Let's say that you live in a brownstone on the corner of your street in a city, and crack dealers are hanging out selling drugs right in front. Do you think your house should get torn
down because of that, or that the law enforcers should do their job and arrest the guys one by one?
Posting to USEnet is not like living in a brownstone, actually. Maybe it would be, if there were an infinite number of houses, and you could move into whatever one you wanted with no difficulty at all. So there's really no reason you should have been in that house in the
first
place. It's like you're standing in front of a moving boulder and bitching about how it's going to roll over you.
1) The alt.* newsgroups... front elements of the hierarchy categorize what you expect to find in the lower parts.
The *alt newsgroups are completely controlled by usenet users... many of the groups do follow such a scheme, it is neither required nor neccessarily followed.
This doesn't help you. You won't cut much ice saying "well, the sign says 'we commit violent and abusive sex acts here', but there's no regulation
requiring
that we actually do so".
The alt.binaries.* hierarchy indicates files that have been encoded...
It is certainly true that most, but not all, of the groups under alt.binaries are used for mime-encoded messages. It is also true that many groups outside of alt.binaries carry a substantial amount of binary traffic.
So? I really don't see how claiming that the same thing happens in other newsgroups has anything to do with
these
newsgroups.
Furthermore, it is not neccessarily illegal or a violation of copyright to transmit or share copyrighted materials. There are many lawful purposes behind such conduct.
Critique and parady are just two of several fair uses of copyrighted material.
Oh, give me a fucking break. Are you really claiming that people were posting 'Up and Cummers III' and pirate recordings of 'Tomb Raider' for the sole purpose of critique and parody? (And properly-spelled parody, at that.)
Airbus and Boeing are roughly at the same safety level and track record per distance flown/time.
"Fatal accidents per distance flown" is a meaningless statistic. I mean, if you look at things that way, then spacecraft are some of the safest vehicles ever built by mankind.
"Fatal accidents per departure" might be a more useful performance measure. That takes into account the fact that landings and takeoffs are a much more significant hazard than cruise.
Also, take the total number of departures and accidents into account. Company A's five accidents in five thousand departures is a better safety record than Company B's one accident in one thousand departures, even though they're the same "rate" in accidents per departures.
Personally, I can see why the ground crews would have balked at the table making enterprise. Those "spare parts" that they used were there serving a purpose, most of which was safety
related. Simply removing them w/out consulting the people who built them and determining their purpose may have the unintended effect of making something unsafe.
This is a very good point. There isn't really anything up there on the station that's just kind of "there", with no apparent use. There's neither the money nor the room for that sort of thing.
Which brings up the question that just begs to be asked, "Why did you scuttle Mir?" Would it have been more expensive to push the thing a into a slightly higher orbit?
Yes.
This isn't like throwing away an old toaster, or a bicycle, or the old ten-inch Viking. This is more akin to scrapping a WWII-era submarine, and that happens all the time. Just because this was in space doesn't make it special. The whole reason they junked it was that it was more than a DECADE old...it just wasn't a place you could guarantee was safe anymore.
NASA is unbelievably retentive about safety, and with good reason--there are no more military people at NASA, and none of the folks here have any sort of expectation that their lives will be on the line. Besides that, there's a difference between 'a risk' and 'certain death'. While people may accept varying levels of risk, the sort that will willingly go to certain death generally aren't the sort that are good at doing science. (Colonel Stapp, God bless him, was a test subject and not a researcher during those experiments.)
We've (as in humanity) have already paid the cost to push the thing out of the gravity well. Why not just leave it up there just in case there is an emergency in which it could be useful?
Because then it would cost money to maintain, money which could better be spent elsewhere. Another thing to remember about NASA is that it never has enough money. The five or six hundred million that keeping Mir alive would have needed could have funded at least three different projects, start to finish.
Nuclear reactors, when handled properly, aren't any more dangerous than any other large, complicated thing that gets hot. All it takes is proper procedures, design standards, and training, and nuclear reactors are safe as houses.
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Posting to USEnet is not like living in a brownstone, actually. Maybe it would be, if there were an infinite number of houses, and you could move into whatever one you wanted with no difficulty at all. So there's really no reason you should have been in that house in the
- first
place. It's like you're standing in front of a moving boulder and bitching about how it's going to roll over you.The *alt newsgroups are completely controlled by usenet users
This doesn't help you. You won't cut much ice saying "well, the sign says 'we commit violent and abusive sex acts here', but there's no regulation
- requiring
that we actually do so".The alt.binaries.* hierarchy indicates files that have been encoded...
It is certainly true that most, but not all, of the groups under alt.binaries are used for mime-encoded messages. It is also true that many groups outside of alt.binaries carry a substantial amount of binary traffic.
So? I really don't see how claiming that the same thing happens in other newsgroups has anything to do with
- these
newsgroups.Furthermore, it is not neccessarily illegal or a violation of copyright to transmit or share copyrighted materials. There are many lawful purposes behind such conduct. Critique and parady are just two of several fair uses of copyrighted material.
Oh, give me a fucking break. Are you really claiming that people were posting 'Up and Cummers III' and pirate recordings of 'Tomb Raider' for the sole purpose of critique and parody? (And properly-spelled parody, at that.)
Airbus and Boeing are roughly at the same safety level and track record per distance flown/time. "Fatal accidents per distance flown" is a meaningless statistic. I mean, if you look at things that way, then spacecraft are some of the safest vehicles ever built by mankind. "Fatal accidents per departure" might be a more useful performance measure. That takes into account the fact that landings and takeoffs are a much more significant hazard than cruise. Also, take the total number of departures and accidents into account. Company A's five accidents in five thousand departures is a better safety record than Company B's one accident in one thousand departures, even though they're the same "rate" in accidents per departures.
Personally, I can see why the ground crews would have balked at the table making enterprise. Those "spare parts" that they used were there serving a purpose, most of which was safety related. Simply removing them w/out consulting the people who built them and determining their purpose may have the unintended effect of making something unsafe.
This is a very good point. There isn't really anything up there on the station that's just kind of "there", with no apparent use. There's neither the money nor the room for that sort of thing.
Which brings up the question that just begs to be asked, "Why did you scuttle Mir?" Would it have been more expensive to push the thing a into a slightly higher orbit? Yes. This isn't like throwing away an old toaster, or a bicycle, or the old ten-inch Viking. This is more akin to scrapping a WWII-era submarine, and that happens all the time. Just because this was in space doesn't make it special. The whole reason they junked it was that it was more than a DECADE old...it just wasn't a place you could guarantee was safe anymore. NASA is unbelievably retentive about safety, and with good reason--there are no more military people at NASA, and none of the folks here have any sort of expectation that their lives will be on the line. Besides that, there's a difference between 'a risk' and 'certain death'. While people may accept varying levels of risk, the sort that will willingly go to certain death generally aren't the sort that are good at doing science. (Colonel Stapp, God bless him, was a test subject and not a researcher during those experiments.) We've (as in humanity) have already paid the cost to push the thing out of the gravity well. Why not just leave it up there just in case there is an emergency in which it could be useful? Because then it would cost money to maintain, money which could better be spent elsewhere. Another thing to remember about NASA is that it never has enough money. The five or six hundred million that keeping Mir alive would have needed could have funded at least three different projects, start to finish.
Nuclear reactors, when handled properly, aren't any more dangerous than any other large, complicated thing that gets hot. All it takes is proper procedures, design standards, and training, and nuclear reactors are safe as houses.