Okay, maybe I'm just nuts... but why shouldn't someone have the intent to tarnish or disparage?
I'm not entirely sure whose "side" of this I fall on, but let me declare my prejudices: I am a fundamentalist Christian, so that might make you think I'm biased toward Mr. Falwell. But I don't believe Falwell is a Christian nor a preacher of the Christian Gospel, so that might make you think I'm biased against.
It seems to me this decision is legally correct. I thought at first the website owner was actually named Fallwell (note spelling) but apparently that is not the case. According to law as it stands, the site was registered in bad faith and should apparently be taken away. Since I believe in the rule of law, I would tend to agree that this should be done even if I disagree with the law in question (and that if there's a problem with the law it should be changed).
So, is there a problem with the law? I kind of feel like there is. In fact, I kind of feel like the First Amendment would make whatever law is involved here unconstitutional. Given that we're told our rights to speech CANNOT be infringed, where do we really get off saying that people can't say bad things about other people? Sure, the site tarnishes and disparages Mr. Falwell... so what's the big deal? People tarnish and disparage me all the time. And I dare say Mr. Falwell does his own tarnishing and disparaging of some folks. Why is some of this protected speech and some of it illegal?
I was under the impression that trademark law was about preventing someone from misrepresenting themselves or their business as you or your business. That there had to be some reasonable chance that those encountering the trademark violation could confuse it for the real thing. Now, let's be honest... is someone looking for Mr. Falwell online going to be confused by this site into thinking Mr. Falwell is suddenly posting gay activist material?
And if someone really was that confused... aren't they really beyond help no matter how many laws we pass or legal actions we take?
In this case I don't see how you could possibly confuse these two. And even in cases where confusion could possibly result... I'm still not sure why the burden is not on the consumer/customer/whoever to verify identity. We live in a world where it doesn't take long to confirm or disprove facts. Nowadays when you hear an urban legend, you can google around and usually find out the truth, even amongst websites that continue to propagate the legend. Here's an example exercise: is "Duck tape" a proper spelling of "Duct tape"? The answer may surprise you, and even though the common misknowledge about the origin of this term is all over the internet, the truth exists and comes up high on a search. Seems to me that in the same way if some entity misrepresents itself as another entity, it won't take long for someone on the web to state that fact and for that fact to start becoming evident on a search. (And in the meantime we have fraud law to deal with the problem if anyone is taken in.)
Why exactly is our legal system worried about tarnishing, disparaging, or people with so little mental prowess they would confuse Jerry Falwell with a gay activist?
I went on a nostalgia kick around July 4th and introduced my wife to this trilogy of games. She had never played a text adventure, although apparently she had tried to write similar games when she was young. Now suddenly she's discovered Inform (language, compiler, and library for creating Infocom Z-machine compatible games) and is turning into a programmer. You never know what could happen.:)
I believe it was during Reagan's presidency that this change happened
No you don't. You just can't resist the urge to try to smear a Republican leader. (Although since others have pointed out that 1st amendment protection for corporations is a good thing, it's not much of a smear.) You made that up or pulled it out of thin air. If not, tell us what in the world made you think that, other than some vague perception that Reagan was a bad guy and thus only interested in helping bad corporations.
'Fraid not. Snowball, part 1 of the Silicon Dreams trilogy from Level 9. Go see my response to another guy for more info. If you liked those kinds of games, you'd probably like hunting these down.
Nice try. I actually never heard of Suspended till recently (I'm experiencing a surge of reinterest in interactive fiction). This was from Snowball, a text adventure with minimal graphics about a suspended-animation colony ship. The game, its premise and gameworld, and its two sequels have fascinated me for years. I highly recommend you hunt them down and play them.
Snowball (part 1 of the Silicon Dreams trilogy) was produced by Level 9, a British interactive fiction publisher. I've seen them sometimes called "the other Infocom." They independently created their own virtual machine running A-code (compare to Infocom's z-code and Z-machine) as well as private authoring and compression software to produce some of the larger games of the day and allow them to run on a multitude of different platforms.
If you're an interactive fiction fan, it'd be to your liking to hunt down info on the company and games, if only for nostalgia.
You are the winner! And actually there were 200 unique rooms in Snowball and its sequels (a great trilogy) but techniques were used to color code rooms and allow the appearance of many thousands more.
I DO need coke-bottle glasses to see, and I'm not doing it either, at least now. Number one reason is I've heard that in a small number of cases, patients come out with perfect vision day and night except for an inability to look at a computer screen for any length of time. That would absolutely block out my primary income skill, and I can't risk that until I'm a lot closer to retirement.
Number two reason is this: lasik is a destructive surgery. A portion of your eye is burned away, destroyed, disintegrated during the procedure. There's no getting it back. And the fact is, evidence indicates that after some time you may need further surgery. But you've already had part of your eye destroyed; if you're lucky there may be enough to do it one more time. And if you need it again after that... well, you're pretty much stuck.
Meanwhile, if some new treatment comes out that doesn't require destroying a small amount of tissue, you may find that if you had waited you could have had a better procedure done, and now you've invalidated yourself because of the previous changes made to your eyes. I think if I were a couple of decades older, Lasik would make more sense, as I would be less likely to need multiple treatments in my lifetime. Better to live with the glasses for another twenty years and try lasik (or whatever comes along next) when it's even more reliable and I have less to risk.
I told them I was going to contest the charges with my credit card company and be done with it. I've never seen such a turn around in my life.
I love the thrill of seeing that.:) Even if you don't get satisfaction, it's enjoyable to watch them squirm.
it was illegal for me to contest the charge
Baloney. It's in your credit card TOS. The only thing paypal can do is revoke your account for breach of their TOS, and that's probably not in their TOS (at least, not back then, and from my experience, apparently not now).
I don't remember what exactly I asked him but I do remember that I was dry, calm, cool, and concise.
I think that's a key in these things. If you lose your cool, you lose your chance. You even quit being able to think.
I called a cellphone company the other day for my sister who had purchased a phone and service but could not receive incoming calls. I called specifically because she is not able to keep her cool, and I am. Even then, I had her going nuts next to me and demanding to speak to the customer service rep. She accomplished absolutely zero other than making it so hard for me to think that I forgot some of the things I needed to ask about and say. But because I kept my cool (and because my sister eventually gave the phone back to me) we were able to get her problem resolved, despite threats from the cellphone company about having to spend money to get a new number assigned (for a mistake that's YOUR fault, not ours?? No way!)
I do remember that whatever I asked him absolutely infuriated him.
Well, look at my story. Paypal did leave me holding the bag. The moral is, use a credit card whose terms of service explicitly guarantee your purchases, even when the merchant does not. I have the feeling that most of those stories online involve people who did not know how to make their credit card companies go to bat for them, or did not go through the official paypal process first.
I think maybe the issue is if you issue a charge back without first going through the paypal process. I went through their process, they tried to not give me my money, and then I called my credit card company.
Paypal then sent me some vague threat that my account could be canceled for not going through their "process" but didn't back it up.
What I got was not a threat, but more of an "I'm hurt, why didn't you come to us, first?" message. Stupid in the first place, and even stupider given that I did come to them first.
Several responders to my original post seem to be under the impression that paypal has terminated accounts for doing what I did. I wonder if the deciding issue is whether or not you went through the official process first.
That's one reason I posted this. I wanted to increase awareness of the protection most people have with their credit cards.
Incidentally, this is why I stay away from paypal sellers who insist on using only a cash-funded paypal account for payment. To me that just screams "Scam!"
Could you consider posting a skeptical critique of Mars Direct to your weblog? It'd be nice to have it available online (and, understandably, most everything you find online about Mars Direct is not skeptical).
Thank you for the very concrete information. That's what needs to be presented to, as I have said, temper Zubrin's optimism.
Of course, my position now is: let's get busy and try the experimental work, because if we could get this technology working, we could go to Mars, possibly on the cheap!
I've never heard that. And if it's true, they've instituted that policy since my incident (which was late last year). I can say this because I eventually bought the Tivo I wanted, with paypal on ebay, for about $700.
If they suspend my account for a good faith exercise of my right to refund after being scammed, then they sure don't deserve my business.
My understanding is that GIF/PNG are not technologically suited for photographic images. My understanding is that converesion of real-world/photographic images to GIF/PNG can result in some undesirable artifacts even though the compression is lossy. JPG's lossy compression prevents those artifacts and actually smooths out the image. GIF/PNG are said to be better suited for logos and other similar images: things that have relatively large regions of solid colors.
I am certain that my understanding of the issue is imperfect; I'm sure a subsequent poster will provide corrections.
Honestly, if you always use a credit card, striking back is usually not that hard. Most credit cards guarantee your purchases, whether or not the merchant does.
Last year I decided I wanted to buy a Pioneer Tivo/DVD recorder combo set. Retail price at the time was about $1500; I noticed on ebay I could pick one up for around $700. While thinking the decision over for a few days, a seller popped up suddenly with a "buy it now" price of $350. I foolishly decided this was an offer I couldn't pass up and bought immediately.
Well, this seller had made some legitimate sales before, but apparently he decided that the time between taking my money and sending me the product was a good time to close up shop and disappear. In retrospect, I could see from his feedback that several people had had problems with him. A couple had sent complaints, not received a prompt answer, and posted bad feedback, only to receive angry replies to their feedback denigrating them. Apparently, this seller believed he was a better person than the rest of us for not sending prompt responses, because that indicates that he "doesn't sit at a 'puter [sic] 24-7 like you!" I still fail to see how that makes one a paragon of virtue, but I digress.
So after a decent amount of time I contacted the seller and received no response. I had initially contacted him on purchase to verify what he said in the sale about shipping being free (yes, that should have been another tipoff), and did receive a response. But now he was nowhere to be seen. And ebay reported that his userid did not exist and/or was not active (although it was still in the system complete with previous bad feedback).
At this point I looked up the seller's phone number and tried to call it, only to get a message that it was out of service. That made sense, since the number had four or five consecutive digits in it. (The number was something like ###-4567, though the area code did match the seller's alleged area.)
Satisfied I'd done everything in my power to contact the seller and resolve the situation, I contacted paypal and informed them I had not received the product and expected to take advantage of their policy. They informed me they would launch an investigation and attempt to recover my money, and I would hear from them within a week. I was a little bit dissuaded by the claims on their policy page that they were only liable up to a certain dollar limit, but I was not terribly worried because I knew my credit card guaranteed me!
After a week, paypal cheerfully sent me a message telling me they had determined two things:
The seller was indeed at fault and had cheated me.
My money could not be recoved.
Apparently they thought this news was going to overjoy and satisfy me. Wonder of wonders; I had been vindicated! At last the whole world knew that the seller was at fault! I felt better already. (Yeah, right.) Turns out the only real promise paypal makes is that they will investigate.
So I immediately contacted my credit card company and let them know what had happened, and that I had no attention of paying the bill. The credit card representative expressed mild surprise that paypal/ebay were not cooperating with me. I was immediately given a provisional credit, pending followup investigation by my credit card company with paypal. I had done this about 6 months earlier, over a DVD bought from an Amazon.com associate seller; the policy is that once they take over, you don't have to worry about anything. The credit card company investigates and, unless you're found to be lying, you get your money back. You don't have to deal with the offending merchant at all going forward.
So, about a day later, I got another form email from paypal. This one stated that they were now involved in responding to an investigation from my credit card company. The form email mentioned that paypal had a very generous policy and would have been happy to have dealt with me directly and investigate
This is a prime example of Zubrin vaporware. Actually, there's *no* evidence that it would work, as it has never been prototyped, and has only been cursorily tested on a lab workbench. There are many significant engineering concerns that have never been adressed. Yet to believe Zubrin, it's only a matter of building a flight unit and launching it.
I agree we shouldn't just launch until we know this works. What I can't understand is why we're not investigating this: surely it's cheaper than everything else, right? Do people have some reason to believe it wouldn't work? What exactly are those significant engineering concerns?
I agree Zubrin's enthusiasm should be tempered, not by Zubrin, but by we who are ultimately to accept and fund whatever proposal gets us to Mars. But is he to be dismissed out of hand? If the only significant piece of missing technology Zubrin offers can be easily tested, why then do we not do that and validate the whole $20-billion or $50-billion plan?
Also, is there something unofficial about NASA's Mars Design Reference Mission, based on Mars Direct? NASA's own estimates for the Design Reference Mission are $50 billion. Is the Design Reference Mission produced by some kind of unofficial rogue group within NASA?
Slashdot Mirror
You probably won't like the honest answer to that.
Or maybe I agree with you more than you think. ;)
Please tell me what you think of this.
Okay, maybe I'm just nuts ... but why shouldn't someone have the intent to tarnish or disparage?
I'm not entirely sure whose "side" of this I fall on, but let me declare my prejudices: I am a fundamentalist Christian, so that might make you think I'm biased toward Mr. Falwell. But I don't believe Falwell is a Christian nor a preacher of the Christian Gospel, so that might make you think I'm biased against.
It seems to me this decision is legally correct. I thought at first the website owner was actually named Fallwell (note spelling) but apparently that is not the case. According to law as it stands, the site was registered in bad faith and should apparently be taken away. Since I believe in the rule of law, I would tend to agree that this should be done even if I disagree with the law in question (and that if there's a problem with the law it should be changed).
So, is there a problem with the law? I kind of feel like there is. In fact, I kind of feel like the First Amendment would make whatever law is involved here unconstitutional. Given that we're told our rights to speech CANNOT be infringed, where do we really get off saying that people can't say bad things about other people? Sure, the site tarnishes and disparages Mr. Falwell ... so what's the big deal? People tarnish and disparage me all the time. And I dare say Mr. Falwell does his own tarnishing and disparaging of some folks. Why is some of this protected speech and some of it illegal?
I was under the impression that trademark law was about preventing someone from misrepresenting themselves or their business as you or your business. That there had to be some reasonable chance that those encountering the trademark violation could confuse it for the real thing. Now, let's be honest ... is someone looking for Mr. Falwell online going to be confused by this site into thinking Mr. Falwell is suddenly posting gay activist material?
And if someone really was that confused ... aren't they really beyond help no matter how many laws we pass or legal actions we take?
In this case I don't see how you could possibly confuse these two. And even in cases where confusion could possibly result ... I'm still not sure why the burden is not on the consumer/customer/whoever to verify identity. We live in a world where it doesn't take long to confirm or disprove facts. Nowadays when you hear an urban legend, you can google around and usually find out the truth, even amongst websites that continue to propagate the legend. Here's an example exercise: is "Duck tape" a proper spelling of "Duct tape"? The answer may surprise you, and even though the common misknowledge about the origin of this term is all over the internet, the truth exists and comes up high on a search. Seems to me that in the same way if some entity misrepresents itself as another entity, it won't take long for someone on the web to state that fact and for that fact to start becoming evident on a search. (And in the meantime we have fraud law to deal with the problem if anyone is taken in.)
Why exactly is our legal system worried about tarnishing, disparaging, or people with so little mental prowess they would confuse Jerry Falwell with a gay activist?
Ah, okay. I stand corrected, and I apologize for jumping all over you. I've just been getting into one of those knee-jerk reactionary moods lately.
I went on a nostalgia kick around July 4th and introduced my wife to this trilogy of games. She had never played a text adventure, although apparently she had tried to write similar games when she was young. Now suddenly she's discovered Inform (language, compiler, and library for creating Infocom Z-machine compatible games) and is turning into a programmer. You never know what could happen. :)
I believe it was during Reagan's presidency that this change happened
No you don't. You just can't resist the urge to try to smear a Republican leader. (Although since others have pointed out that 1st amendment protection for corporations is a good thing, it's not much of a smear.) You made that up or pulled it out of thin air. If not, tell us what in the world made you think that, other than some vague perception that Reagan was a bad guy and thus only interested in helping bad corporations.
'Fraid not. Snowball, part 1 of the Silicon Dreams trilogy from Level 9. Go see my response to another guy for more info. If you liked those kinds of games, you'd probably like hunting these down.
Nice try. I actually never heard of Suspended till recently (I'm experiencing a surge of reinterest in interactive fiction). This was from Snowball, a text adventure with minimal graphics about a suspended-animation colony ship. The game, its premise and gameworld, and its two sequels have fascinated me for years. I highly recommend you hunt them down and play them.
Snowball (part 1 of the Silicon Dreams trilogy) was produced by Level 9, a British interactive fiction publisher. I've seen them sometimes called "the other Infocom." They independently created their own virtual machine running A-code (compare to Infocom's z-code and Z-machine) as well as private authoring and compression software to produce some of the larger games of the day and allow them to run on a multitude of different platforms.
If you're an interactive fiction fan, it'd be to your liking to hunt down info on the company and games, if only for nostalgia.
You are the winner! And actually there were 200 unique rooms in Snowball and its sequels (a great trilogy) but techniques were used to color code rooms and allow the appearance of many thousands more.
The lid above rises and a light comes on. You are in a sponge-lined coffin. The only exit is out.
The panel has 10 buttons: black, brown, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, grey and white.
Hi; uh, do you want me to go through the treatment for some reason?
I'm 26.
And I'm not fearing having to wear glasses again in 20 years. I'm fearing not being able to work for those 20 years.
It's great that you got the treatment. You don't need me to vindicate your decision.
I DO need coke-bottle glasses to see, and I'm not doing it either, at least now. Number one reason is I've heard that in a small number of cases, patients come out with perfect vision day and night except for an inability to look at a computer screen for any length of time. That would absolutely block out my primary income skill, and I can't risk that until I'm a lot closer to retirement.
Number two reason is this: lasik is a destructive surgery. A portion of your eye is burned away, destroyed, disintegrated during the procedure. There's no getting it back. And the fact is, evidence indicates that after some time you may need further surgery. But you've already had part of your eye destroyed; if you're lucky there may be enough to do it one more time. And if you need it again after that ... well, you're pretty much stuck.
Meanwhile, if some new treatment comes out that doesn't require destroying a small amount of tissue, you may find that if you had waited you could have had a better procedure done, and now you've invalidated yourself because of the previous changes made to your eyes. I think if I were a couple of decades older, Lasik would make more sense, as I would be less likely to need multiple treatments in my lifetime. Better to live with the glasses for another twenty years and try lasik (or whatever comes along next) when it's even more reliable and I have less to risk.
I told them I was going to contest the charges with my credit card company and be done with it. I've never seen such a turn around in my life.
I love the thrill of seeing that. :) Even if you don't get satisfaction, it's enjoyable to watch them squirm.
it was illegal for me to contest the charge
Baloney. It's in your credit card TOS. The only thing paypal can do is revoke your account for breach of their TOS, and that's probably not in their TOS (at least, not back then, and from my experience, apparently not now).
I don't remember what exactly I asked him but I do remember that I was dry, calm, cool, and concise.
I think that's a key in these things. If you lose your cool, you lose your chance. You even quit being able to think.
I called a cellphone company the other day for my sister who had purchased a phone and service but could not receive incoming calls. I called specifically because she is not able to keep her cool, and I am. Even then, I had her going nuts next to me and demanding to speak to the customer service rep. She accomplished absolutely zero other than making it so hard for me to think that I forgot some of the things I needed to ask about and say. But because I kept my cool (and because my sister eventually gave the phone back to me) we were able to get her problem resolved, despite threats from the cellphone company about having to spend money to get a new number assigned (for a mistake that's YOUR fault, not ours?? No way!)
I do remember that whatever I asked him absolutely infuriated him.
Feels good, don't it?
Well, look at my story. Paypal did leave me holding the bag. The moral is, use a credit card whose terms of service explicitly guarantee your purchases, even when the merchant does not. I have the feeling that most of those stories online involve people who did not know how to make their credit card companies go to bat for them, or did not go through the official paypal process first.
I think maybe the issue is if you issue a charge back without first going through the paypal process. I went through their process, they tried to not give me my money, and then I called my credit card company.
Paypal then sent me some vague threat that my account could be canceled for not going through their "process" but didn't back it up.
What I got was not a threat, but more of an "I'm hurt, why didn't you come to us, first?" message. Stupid in the first place, and even stupider given that I did come to them first.
Several responders to my original post seem to be under the impression that paypal has terminated accounts for doing what I did. I wonder if the deciding issue is whether or not you went through the official process first.
That's one reason I posted this. I wanted to increase awareness of the protection most people have with their credit cards.
Incidentally, this is why I stay away from paypal sellers who insist on using only a cash-funded paypal account for payment. To me that just screams "Scam!"
I can identify with that.
Could you consider posting a skeptical critique of Mars Direct to your weblog? It'd be nice to have it available online (and, understandably, most everything you find online about Mars Direct is not skeptical).
Thank you for the very concrete information. That's what needs to be presented to, as I have said, temper Zubrin's optimism.
Of course, my position now is: let's get busy and try the experimental work, because if we could get this technology working, we could go to Mars, possibly on the cheap!
Interesting. My paypal account is still active. And all I have is my credit card number.
I've never heard that. And if it's true, they've instituted that policy since my incident (which was late last year). I can say this because I eventually bought the Tivo I wanted, with paypal on ebay, for about $700.
If they suspend my account for a good faith exercise of my right to refund after being scammed, then they sure don't deserve my business.
My understanding is that GIF/PNG are not technologically suited for photographic images. My understanding is that converesion of real-world/photographic images to GIF/PNG can result in some undesirable artifacts even though the compression is lossy. JPG's lossy compression prevents those artifacts and actually smooths out the image. GIF/PNG are said to be better suited for logos and other similar images: things that have relatively large regions of solid colors.
I am certain that my understanding of the issue is imperfect; I'm sure a subsequent poster will provide corrections.
Honestly, if you always use a credit card, striking back is usually not that hard. Most credit cards guarantee your purchases, whether or not the merchant does.
Last year I decided I wanted to buy a Pioneer Tivo/DVD recorder combo set. Retail price at the time was about $1500; I noticed on ebay I could pick one up for around $700. While thinking the decision over for a few days, a seller popped up suddenly with a "buy it now" price of $350. I foolishly decided this was an offer I couldn't pass up and bought immediately.
Well, this seller had made some legitimate sales before, but apparently he decided that the time between taking my money and sending me the product was a good time to close up shop and disappear. In retrospect, I could see from his feedback that several people had had problems with him. A couple had sent complaints, not received a prompt answer, and posted bad feedback, only to receive angry replies to their feedback denigrating them. Apparently, this seller believed he was a better person than the rest of us for not sending prompt responses, because that indicates that he "doesn't sit at a 'puter [sic] 24-7 like you!" I still fail to see how that makes one a paragon of virtue, but I digress.
So after a decent amount of time I contacted the seller and received no response. I had initially contacted him on purchase to verify what he said in the sale about shipping being free (yes, that should have been another tipoff), and did receive a response. But now he was nowhere to be seen. And ebay reported that his userid did not exist and/or was not active (although it was still in the system complete with previous bad feedback).
At this point I looked up the seller's phone number and tried to call it, only to get a message that it was out of service. That made sense, since the number had four or five consecutive digits in it. (The number was something like ###-4567, though the area code did match the seller's alleged area.)
Satisfied I'd done everything in my power to contact the seller and resolve the situation, I contacted paypal and informed them I had not received the product and expected to take advantage of their policy. They informed me they would launch an investigation and attempt to recover my money, and I would hear from them within a week. I was a little bit dissuaded by the claims on their policy page that they were only liable up to a certain dollar limit, but I was not terribly worried because I knew my credit card guaranteed me!
After a week, paypal cheerfully sent me a message telling me they had determined two things:
Apparently they thought this news was going to overjoy and satisfy me. Wonder of wonders; I had been vindicated! At last the whole world knew that the seller was at fault! I felt better already. (Yeah, right.) Turns out the only real promise paypal makes is that they will investigate.
So I immediately contacted my credit card company and let them know what had happened, and that I had no attention of paying the bill. The credit card representative expressed mild surprise that paypal/ebay were not cooperating with me. I was immediately given a provisional credit, pending followup investigation by my credit card company with paypal. I had done this about 6 months earlier, over a DVD bought from an Amazon.com associate seller; the policy is that once they take over, you don't have to worry about anything. The credit card company investigates and, unless you're found to be lying, you get your money back. You don't have to deal with the offending merchant at all going forward.
So, about a day later, I got another form email from paypal. This one stated that they were now involved in responding to an investigation from my credit card company. The form email mentioned that paypal had a very generous policy and would have been happy to have dealt with me directly and investigate
This is a prime example of Zubrin vaporware. Actually, there's *no* evidence that it would work, as it has never been prototyped, and has only been cursorily tested on a lab workbench. There are many significant engineering concerns that have never been adressed. Yet to believe Zubrin, it's only a matter of building a flight unit and launching it.
I agree we shouldn't just launch until we know this works. What I can't understand is why we're not investigating this: surely it's cheaper than everything else, right? Do people have some reason to believe it wouldn't work? What exactly are those significant engineering concerns?
I agree Zubrin's enthusiasm should be tempered, not by Zubrin, but by we who are ultimately to accept and fund whatever proposal gets us to Mars. But is he to be dismissed out of hand? If the only significant piece of missing technology Zubrin offers can be easily tested, why then do we not do that and validate the whole $20-billion or $50-billion plan?
Also, is there something unofficial about NASA's Mars Design Reference Mission, based on Mars Direct? NASA's own estimates for the Design Reference Mission are $50 billion. Is the Design Reference Mission produced by some kind of unofficial rogue group within NASA?