
On the other hand, conservation of mass-energy is upheld. So even if all the mass gets transformed into energy (highly speculative, since we can't know what happens!), that energy will forever be contained within the event horizon; the Einsteinian geodesics all loop back upon themselves. So you've got a huge energy discharge traveling forever within a very narrow, confined space.
It's not just mass which distorts space-time and creates the appearance of gravity. Energy can do the exact same thing. So if the entire mass gets converted into a singularity--there's no big deal; it's still a black hole by virtue of how much energy is compressed into that space.
Again: my physics is several years out of date, and this is all IIRC.
I really don't know how so many people can blast the RIAA, Microsoft, and other big corporations for being able to buy their way into anything
The exact same way I can blast the Klan for being racists, while in the same breath saying that it's a very good thing that we've got free speech. Liberty is a double-edged sword; yes, people are going to use it irresponsibly. The existence of irresponsible uses of liberty does not give one single shred of credibility to "oh, let's do away with liberty" arguments.
I'm offended by people telling me to go out and get a better job, go to school, stop whining, whatever.
Grow up. If you're going to whine about only making $7,000 a year, then either do something about it or learn to live with it. Either way, nobody wants to hear it. I didn't go bitching to you when I was homeless, did I? What do you want from us--"oh, dear, you're only making $7K, so I guess that means your arguments against economic liberty have extra weight..."?
If you don't want people to tell you to stop whining, then don't whine. I'm unemployed. I whine to my best friend, yeah... but I don't whine to you. And if I start whining to you, I'd appreciate it if you'd tell me those two magic words: "grow up."
If people only paid taxes on what they used, we'd be in a sore state.
Straw man argument. Not even Milton Friedman (a far-right-wing Nobel economist) believes this. The Friedmanic belief is that people should pay taxes based on what services and protections they enjoy. We all receive the benefit of a 911 service, of a police force, of a fire department, etc., therefore we all pay into it.
Nobody is arguing that we should only pay taxes on what we use.
The only thing the federal government does for me is military action (which I don't support currently) and deliver my mail (badly), but I pay federal income tax.
At $7,000, you're not paying Federal income tax except in a transient sense--you're well below the cutoff line, so you get every dime back. I agree that it's still offensive to see that long succession of nickels and dimes stream out of your paycheck even if you'll get them back later--but let's not say you're paying Federal income tax, because most likely you're not.
Where do I fit another job?
Welcome to the world of economics. Economics is not the study of money; it's the study of how to allocate finite resources to best serve infinite needs. Time is the classical example of a finite resource.
Needless to say, I am living on a razor-thin margin, and would welcome things like universal health care and government-funded schooling
In other words, you'd love it if someone else were to pay for your health care and education. Isn't that the definition of greed?
How greedy is it to sit and contemplate whether you are going to have steak or lobster tonite, or whether your kids are going to a private boarding school in connecticut or massachusetts, when there are other people down the street who can barely afford to eat ramen and have no hope of going to college based on their socio-economic background?
It's not greedy at all. Take my father as an example--he was born dirt-poor in the sticks of small-town Iowa. He's worked 60-hour weeks ever since he was fifteen years old, save for his law school days, when he was only working 40s so he could "concentrate on school". Once in his life he took a two-week vacation--for his honeymoon--but other than that, he's only taken a maximum of ten days. He joined the Army partially to help cover his college debts; and today he's a respected, esteemed, semi-retired member of the bar... and wealthy.
So. How greedy is it for Dad, who's worked 60-hour weeks for the last fifty years, to say "you know, I want to eat lobster tonight"? I think the man's entitled to it. Of course, you, who know how to spend Dad's money better than he does, and who obviously know how hard Dad has worked for it, have different ideas of what Dad is entitled to.
There's that word, "entitlement". Oooh. Bogeyman. The left thinks the right is allergic to it, that the right wants to shut down all entitlements. Nothing is further from the truth. Conservatives believe there are very few entitlements; the rest is just wishful thinking of the way the world should be.
You're entitled to liberty--entitled to make your own decisions for yourself, not having them imposed upon you by the government. This includes the liberty of making your own economic decisions.
You're entitled to work as hard as you like, or as little as you like. Nobody's cracking a whip over your shoulders. Don't want to work? Don't have to work. Want to work hard? You can work hard.
You're entitled to the fruits of your labors. What you build with your own two hands, you're entitled to own. And you can trade this entitlement--remember the "entitled to economic liberty" thing?--in a fair marketplace; if you want to take RIAA's money and give them the fruits of your labor, you can. The government's not forcing you to do it, nor is it forcing you not to do it.
Those are entitlements, and they all stem from the same basic entitlement: human beings are entitled to political and economic liberty. Everything else that gets swept under the rubric of "entitlement" is just people desperately wishing the world was otherwise than it was.
You have no entitlement to take my money out of my pocket to engage in your own private "redistribution of wealth" schemes. That's not liberty; that's tyranny. That's you making these decisions for me. You can try it if you like, but expect to get socked in the jaw. I don't give a damn about the money; money is a whore. I give a damn about your attempt at turning me into your slave.
If you make $500,000/yr and the government wants 30%, you aren't starving.
In the dot-com boom I was getting paid $100,000 a year. By your logic I was living on easy street, right? The reality is I got evicted from my apartment and was homeless in my car for a few days. Let's look at the math:
From a starting salary of $100,000, take away $50,000 right off the top between California and Federal income taxes. Wham--presto--gone.
From the $50,000 left, take away $36,000 for rent. I was living in a one-bedroom garret in San Francisco and property values were so overinflated that I was paying $3,000 a month just in rent.
From the $14,000 left, take away $3,000 for utilities. California power crisis is a bitch, don't you know.
From the $11,000 left, take away $6,000 for car payments on a five-year-old used car.
From the $5,000 left... that's what you have to live on for a year. That has to put gas in the car, that has to put money
Definitely Zork. Great cover art, but the in-game graphics sucked.
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(For the humor-impaired: Zork was an early Infocom text-only adventure game, and was incredibly fun. Zork is probably older than most of the people who are reading this, which makes me feel thirty-one flavors of Geezer.)
Yes and no. Yes, neutrinos are created in many kinds of nuclear reactions, and yes, they do travel at lightspeed with some awe-inspiring ability to travel clear through anything, and yes, they could be used for SETI; but no, nobody's going to be using them for SETI.
The reason for this is any civilization advanced enough to have fission--much less fusion, MAM, quark-gluon conversion or other exotic energies--is first going to progress through a much lower-tech level, during which point their civilization is going to glow like a supernova in certain bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. (Earth, for instance, far outshines the Sun in several wavelengths.)
Rather than peek at the cosmos with a neutrino telescope to see the (relatively small) signatures of an individual fusion reactor here or there, it makes more sense to look at the cosmos with radio-astronomy tools to look for planets that are brighter than stars. Find one like that, and dollars to donuts says it's got intelligent life.
To give you an idea of just how quiet the cosmos is... if you were to stand on Pluto and turn on a cell phone, you'd create a radio signal so loud it would drown out literally everything in the night sky (at least on its band). It's quiet out there.
IANAL, but I've got a good grounding in legalese. So let me try and translate it into clear English. As far as legalese goes, BTW, this stuff is pretty clear.
"Commercial e-mail" means an electronic communication between two or more computers which tries to get you to buy, lease or exchange things (goods, services, property, or basically anything else of value).
It's pretty clear to me that donations are exempted; there's no sale, no lease, and no exchange of goods/services. Likewise, political messages are exempt; no sale, no lease, no exchange of goods/services.
While it's true that there have been several foam impacts before, NASA never (to the best of my knowledge) said wings had been breached before. Breaches are amazingly lethal conditions, and NASA takes them very seriously; when any tile gets deteriorated by more than 0.04 inches, it gets completely replaced.
NASA's line about why they didn't throw a fit over the foam has always been "well, it never caused any problems before..."
Now it turns out it did cause problems before and came within a whisker of losing Atlantis. In a fair world, it would mean the jobs of several NASA bureaucrats--not just for not paying attention to foam-strike problems, but for lying to Lehman's committee, to Congress, and to the American people about how there had never before been any foam-strike problems.
From this AP story you can read that one of the astronauts on board the Atlantis when it had the wing-breach found out about the wing-breach when she was contacted by the AP for a comment. Not only had NASA covered up the wing-breach--they weren't even informing astronauts of the risks.
The poster's absolutely correct. With very few exceptions (like, say, Louisiana), every court decision creates binding precedent throughout its jurisdiction. A panel decision possesses almost as much precedential value as an en banc decision; the only difference is an en banc hearing can overturn a panel decision, while a panel decision cannot overturn an en banc decision.
As a matter of practice, en bancs are almost superfluous. Looking at the statistics for the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, they hand down unanimous panel decisions 97% of the time. This is for a court which is stocked almost straight 50/50 with appointees from hardcore Republicans and hardcore Democrats.
Only 3% of the time is a panel decision split; and less than 10% of the split decisions are sufficiently "interesting" (in a legal sense of the word) to warrant an en banc hearing.
If anyone's interested I can get statistics for the other circuits as well--I only know the 8th Circuit stats off the top of my head, though.
IANAL.
Highly dependent on the circumstances. If you shoot a burglar who's carrying a weapon (even a holstered one), most DAs won't bat an eyelash: the guy was armed, your action was reasonable, the death certificate gets listed as a homicide and it gets processed as justifiable self-defense.
In Iowa, "self-defense" doesn't necessarily mean responding to an attack. Preemptive attack is acceptable, provided you're acting in response to a perception of a clear and present danger. If the bad guy's unarmed and only wanted your TV set, but he was sneaking into your bedroom and you had a reasonable fear he was going to kill you, you're safe. If the bad guy's unarmed and he's sneaking out your back door with your TV set, you can be successfully prosecuted if you attack, since there's no clear and present threat.
Warning: IANAL.
Here in Iowa, we have Castle Doctrine both on the criminal lawbooks and the civil lawbooks. It's a lovely little bit of law: if you're found to have been acting in self-defense (either by the DA refusing to file charges, or by being acquitted in court of criminal charges stemming from the shooting), you're totally immune from all civil litigation surrounding the act.
In other words, if I shoot the intruder in a clear case of home defense, his estate can't file a lawsuit.
It's a great law, and I wish more states adopted it.
Why do homeowners need to be careful about shooting intruders?
It's people like you who give gunowners like me a bad name. YOU NEED TO BE CAREFUL BECAUSE YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT TAKING A HUMAN LIFE, YOU DOORKNOB. This isn't something wherein you can say "whoops, my goof, sorry Frank, sure we've been friends for 30 years and sure your car broke down and sure you thought we were out of town and sure you came in using the house key we gave you 20 years ago, and sure you just wanted to use the phone. Tough shit. You were fair game."
Before you go about shooting someone, you need to damn well make certain--and I mean certain--that they pose a clear and present threat to your life, your family's life, or some innocent person's life. If you don't do this, then you're not an armed citizen, you're a thug with a gun.
Would a gun camera help cut down on reckless shooting? I think so, yes, because it would allow accountability. If a homeowner was shooting at an unidentified shadow, the camera would show that, and the homeowner could be held accountable for it.
We are talking about police that operate in the urban enviroment, it worries me that police could be so careless with their guns that they might accidently find a puddle of mud and drop it in.
One of the officers I shoot with recently had a drunk puke on him. Not "a little got on his shoes", instead "as I was hauling this guy up and away from the bar, he leaned in towards me like he needed support and just let loose all down my uniform".
Or what about if a drunk driver goes off the road and winds up half-submerged in a river? Officers don't say "well, hell, I guess I'd better remove my firearm and put it down right over here" before wading in. They go straight in without wasting time like that--so their firearms had damn well better be able to fire after being totally submerged in water.
Being a police officer is a messy, messy job. On a good day you'll just run the risk of drunks puking on you. On a bad day you run the risk of having to wrestle a suspect to the ground, and that tends to be a very dirty thing. You ever seen how dirty a seven-year-old gets while wrestling outside? Now imagine it's between two grown men, one of whom is actively trying to kill the other.
Policing is not a sedentary job, and it's not a clean one.
First, I really don't mean to be rude here, so please forgive me if I come across that way.
A smart gun weapon system which defaults to allowing someone to fire is pretty much useless. It's a matter of only a second or two to drop the gun in a mud puddle, or to remove the battery, or whatever, at which point you've circumvented the access control altogether.
If you're going to use technology to control access to something, it almost always needs to default to no access.
Ask cops sometime what they think of smart gun technologies. Of all the cops I've asked, they all hate the idea. Admittedly, my sample isn't representative; the cops I know are all ones I see at the local shooting range.
Their opinion comes down to basically guns need to be kept as simple as possible. That's been the major direction firearms technology has been taking for the last 50+ years; not making more complex weapons but simpler and cheaper weapons. A modern Glock handgun is cheaper, more reliable, and (most astonishingly!) has fewer moving parts than a revolver of 50 years ago. A modern SIG-Sauer is cheaper, more reliable, and has fewer moving parts than a 1908 Luger.
This trend--towards weapons which have fewer moving parts, fewer breakable parts, and are thus cheaper to manufacture and more reliable--has been overwhelmingly welcomed by shooters. It's been so welcomed that I don't know a single shooter who doesn't welcome it, and I've been shooting for 20 years. In fact, the only people I've ever seen advocate adding complexity to weapons are people who neither shoot for sport nor carry a weapon as part of their daily job.
What happens as soon as you add a fingerprint-recognition system to a firearm?
Well, first, you've got some kind of optical reader... how well does the optical reader work if you drop your gun in a mud puddle? I've dropped an M1911A1 in a bucket of mud before, pulled it out, given it two shakes to dislodge mud from the barrel, and gone through 21 rounds (three magazines) without a failure. I was spattered with mud and the gun was literally steaming by the end of it, but it fired perfectly--zero failures. Could I repeat that kind of reliability experiment with a fingerprint-reading gun? No? Okay, great. Your new smartgun is now less reliable in the face of hostile environments (like mud, water, etc.) than a pistol first designed in the early 1900s.
The next thing you need is some kind integrated circuit controller and wires between it and the optical reader. Do you know why there's been such a push towards simpler and simpler firearms designs? Because when you fire a semiautomatic pistol, parts of it are subjected to internal stresses of hundreds of G-forces and tens of thousands of pounds per square inch. It's not uncommon to have bullets loaded to generate 50,000 pounds per square inch. Take hundreds of G-forces and repeated exposure to huge overpressures and you get an environment which is very, very hostile to everything; the fewer moving parts you have, the fewer parts which can break. Can wires and integrated circuits be built which handle these things? Sure. An example would be the Army's Copperhead artillery system, which uses artillery shells with built-in integrated circuits. The question isn't "can we do it", though: the question is "do we want to be totally dependent on the circuit". If a load of Copperheads doesn't work, the artillery crew can just fall back on conventional high-explosive warheads--they're back in action almost immediately. If your smart gun doesn't work, you're best off throwing the gun at the bad guy. Big difference.
Third thing you need is a battery, because ICs don't run on nothing. Great. So now do you not only have to make sure that your gun is loaded, that a round is chambered, that all safeties are disengaged, you now also have to make sure that your battery hasn't run out? Most cops--the majority of them--shoot very rarely. They don't inspect their guns very often. They go to the range once a year (or however often their department requires that they qualify) and then they forget about the gun the other 364 days. You ever had a power outage and then discovered the batteries in your flashlight are out? Do you really want the same thing happening to your firearm when the bad guy is shooting at you, your life is on the line, and all you want to do is get home safely to your wife and kids?
... Also, take a look at how many cops are shot by criminals with their
When I first read that, I read it as International Business Marines.
I immediately thought, "Man, I knew IBM had some badass attorneys, but this is boss. Where's their recruiting office?"
The UNKNOWN-UNKNOWN problem was first explained to me about ten years ago by a Marine Corps gunnery sergeant who'd been around the block a few dozen times, and learned what he called UNKNOWN-UNKNOWN the hard way. I.e., the UNKNOWN-UNKNOWN left him in a hospital for seven months having his spine and pelvis reassembled.
Let's put it into terms that you'd understand. Let's say you're a CompSci student at a university and you have an exam coming up.
There are things which you know, and you know that you know them. You know C++, which the prof is using in the course. You know the language, and you are aware of the fact that you know. If you KNOW-KNOW something, and you're correct in your assessment, you're sitting in the catbird seat.
Just slightly worse are the things you don't know, but of which you're aware that you're lacking. You know that the lambda calculus exists; you know you don't know beans about it. No problem! If you see a lambda question on the exam, you'll be able to just skip it and come back to it at the end, to maybe see if you can make heads or tails of it. A KNOWN-UNKNOWN is nothing to be afraid of. Minimized, sure... but you can deal with known unknowns. You can even plan for them.
Where people screw themselves over are the places where they don't know beans, and they aren't aware that they're ignorant. Let's say that you're ignorant about generic programming. You've never heard of it before. Don't know beans about it. So when the prof tells you that your exam will cover the entire C++ language, you don't mind--you know C++, right?
Except... you don't. And up until you see the funky template notation on the test, you're completely in the dark as to just how ignorant you are. You'll probably charge headlong at the problem because... well, sure, it looks kind of strange, but you know C++, right? And since you don't know generics, and you're unaware of just how ignorant you are, you'll waste half an hour getting absolutely nowhere on a generics question. You can't plan for UNKNOWN-UNKNOWNs. You can't plan for them because you don't know they're going to happen, because they come totally out of left field (usually as the result of totally botching your KNOWN-KNOWNs). If you had any forewarning, then you could've been prepared, right?
What you want to mock as illogical and sophomoric is actually a fairly deep rumination on what it means to know something. Try Kant's Critique of Pure Reason if you want to see this general idea presented in great detail and in mind-boggling length.
Or, if you'd rather have the Cliff's Notes version, try Mark Twain's reduction of Kant: "What gets people in trouble ain't so much the things they don't know as it is the things they do know that just ain't so."
C++ is an abomination. 13 Years after the standard there STILL is not a single compiler that implements the language correctly.
As be-fan has (correctly) pointed out, it's only been five years since the standard was published. Several compiler suites are within epsilon of complete conformance (GCC 3.x, Intel 7.1), and last I heard the latest iteration of Kai C++ (they got bought out, but I forget by whom) even supports the export keyword. So yes, there are compilers which implement the language correctly, for reasonable definitions of "correctly".
Secondly--of course C++ is a mess. C++ was specifically designed to be a mess. It was designed to be a mess because the Committee knows the problem set is a mess. C++ has direct support for procedural, object-oriented and functional programming, when pretty much every other language out there tells you to pick one and stick with it[*]. C++ has generics and the Standard Template Library, which is so breathtakingly cool that it's hard to explain to people who don't understand it just why it's so great.
C++ is an abomination? Sure. Most of us C++ programmers will happily admit that it's an abomination. But if you're willing to make the (significant!) investment in learning C++, and learning it well, then it can pay enormous dividends.
My favorite two languages, incidentally, are C++ and the LISPs (Scheme particularly).
[*] Admittedly, you can make Scheme act like anything you like, but Scheme doesn't natively support OO. If you want OO, you've got to hang a bag on the side.
It's been a few years since I took my college German classes, but if I recall correctly from that class, Germany has some very strong laws meant to protect the good names of people, companies and organizations. If I go about talking trash about you, your company, firm or organization, you have the right to present me with an Abmahnung. It's not a "cease and desist" letter, it's a "put up or shut up" letter.
What the Abmahnung does is creates a legal obligation for me to present evidence to prove my claims--or else I'm legally enjoined from continuing my trash-talking, under penalty of a very hefty fine.
So no, LinuxTag hasn't just sent SCO a nastygram. They've sent SCO a nastygram with teeth. From here on out in Germany, SCO has three choices: they can either prove it and keep talking, they can keep talking and pay a huge fine, or they can shut up.
ObWarning: it's been a while since I took my college German studies, and even longer since I was a foreign exchange student in Germany (where my host father was a German prosecutor). This is all based on my best recollection.
Minor correction--his name is Masaad Ayoob, and he goes by "Mas".
What kind of an incompetent idiot is going to try to attack a woman with other witnesses around?
Ask Kitty Genovese. She might have something to say about the frequency with which incompetent idiots attack a woman with 38 witnesses around.
No, I didn't miss the point with respect to the Proton-M. It puts 48,000 pounds of cargo into orbit at a cost of $2,000 per pound. The Shuttle puts 58,000 pounds into orbit at a cost of $7,700 per pound. That just means we're spending three times as much as we need to be when we could be buying our ELVs from Russia.
I agree that a totally different launch solution is needed. But the Proton-M is worth noting and comparing the Shuttle to, if only to show how incredibly, mind-bogglingly atrocious a launch vehicle the Shuttle is. It costs three times as much and has a one-in-fifty chance of snuffing out seven human lives? No thanks.
It's a lousy design for getting into the atmosphere. One, the winged design adds absolutely nothing but weight. Sure, it makes certain polar orbits easier, but there's no scientific or military need for the Shuttle to launch into a polar orbit. Two, the winged design means that it lands like an airplane. This is great, except for the fact it lands at 220mph (a DC-3 lands at 130mph), its brakes have to bleed off three times as much kinetic energy as a DC-3's, the DC-3's brakes haven't been exposed to the blistering heat, chilling cold and annihilating vacuum of space, and if for some reason the landing gear fails to deploy the Shuttle, since it can't just punch the engines and make another pass, does a 220mph crash into the asphalt.
Sure. Great. The Shuttle is a great idea for re-entry, if you want to put your trust in a couple of thousand interconnected, interdependent systems, the failure of any one of which will totally doom you.
By comparison, a purely ballistic entry is easy. Do you have the right angle? The right velocity? Is your heat shield intact? Do your parachutes work? Great: go for it.