Yep. All the money is now focused on things to serve the Earth (like a TV relays, spy pictures, or weather data) or serving wealthy earthlings who want to go into something almost zero gravity for a short stay. There's nobody interested in paying for Moon or Mars projects anymore it seems.
No one is interested in the Moon unless we'll build a base there. No one wants to pay for another trip back to the Moon if we're just going to plant the flag and come home again. Been there, done that.
Do something new and different, or don't go at all.
" I think NASA should be used as a governing body to be in charge of overall space operations (for now), but the private industry should be funded enough to do the research and build the vehicles."
I think NASA should be abolished. It was a creature of it's time... the US-Soviet space race, and it served its purpose as a cradle of US space exploration. It's time we left the cradle and let the children grow up and move out on their own. Abolish NASA, and farm out its responsibilities to existing agencies. Traditional aerospace research... the "Right Stuff" kind of flight testing, etc... should be given to DARPA. A new, smaller agency should be created that does nothing but manage space exploration and astronomy-based sciences. They'd do things like manage observatories, coordinate space research with universities, and manage space and planetary probes. Call it the US Space Institute or something similar if you like. Last, as much launch activity as possible should be turned over to the private sector. Perhaps the Commerce Department should have a bureau that manages these activities. Create more "Spaceports" like Mojave. There are plenty of retired Air Force bases and Army Air Corps fields in the southwest that could be converted to this kind of use.
Regardless, NASA in its current form has outlived its usefulness, and its duties are too varied and scattershot. Break it up and merge it into smaller units with distinctive missions.
Competition is thriving in the open-source market, hence the lack of massive market-cap non-specialised companies. FOSS is showing capitalism how it's done.
I'm a huge supporter of both capitalism and the open source movement, but please, lets not pretend that the latter has much to do with the former. The reason why open source doesn't make much money is because it's essentially a volunteer effort. The vast majority of people that do FOSS work do it unpaid, and on their own time. I've yet to find a stockbroker that works for "the love of the game". Capitalists are in it for the money, first, last, and always. The open source movement is basically a bunch of voluntary communes. If they make some money, hey, that's nice, but the software is what's important to them, and they're willing to work for free to see it happen.
The two ideas have little to nothing in common, save the idea of voluntary participation.
Skynet jokes aside, drones are both useful and inevitable. And not only the winged ones. Look for a possible resurgence of blimps and airships in widespread use. Hang a radar on a blimp, park it at high altitude, and you have an instant radar system upgrade for air traffic control. Or for border patrol. Or for search and rescue. Etc etc etc. The uses for UAV's in the civilian sector are endless.
Gartner is shilling
on
Time To Dump XP?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Another example of why companies like Gartner are useless. They're little more another source of advertising for computer companies.
Your decisions on your OS should be driven by your needs first and foremost. If XP is still supported, and it's doing the job well for you... why switch? Switch if YOU need to, not because someone like Gartner says "Hey you, get out of the past and get with the future. All the cool kids are running *insert OS here*"
Uh, no, not even close. This isn't even close to being the worst oil spill in history, let alone the worst disaster in history. If the worst case scenario comes to pass... a spewing well until Christmas... then maybe this will make the top ten spill list. Second, this is oil, a natural substance, which even in its toughest form is a far cry from the chemical pesticides that Union Carbide leaked (and this leak is light sweet crude, not the much heavier grade of oil that was spilled at Valdez. It'll actually start evaporating). Last, Bhopal killed 17,000 people. This spill will kill no one, unless we've suddenly started counting birds and fish as people. The birds and fish will recover. The victims of Bhopal aren't coming back.
Because Jefferson said that the Tree of Liberty had to be occasionally watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants, not the idle chatter of a message board.
"It will be justified under the 'interstate commerce' clause, the catch all used to justify everything from compelling Americans to buy health insurance to telling them that they can't set dried up bits of cannabis on fire and inhale the resulting smoke into their lungs."
There is some hope here. Recall that SCOTUS has, in the past two decades, begun slapping the Federal government down occasionaly for justifying everything with the Commerce Clause. Both the Rehnquist and Roberts courts have told the government that the CC doesn't trump the rest of the Constitution, though this hasn't sunk in completely with current politicians. Nancy Pelosi specifically referenced the CC when defending the health care bill.
"I'm rather pessimistic about our chances of reversing this trend, absent a constitutional convention and/or revolution, neither of which will happen because both would require Americans to stop watching TV long enough to realize how many rights they are losing."
It's not so much that American's don't care... many are truly concerned... so much as Americans have now fallen into a comfortable pusher-addict relationship with the government, especially when it comes to dollars that Uncle Sam doles out, either directly or in the form of tax credits. We're simply afraid to fend for ourselves in the event of a real uprising. It's very hard for an addict to rebel against his supplier, after all.
"Helium-3 is not Helium like you put in Balloons, its the Isotope of Helium you put in Fusion Reactors and Medical Imaging technology."
True, but the article link indicates that good ole' regular helium is plentiful there too.
"Hydrogen would be much less expensive for this application, and like others have stated if you don't paint the sides of the airship with rocket fuel, a rigid airship with segmented air bladders is pretty safe."
You may be right or not, but if going back to hydrogen would usher in a new golden age of airship use, I'd be all for it.
"Maybe we can even reopen the Blimp port on the top of the Empire State Building."
I've dreamed of seeing that happen for years. I'm a big fan of the interwar period, where so much promising technology, art, and vision were born. Art deco skycrapers, beautiful bullet shaped trains, grand airships, the heyday of radio... if I could time travel, I'd be back in the 30's pronto-like. Look at our comic books of the period. The modern American imagination was born in the 30's. How fine it would be to see at least part of it realized again, if 70 years later.
For helium-3's true believers - the ones who think the isotope's fusion power will take us to the edge of our solar system and beyond - talk of the coming shortage is overblown: There's a huge, untapped supply right in our own backyard.
"The moon is the El Dorado of helium-3," says Savage, and he's right: Every star, including our sun, emits helium constantly. Implanted in the lunar soil by the solar wind, the all-important gas can be found on the moon by the bucketful."
So all of the helium we could need is on the moon, and if we can reach them, the gas giant planets. So the second part of the good news is that this gives us a real, economically viable reason to go back to the moon and stay this time... to actually build a base and commence helium mining and collection. And there's other resources on the moon waiting for us as well.
I think it would be a mistake to assume that. An orbital ship isn't fundamentally any more complicated than a passenger jetliner.
They're vastly different, not only in terms of what's under the skin (specially engineered components, ultra-hazardous chemicals, etc), but also in terms of economics. Jetliners are designed from the outset to be economical enough to make a profit, not to exceed physical performance goals. If Boeing can't make a jet that makes money for other people, then they drop the project, even if it's interesting. See the Sonic Cruiser for the latest example in a long line of them.
Private companies, by contrast, are just now taking the same approach to building rockets. And since NASA is a government agency... they're not concerned with profit at all.... then their priorities are performance and technical achievement. Cost has always far down on the list of NASA's priorities. Their in-house slogan during the Moon Race was, after all, "money is no object, but time is of the essence".
When NASA says that they're building something with economy in mind, they always fail in some way, because they don't really have the same kind understanding about economy as a business that lives and dies by profit. This is the main reason, even more than politics, that the Shuttle became so expensive, and why the Clinton Era "better, faster, cheaper" programs had so many spectacular failures.
I'm a big proponent of SSTO
I love the idea of SSTO, but it's the spacefaring equivalent of Cold Fusion; a modern day pipe dream at current technology levels. Lockheed couldn't even get it to work with the X-33, let alone with the VentureStar it was supposed to spawn.
Having a viable prototype design that's gone through simulations and the like is a lot more than artists renderings. What the hell do you think they do to make an airplane? Take some steel, rivets, and aluminum out to the hangar and just see where things end up?
But sometimes even simulations don't tell the whole picture. How many times have we seen technology projects that were supposed to be cheap and efficient turn out bad... especially in aviation and the military? Look at Boeing's new "Dreamliner". They thought they had everything figured out with the simulations, but when they actually tried putting one together, they ran into all sorts of problems the simulations didn't predict, from difficulty in fusing the new composite parts, to airframe stresses that the computers didn't account for. And while it'll be more fuel efficient than previous Boeings, it turns out that the actual productions aircraft won't be as efficient as the models suggested in its real production form.
This stuff sounds interesting, but I've seen too many instances of research products promising affordable, near-miraculous results, while the end product was a bust. I'll watch these designs with interest, but when one of them actually makes it into production, give me a call.
So the area now known as Texas rose out of the gulf in 1836? Or was there a conflict in which settlers fought for independence from Mexico?
The latter. But the larger point is that the poster I replied to was making the case that the United States "stole" Texas from Mexico, because the settlers in Texas came from other US states.
This is a false argument on two fronts; one, the settlers left the US to start new lives, literally in another country. This wasn't some secret plot by the United States government... "OK, you guys go live in the Texas territories for 20 years, then rebel, then form your own republic for 10 years, then join the Union. Our plan is foolproof!".
Second, that land didn't originally belong to Mexico. Nor did the land in Southern California, Arizona, or New Mexico. Mexico invaded those lands and conquered the local Indian tribes to get it. Mexican troops had a reputation for utter brutality among the Indian tribes. You think the Indians hated the US? Ask an Apache, Pueblo, or Hopi what he thinks of Mexico.
"Um, which overwhelming support are you talking about, the general public or the limited public that used and ran the airlines?"
Both: Reagan's support on this issue in public polls topped 60 percent.
Even though it's illegal for a Federal worker to strike (a condition of Congress allowing Federal unionization in the fist place), numerous federal unions did it anyway in the late 70's. It wasn't Reagan that started to bust the fed unions; it was Carter. There were 22 strikes by fed unions in the late 70's, and the public was sick of them. And then PATCO threatened the biggest strike of all... 3/4's of their members... during the busiest travel period of the season. The public was sick of it.
Exorbitant demands, they were striking to have the already budgeted money released to upgrade the towers instead of hiding the deficit and relief for jobs that were rapidly being overloaded to the point of failure.
They were asking for an across the board 10,000 dollar raise per member, and they already had wages well above the national average. They were also demanding a 32 hour work week and full retirement after 20 years. This is exorbitant, and it killed whatever public sympathy they ever had.
"How many major plane crashes were there in the U.S. after the controller firings during the 1980's? How many people died? '
Accident rates didnt' change, much to the chagrin of PATCO, whose members sometimes openly hoped for "aluminum rain" after their firing. The measures that the FAA took... puting supervisors back on duty, bringing in military ATC's, limiting flights during peak hours temporarily while training new controllers... kept the accident rate the same. The following year, when all of the replacement ATC's were in place, the FAA decertified PATCO, with wide public support.
"Reagan blew it and like everything else he did never took responsibility for it."
Obviously, America didn't agree. In 1984, Reagan carried every state except for Minnesota. Mondale got a grand total of 13 electoral votes.
When Reagan broke the ATC union, he was standing up to the Big Bad Union. When Chavez did it, he was being an autocratic commie.
When Reagan broke PATCO, A) he had overwhelming support from the public, which was tired of constant strikes and exhorbitant demands, and B) Reagan made sure experienced AC's were in place so safety was maintained.
Chavez did it because they dared oppose him, and like a Stalinist goon, he chased off all the smart and talented people without replacing them with other smart and talented people. Comparing the two situations is either blind union fanboyism, or silly cheerleading for Chavez.
Can I blame those GOP Senators for pushing for funding to keep jobs in their state?
You can when they're also pushing for an end to earmarks, reduced government spending, and a generalized "the government can't do anything right" attitude.
"Small government" is a valid position, but "reduce spending on everybody but me" is an attitude that merits blame.
One state's "pork" is another states "vital national program".
Except in America every child is special and deserves to go to college
No, they aren't, and they don't. The vast majority of people are average and ordinary. And that's just fine. That's reality. Most work is done by ordinary people, not Einsteins and Mozarts. One of the things I despise about modern education is the way we lie to children and parents... every child has untapped genius!, when the truth is, no, most of us don't.
Now, anyone can improve themselves. Anyone can work harder and learn more and better themselves. But that's not the same as being special, and it's not a justification for sending everyone to college.
How many of us are still driving a 25 year old car?
The Air Force is flying B-52's that are on average about 46 years old. The last BUFF rolled off the line at Boeing in 1962. USAF plans on using them another 30+ years. The last ones will be about 90 years old when they're finally retired.
"This comment is very ignorant. As I look at the projected budget deficits for the next few years I'm struck by the fact that the vast majority of this deficit is really the war coming due. "
Even with war costs, the vast majority of the budget still goes for entitlements.... social security, medicare, etc.
About 40 percent goes to SS and Medicare. Another 17 percent goes to "other mandatory spending", including current interest on the debt and other social program. DOD is 23 percent of the budget. GDP spent on defense, despite being in a war, has stayed fairly steady. Military spending is nowhere near the levels seen during Ike, Kennedy, and Johnson's times. Defense took 50 percent of the federal budget in the 1950's.
I'm all for cutting some outrageous defense spending... fiascos like the DDG-100 and Joint Strike Fighter come to mind. But blaming our budget problems all on defense is dishonest and disingenuous. It's the entitlements that keep growing and eating more and more of the budget. You could eliminate the military completely, and in three decades the budget will still start coming up short because of social entitlements.
"Pair that with the old tech, and it's seriously time to replace/upgrade."
It's not the age of the technology, it's the age of the spacecraft. Old does not equal bad when it comes to technology. We're still using the axe, shovel, and pencil, after all. Our primary bomber will continue to be the 1950's era B-52 for another 30 years. It'll be over 90 years old when we retire the last of them. The 747 was introduced when I was a toddler, but Boeing is still building newer, better versions of them.
The answer here wasn't to abandon the Shuttle, but to build new ones with some evolutionary improvements. Instead, we're going to be relying on the Russians until someone steps up to the plate with a replacement. Ares doesn't seem to be it, and none of the commercial rockets can do with that Shuttle can. We're going to regret retiring it without a replacement already in place. That's just irresponsible.
"The only reason for manned flight is to get to a place worth colonizing."
Though I'm a big critic of Obama, I'm sympathetic to a lot of his new program, and I simply thought Constellation was a waste, but not for the same reasons as you. I very much disagree with your statement above. Sometimes, as corny as this sounds, the reason for doing something is simply to fulfill the human spirt. "Because it's there" is as good a description of any for this kind of philosophy.
What scientific or commercial benefits do you get from having men climb to the top of Mt. Everest? None. You can't live there or colonize it, and if you were simply scientifically curious, you could have air-dropped insruments there from high altitude. But getting to the top is still important to us, it says something about us. Animals don't do "because it's there". Only men do. It's one of the truly heroic things about being human.
So I opposed Constellation simply because "eh, been there, done that". We weren't going to do anything different this time, or build a base and stay, so it was just a nostalgia trip. I oppose a trip to Mars now only because it's virtually impossible at this point. "Because it's there" is good. Tilting at windmills is not. One day we'll be able to go to Mars, but we're nowhere near that right now. Still, you can't just sit back and hand it all to the robots. To hell with that. Efficient science? Yes. Heroic? No. We need heroism. We need feats. It inspires us. It makes us better. And more importantly, people follow heroes. No one follows the safe, orderly manager that pooh-pooh's all risk. That way lays insignificance and cultural death. We put guys like that in charge of warehouses and HR. We put them in nice, boring bureaucracies. We follow the daring guys. They become the leaders. People want heroism and frontiers. People need them.
So, once again, let me advocate a manned trip that hasn't been done, but can feasibly be done with recent levels of technology; a manned trip to a large asteroid. Why? Because it's there.
Just wait 'till someone gets hurt. Inevitably, there's going to be an accident. And then the lawyers and bureaucrats get involved.
I think the notion of "space tourism for everyone" is going to go the way of jetpacks and flying cars, a nice dream that just never comes to real fruition.
They favor small government when it helps big business. They favor new legislation when it helps big business. They are experts at fooling average hard-working folks into voting against their own best interests.
I keep hearing that the GOP = Big Business, when big business have given more to the Democratic Party over time than to the GOP. While there is certainly support in business for the Republicans, there is certainly no shortage of support for Democrats in the halls of commerce, either. Goldman Sachs is practically the in-house fundraiser for the DNC. Each of the largest megabanks... Citi, Bank of America, etc.. has very close ties to major Democratic politicians like Chuck Schumer, Chris Dodd, and... I think you get the picture.
While your narrative plays well at Democratic Underground, Daily Kos, etc, those Wascawy Demokwats are even more deeply buried in the bosom of "big business". The RIAA is big business. As is Google. As is Apple. As is HP. The quintessential "big business" is GM, and guess who was eager to have government buy them? Hmm?
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. All the money is now focused on things to serve the Earth (like a TV relays, spy pictures, or weather data) or serving wealthy earthlings who want to go into something almost zero gravity for a short stay. There's nobody interested in paying for Moon or Mars projects anymore it seems.
No one is interested in the Moon unless we'll build a base there. No one wants to pay for another trip back to the Moon if we're just going to plant the flag and come home again. Been there, done that.
Do something new and different, or don't go at all.
" I think NASA should be used as a governing body to be in charge of overall space operations (for now), but the private industry should be funded enough to do the research and build the vehicles."
I think NASA should be abolished. It was a creature of it's time... the US-Soviet space race, and it served its purpose as a cradle of US space exploration. It's time we left the cradle and let the children grow up and move out on their own. Abolish NASA, and farm out its responsibilities to existing agencies. Traditional aerospace research... the "Right Stuff" kind of flight testing, etc... should be given to DARPA. A new, smaller agency should be created that does nothing but manage space exploration and astronomy-based sciences. They'd do things like manage observatories, coordinate space research with universities, and manage space and planetary probes. Call it the US Space Institute or something similar if you like. Last, as much launch activity as possible should be turned over to the private sector. Perhaps the Commerce Department should have a bureau that manages these activities. Create more "Spaceports" like Mojave. There are plenty of retired Air Force bases and Army Air Corps fields in the southwest that could be converted to this kind of use.
Regardless, NASA in its current form has outlived its usefulness, and its duties are too varied and scattershot. Break it up and merge it into smaller units with distinctive missions.
Competition is thriving in the open-source market, hence the lack of massive market-cap non-specialised companies. FOSS is showing capitalism how it's done.
I'm a huge supporter of both capitalism and the open source movement, but please, lets not pretend that the latter has much to do with the former. The reason why open source doesn't make much money is because it's essentially a volunteer effort. The vast majority of people that do FOSS work do it unpaid, and on their own time. I've yet to find a stockbroker that works for "the love of the game". Capitalists are in it for the money, first, last, and always. The open source movement is basically a bunch of voluntary communes. If they make some money, hey, that's nice, but the software is what's important to them, and they're willing to work for free to see it happen.
The two ideas have little to nothing in common, save the idea of voluntary participation.
Skynet jokes aside, drones are both useful and inevitable. And not only the winged ones. Look for a possible resurgence of blimps and airships in widespread use. Hang a radar on a blimp, park it at high altitude, and you have an instant radar system upgrade for air traffic control. Or for border patrol. Or for search and rescue. Etc etc etc. The uses for UAV's in the civilian sector are endless.
Another example of why companies like Gartner are useless. They're little more another source of advertising for computer companies.
Your decisions on your OS should be driven by your needs first and foremost. If XP is still supported, and it's doing the job well for you... why switch? Switch if YOU need to, not because someone like Gartner says "Hey you, get out of the past and get with the future. All the cool kids are running *insert OS here*"
BP = Bhopal for the Gulf.
Uh, no, not even close. This isn't even close to being the worst oil spill in history, let alone the worst disaster in history. If the worst case scenario comes to pass... a spewing well until Christmas... then maybe this will make the top ten spill list. Second, this is oil, a natural substance, which even in its toughest form is a far cry from the chemical pesticides that Union Carbide leaked (and this leak is light sweet crude, not the much heavier grade of oil that was spilled at Valdez. It'll actually start evaporating). Last, Bhopal killed 17,000 people. This spill will kill no one, unless we've suddenly started counting birds and fish as people. The birds and fish will recover. The victims of Bhopal aren't coming back.
Why does it always have to be a "fight"?...
Because Jefferson said that the Tree of Liberty had to be occasionally watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants, not the idle chatter of a message board.
"It will be justified under the 'interstate commerce' clause, the catch all used to justify everything from compelling Americans to buy health insurance to telling them that they can't set dried up bits of cannabis on fire and inhale the resulting smoke into their lungs."
There is some hope here. Recall that SCOTUS has, in the past two decades, begun slapping the Federal government down occasionaly for justifying everything with the Commerce Clause. Both the Rehnquist and Roberts courts have told the government that the CC doesn't trump the rest of the Constitution, though this hasn't sunk in completely with current politicians. Nancy Pelosi specifically referenced the CC when defending the health care bill.
"I'm rather pessimistic about our chances of reversing this trend, absent a constitutional convention and/or revolution, neither of which will happen because both would require Americans to stop watching TV long enough to realize how many rights they are losing."
It's not so much that American's don't care... many are truly concerned... so much as Americans have now fallen into a comfortable pusher-addict relationship with the government, especially when it comes to dollars that Uncle Sam doles out, either directly or in the form of tax credits. We're simply afraid to fend for ourselves in the event of a real uprising. It's very hard for an addict to rebel against his supplier, after all.
"Helium-3 is not Helium like you put in Balloons, its the Isotope of Helium you put in Fusion Reactors and Medical Imaging technology."
True, but the article link indicates that good ole' regular helium is plentiful there too.
"Hydrogen would be much less expensive for this application, and like others have stated if you don't paint the sides of the airship with rocket fuel, a rigid airship with segmented air bladders is pretty safe."
You may be right or not, but if going back to hydrogen would usher in a new golden age of airship use, I'd be all for it.
"Maybe we can even reopen the Blimp port on the top of the Empire State Building."
I've dreamed of seeing that happen for years. I'm a big fan of the interwar period, where so much promising technology, art, and vision were born. Art deco skycrapers, beautiful bullet shaped trains, grand airships, the heyday of radio... if I could time travel, I'd be back in the 30's pronto-like. Look at our comic books of the period. The modern American imagination was born in the 30's. How fine it would be to see at least part of it realized again, if 70 years later.
"and we only have so much helium left"
That's the bad news. The good news is actually two-sided. For one...
For helium-3's true believers - the ones who think the isotope's fusion power will take us to the edge of our solar system and beyond - talk of the coming shortage is overblown: There's a huge, untapped supply right in our own backyard.
"The moon is the El Dorado of helium-3," says Savage, and he's right: Every star, including our sun, emits helium constantly. Implanted in the lunar soil by the solar wind, the all-important gas can be found on the moon by the bucketful."
So all of the helium we could need is on the moon, and if we can reach them, the gas giant planets. So the second part of the good news is that this gives us a real, economically viable reason to go back to the moon and stay this time... to actually build a base and commence helium mining and collection. And there's other resources on the moon waiting for us as well.
I think it would be a mistake to assume that. An orbital ship isn't fundamentally any more complicated than a passenger jetliner.
They're vastly different, not only in terms of what's under the skin (specially engineered components, ultra-hazardous chemicals, etc), but also in terms of economics. Jetliners are designed from the outset to be economical enough to make a profit, not to exceed physical performance goals. If Boeing can't make a jet that makes money for other people, then they drop the project, even if it's interesting. See the Sonic Cruiser for the latest example in a long line of them.
Private companies, by contrast, are just now taking the same approach to building rockets. And since NASA is a government agency... they're not concerned with profit at all.... then their priorities are performance and technical achievement. Cost has always far down on the list of NASA's priorities. Their in-house slogan during the Moon Race was, after all, "money is no object, but time is of the essence".
When NASA says that they're building something with economy in mind, they always fail in some way, because they don't really have the same kind understanding about economy as a business that lives and dies by profit. This is the main reason, even more than politics, that the Shuttle became so expensive, and why the Clinton Era "better, faster, cheaper" programs had so many spectacular failures.
I'm a big proponent of SSTO
I love the idea of SSTO, but it's the spacefaring equivalent of Cold Fusion; a modern day pipe dream at current technology levels. Lockheed couldn't even get it to work with the X-33, let alone with the VentureStar it was supposed to spawn.
*This* is why we environmentalists want to protect marine life. It kicks ass.
Many environmental groups are on record as opposing the marine mammal program. You may be the minority in your own crowd.
Having a viable prototype design that's gone through simulations and the like is a lot more than artists renderings. What the hell do you think they do to make an airplane? Take some steel, rivets, and aluminum out to the hangar and just see where things end up?
But sometimes even simulations don't tell the whole picture. How many times have we seen technology projects that were supposed to be cheap and efficient turn out bad... especially in aviation and the military? Look at Boeing's new "Dreamliner". They thought they had everything figured out with the simulations, but when they actually tried putting one together, they ran into all sorts of problems the simulations didn't predict, from difficulty in fusing the new composite parts, to airframe stresses that the computers didn't account for. And while it'll be more fuel efficient than previous Boeings, it turns out that the actual productions aircraft won't be as efficient as the models suggested in its real production form.
This stuff sounds interesting, but I've seen too many instances of research products promising affordable, near-miraculous results, while the end product was a bust. I'll watch these designs with interest, but when one of them actually makes it into production, give me a call.
So the area now known as Texas rose out of the gulf in 1836? Or was there a conflict in which settlers fought for independence from Mexico?
The latter. But the larger point is that the poster I replied to was making the case that the United States "stole" Texas from Mexico, because the settlers in Texas came from other US states.
This is a false argument on two fronts; one, the settlers left the US to start new lives, literally in another country. This wasn't some secret plot by the United States government... "OK, you guys go live in the Texas territories for 20 years, then rebel, then form your own republic for 10 years, then join the Union. Our plan is foolproof!".
Second, that land didn't originally belong to Mexico. Nor did the land in Southern California, Arizona, or New Mexico. Mexico invaded those lands and conquered the local Indian tribes to get it. Mexican troops had a reputation for utter brutality among the Indian tribes. You think the Indians hated the US? Ask an Apache, Pueblo, or Hopi what he thinks of Mexico.
...another fine bit of "historical spin".
It was American settlers that were doing the original settling and subsequent rebelling.
If you're arguing against the facts, then the spin is yours. There was a Republic of Texas before there was a State of Texas.
"Um, which overwhelming support are you talking about, the general public or the limited public that used and ran the airlines?"
Both: Reagan's support on this issue in public polls topped 60 percent.
Even though it's illegal for a Federal worker to strike (a condition of Congress allowing Federal unionization in the fist place), numerous federal unions did it anyway in the late 70's. It wasn't Reagan that started to bust the fed unions; it was Carter. There were 22 strikes by fed unions in the late 70's, and the public was sick of them. And then PATCO threatened the biggest strike of all... 3/4's of their members... during the busiest travel period of the season. The public was sick of it.
Exorbitant demands, they were striking to have the already budgeted money released to upgrade the towers instead of hiding the deficit and relief for jobs that were rapidly being overloaded to the point of failure.
They were asking for an across the board 10,000 dollar raise per member, and they already had wages well above the national average. They were also demanding a 32 hour work week and full retirement after 20 years. This is exorbitant, and it killed whatever public sympathy they ever had.
"How many major plane crashes were there in the U.S. after the controller firings during the 1980's? How many people died? '
Accident rates didnt' change, much to the chagrin of PATCO, whose members sometimes openly hoped for "aluminum rain" after their firing. The measures that the FAA took... puting supervisors back on duty, bringing in military ATC's, limiting flights during peak hours temporarily while training new controllers... kept the accident rate the same. The following year, when all of the replacement ATC's were in place, the FAA decertified PATCO, with wide public support.
"Reagan blew it and like everything else he did never took responsibility for it."
Obviously, America didn't agree. In 1984, Reagan carried every state except for Minnesota. Mondale got a grand total of 13 electoral votes.
When Reagan broke the ATC union, he was standing up to the Big Bad Union. When Chavez did it, he was being an autocratic commie.
When Reagan broke PATCO, A) he had overwhelming support from the public, which was tired of constant strikes and exhorbitant demands, and B) Reagan made sure experienced AC's were in place so safety was maintained.
Chavez did it because they dared oppose him, and like a Stalinist goon, he chased off all the smart and talented people without replacing them with other smart and talented people. Comparing the two situations is either blind union fanboyism, or silly cheerleading for Chavez.
Can I blame those GOP Senators for pushing for funding to keep jobs in their state?
You can when they're also pushing for an end to earmarks, reduced government spending, and a generalized "the government can't do anything right" attitude.
"Small government" is a valid position, but "reduce spending on everybody but me" is an attitude that merits blame.
One state's "pork" is another states "vital national program".
Except in America every child is special and deserves to go to college
No, they aren't, and they don't. The vast majority of people are average and ordinary. And that's just fine. That's reality. Most work is done by ordinary people, not Einsteins and Mozarts. One of the things I despise about modern education is the way we lie to children and parents... every child has untapped genius!, when the truth is, no, most of us don't.
Now, anyone can improve themselves. Anyone can work harder and learn more and better themselves. But that's not the same as being special, and it's not a justification for sending everyone to college.
How many of us are still driving a 25 year old car?
The Air Force is flying B-52's that are on average about 46 years old. The last BUFF rolled off the line at Boeing in 1962. USAF plans on using them another 30+ years. The last ones will be about 90 years old when they're finally retired.
"This comment is very ignorant. As I look at the projected budget deficits for the next few years I'm struck by the fact that the vast majority of this deficit is really the war coming due. "
Even with war costs, the vast majority of the budget still goes for entitlements.... social security, medicare, etc.
About 40 percent goes to SS and Medicare. Another 17 percent goes to "other mandatory spending", including current interest on the debt and other social program. DOD is 23 percent of the budget. GDP spent on defense, despite being in a war, has stayed fairly steady. Military spending is nowhere near the levels seen during Ike, Kennedy, and Johnson's times. Defense took 50 percent of the federal budget in the 1950's.
I'm all for cutting some outrageous defense spending... fiascos like the DDG-100 and Joint Strike Fighter come to mind. But blaming our budget problems all on defense is dishonest and disingenuous. It's the entitlements that keep growing and eating more and more of the budget. You could eliminate the military completely, and in three decades the budget will still start coming up short because of social entitlements.
"Pair that with the old tech, and it's seriously time to replace/upgrade."
It's not the age of the technology, it's the age of the spacecraft. Old does not equal bad when it comes to technology. We're still using the axe, shovel, and pencil, after all. Our primary bomber will continue to be the 1950's era B-52 for another 30 years. It'll be over 90 years old when we retire the last of them. The 747 was introduced when I was a toddler, but Boeing is still building newer, better versions of them.
The answer here wasn't to abandon the Shuttle, but to build new ones with some evolutionary improvements. Instead, we're going to be relying on the Russians until someone steps up to the plate with a replacement. Ares doesn't seem to be it, and none of the commercial rockets can do with that Shuttle can. We're going to regret retiring it without a replacement already in place. That's just irresponsible.
"The only reason for manned flight is to get to a place worth colonizing."
Though I'm a big critic of Obama, I'm sympathetic to a lot of his new program, and I simply thought Constellation was a waste, but not for the same reasons as you. I very much disagree with your statement above. Sometimes, as corny as this sounds, the reason for doing something is simply to fulfill the human spirt. "Because it's there" is as good a description of any for this kind of philosophy.
What scientific or commercial benefits do you get from having men climb to the top of Mt. Everest? None. You can't live there or colonize it, and if you were simply scientifically curious, you could have air-dropped insruments there from high altitude. But getting to the top is still important to us, it says something about us. Animals don't do "because it's there". Only men do. It's one of the truly heroic things about being human.
So I opposed Constellation simply because "eh, been there, done that". We weren't going to do anything different this time, or build a base and stay, so it was just a nostalgia trip. I oppose a trip to Mars now only because it's virtually impossible at this point. "Because it's there" is good. Tilting at windmills is not. One day we'll be able to go to Mars, but we're nowhere near that right now. Still, you can't just sit back and hand it all to the robots. To hell with that. Efficient science? Yes. Heroic? No. We need heroism. We need feats. It inspires us. It makes us better. And more importantly, people follow heroes. No one follows the safe, orderly manager that pooh-pooh's all risk. That way lays insignificance and cultural death. We put guys like that in charge of warehouses and HR. We put them in nice, boring bureaucracies. We follow the daring guys. They become the leaders. People want heroism and frontiers. People need them.
So, once again, let me advocate a manned trip that hasn't been done, but can feasibly be done with recent levels of technology; a manned trip to a large asteroid. Why? Because it's there.
Just wait 'till someone gets hurt. Inevitably, there's going to be an accident. And then the lawyers and bureaucrats get involved.
I think the notion of "space tourism for everyone" is going to go the way of jetpacks and flying cars, a nice dream that just never comes to real fruition.
They favor small government when it helps big business. They favor new legislation when it helps big business. They are experts at fooling average hard-working folks into voting against their own best interests.
I keep hearing that the GOP = Big Business, when big business have given more to the Democratic Party over time than to the GOP. While there is certainly support in business for the Republicans, there is certainly no shortage of support for Democrats in the halls of commerce, either. Goldman Sachs is practically the in-house fundraiser for the DNC. Each of the largest megabanks... Citi, Bank of America, etc.. has very close ties to major Democratic politicians like Chuck Schumer, Chris Dodd, and ... I think you get the picture.
While your narrative plays well at Democratic Underground, Daily Kos, etc, those Wascawy Demokwats are even more deeply buried in the bosom of "big business". The RIAA is big business. As is Google. As is Apple. As is HP. The quintessential "big business" is GM, and guess who was eager to have government buy them? Hmm?