If makes you feel any better, when our parked '96 Mazda Protege was low-speed sideswiped by a drunk going *the wrong way* on a 2-way street, the front and back door panels were ruined but internally everything worked, even the windows. It was drivable. $3000. 3 week wait (not clear why). I think our real enemy is body shops, regardless of whatever material they work in, and worse the manufacturers who sell replacement parts for astronomical prices.
Your cost was very high for a domestic car. We had a $200 deductible, that's the only nice thing I can say.
Maybe elastic or clay-like cars? Cars that bounce like beach balls?
The colored plastic bumper covers on our conventional Mazda Protege get black scuff marks. The thing to do is to pick a color similar to the default plastic.:) (Ours is dark blue, works well.)
Not so simple. I grew up in L.A., where you virtually had to have a car, and that was by design: the city was designed around the car, when it represented the gateway to luxury, your own single-family home, and so on. Soon they had the literally lethal smog of the 50's, and it wan't so hot in the 70's. Now L.A. has a half-hearted subway system, but I don't know if they will overcome the fundamentals of teh city's design philosophy.
I don't want a horse-and-buggy, or to be Amish; my point is that you don't *have* to live the way we take for granted. Endless technological fixes to the car may miss the forest, same for the internal combustion engine. The emmissions control were a good thing, but staved off dealing with the inevitable, and even now the committment to alternatives is pathetic (President Bush's fuel-cell initiative is a pittance).
I have since lived in three eastern cities with good public transit. These are, in many cases, smarter transit solutions that cars. We also have stores we can walk to. That didn't exist most places in L.A. A lot of this has been driven by congestion, and local resistance to enlarging the interstates to accommodate ever increasing traffic.
Think of it as a binary tree. Going off on a bad fork just gets worse unless you think to reconsider that earlier choice of path (is that CS enough?:). So.... on point, plastic paint may distract from lighter, rustproof composites instead of steel. Or not. But the risk is there.
Interesting, and good, point about the Ivory Coast. It immediately comes ot mind that the Ivory Coast is a former French colony. This doesn't justify them doing whatever they choose, but does lay a framework. One wishes Beligium had taken a more intelligent role in its former colony, Rwanda, regardless of international inattention.
With France/Germany's relevance here (when THOSE two agree, watch out), I'd like to hear them out. Instead we dispense a "you're either with us or against us" sort of doctrine; if you're against, you're "old Europe," whatever that means. If I were French I'd be pissed even if I thought Bush was right.
The international law of intervening in another country's internal affairs is complicated and ill-defined. But with Iraq we have not a former colony (though one could argue western meddling has a lot to do with Middle Eastern borders and problems) but a nation that is supposedly threatening *us* in the U.S. with some imminence. Alternatively, he is apparently in violation of UN resolutions dating from the last gulf war, and that should give us jurisdiction to coerce inspections or, if necessary, more. But the administration instead argues something called "pre-emptive self defense" that would supposedly authorize attacking anyone who could pose a threat to you some day. Imagine how many wars we would have if this were broadly applied -- India and Pakistan anyone? North and South Korea? I bet there are a dozen more. Hey, the longer we wait, the more bombs North Korea will have, and those bombs or bomb material may be for sale. They are already collaborating with the Pakistanis, our (ahem) ally.
Worst of all this, however, is that the proof is just not there. Yes, Hussein is interfering with our search for proof, but that doesn't prove he's got what we're looking for. And at the outset the Administration was pepared to act unilaterally and hastily; though they've backed a bit I think they revealed their basic philosophy and indifference to proof right there. That Saddam is a slimeball -- heck, my six year-old could prove that with a couple of press clippings. We have rarely intervened on the humanitarian basis alone, and here would kill thousands of Iraqi conscripts before getting anywhere near Hussein. Thousands of the people we are supposedly liberating. The Iraqi people, sadly, bear the burden of either Saddam or our invasion.
Speaking of bad guys, what happened to Osama bin Laden? And again, what about that nut in desperately poor North Korea who may have the bomb? Anyone else uncomfortable with the words "desperate" and "the bomb" in one sentence?
I can understand why you're on the fence. In a way I am, too. But I'd be all the more so if I thought the Administration were on the fence, too, rather than heeding the advice of neocons over generals. Notice that Powell, who was keeping a low profile is now center stage; the folly of ill-considered, unilateral action must have become clear. Notice Bush at least tentatively considering exile as an option for Hussein -- not that he'd ever accept it, but the consideration signals a retreat from wanting his head on a pike above all else.
Finally, and like the sole comment I should have made, absolutely yes bloodless methods of warfare are desirable, to save lives on both sides. After all, it is the victory and not the killing that, for us, is supposed to be the point. The violence diminshes su and our message. I was intrigued to learn that Timothy McVeigh was in a support role on the of the combat bulldozer (a specially outfitted tank) details that buried Iraqi conscripts alive in their trenches. He came away from it disillusioned, and crazier.
The paint-that-isn't technology of course bring Saturn to mind, and I mentioned them in another post. But I don't know much about them since shopping about 5 years ago (problem then was than it was a bit too small).
As an experienced Saturn driver who has perhaps hit something or been hit; or even if not, does the plastic sacrifice much in a collision, say to penetration? I couldn't get a satisfactory answer.
Also, it seemed that the panels were a lot noisier compared to steel, once they finally started welding the later. The noise was particularly dramatic on full-bore acceleration. Steel's rust resistance also improved a great deal over the years -- many of us will remember when rusted-through car doors were commonplace, a problem largely due I'm told to bad drainage.
I complement Saturn for doing a lot of things new, even as a spinoff of a company far more sluggish. I don't think they're there yet, but then they're the Henry Ford of body panels.
I don't mean to be a smart aleck -- well, maybe a little -- but do want to mention that the ever-increasing complexity of our lives is often good but not always necessary. If I could, I would like to get rid of my car altogether -- I'm no Luddite, but I think a lot of our technological improvements are aimed at correcting the problems introduced by our other technological improvement and distract us from fundamental goals. For example, we have for years been stalled with inefficient and polluting engines whose lifespan has been increased by ingenious inventions of emission control, electronic ignition, and so on, rather than inventing anew with fuel cells and the like (which are fundamentally not a new technology).
With respect to the improvement of paint, it is a wonderful idea that if successful would avoid a lot of waste in paint's first mission, preserving the vulnerable material underneath. But why don't we find ways to get rid of the sheet metal altogether? Saturn is the only one to have taken it really seriously, and I imagine part of that was the advantage of starting as a new company (yes, as a spinoff of a very old one, but you know what I mean -- UAW didn't even hold their new plant to the standard rules, and that was revolutionary!). They haven't beat the problems, but at least they've tried.
Here's a analogy I heard from a professor: Back in the days of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI used to hold up every year a graph of the steady increase in their interdiction of interstate stolen cars. Problem was, interstate theft was increasing even faster. Then Detroit went to ignition steering wheel locks, eliminating the simple way to steal a car by hot wiring. The rate of theft plummeted. Sometimes changing something fundamental is more efficient that layering on additional layer of protection. (I hope the analogy held, but you get the idea.)
I can understand how the duty of candor is generally important, and admire the forensic work of the wuthor, but don't understand how using a shell assignee is significant. Companies do this sort of thing to keep competitors in the dark, and I don't see how it is fraudulent.
So... can anyone explain how this is significant? How can it be used to conceal prior art? Ideally, shouldn't the examiner be blind to the identity of the applicant/assignee, to avoid bias? It just seems like an academic Q.
"Inventiveness" is one of the last words I associate with Microsoft. While we're on the topic, and off topic, any predictions for the year Microsoft goes out of business or gets bough out? I'm thinking 2022.
You're confusing what the employer can do with what it should do. What it can do depends on the law, what it should on common sense and leverage.
There are limits, you do have some privacy rights as an employee. They can't surreptitiously tape your phone calls or videotape you in the bathroom, even if it reveals you're violating company policy.
People used to be a lot more upset about drug testing and I think it's a shame they gave in. Mandatory credit checks are similar. It's not that they're never relevant to employment, rather that is they become routine that we've lost one more bit of privacy for no good reason, and it will be too late to complain. "Because we do it to everyone" or "because it might turn up something interesting even though we have no clear policy on how we interpret these things and we made an offer you accepted without warning you we're a bunch of turkeys on a fishing expedition."
I'm thinking that your stance is partly abstract principle, not just concern for your individual privacy. If so, I think that's laudable.
You get an idea what I'd argue, though more diplomatically. I think it's a big deal that you accepted their offer -- it legalese, you relied on their offer -- only to face a condition of employment that (for the moment anyway) is atypical and invasive. They changing the conditions of your employment after the agreement was struck.
Odds are this is just a poorly thought-out policy that seemed good at the time. If you still want to work for them you need to work with them to help them see whay a credit check is not just invasive, but potentially risky for you if the report should fall into the wrong hands. The other poster who got his employer to set out in writing how the report should be handled was very clever.
I would expect them to destroy the credit report as soon as they had reviewed it to their satisfaction. I usually ask for a credit report on tenants but see no reason to keep it after scanning for red flags like bankruptcy.
I should throw in that your area might has specific laws concerning privacy and credit checks. An attorney could clear that up quickly.
PS I'm just kidding and I didn't actually do anything that I've described in this post. By reading this post you agree that I didn't run a sniffer, or reverse engineer AIM's protocol just by watching it's traffic in a sniffer.
Ah, you put your condition at the end. I can't agree to something by reading a post without knowing the condition first. Plus there's the questionable enforceability of ERLA's (end-reader user agreements).
But don't worry. You've already done far more to publish your self-incrimination than I could possibly expand upon. Besides, "gossip wants to be free.":)
I think you could enter into a real contract and agree to let the vendor come and inspect the machines at certain intervals, provided to got something in return like a discount or something. That is, the provision would have to be genuinely negotiated, not tucked away in the fine print of a boilerplate contract. I wonder how many businesses would voluntarily consent to something like this.
Which brings us to EULA's or shrinkwrap license. They are kinda sorta enforceable, depending on where you are.:o) I know for certain that the Seventh Circuit (Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana) ruled in favor of the vendors, but I don't know what even that court would think of gotcha inspection clauses buried in EULA's. In other words, we should I think be held to the expected stuff int he EULA's that are so mindnumbing and crammed into little boxes that we don't read them, but not any forfeit-your-life clauses without a heads-up.
No, #3 was "he tried , and the lawyer & judge told him "the government can't get sued for doing its job." The writer was apparently thinking immunity, not lack of merit. I don't know what "the third was probably just a judge trying to adapt to the unknown" meant.
The misdeeds of others: I was referring to Mitnick's whine about how other instances of gov't misconduct (a judge denying bail or a prosector making charging or plea bargain decisions) in cases other than his (e.g., "folks have been held w/o bail hearings for centuries") are irrelevant. This sort of disparate treatment is generally not governmental misconduct. Mitnick may be correct to be the only recorded case of a defendant denied a bail hearing, except for this novel "illegal enemy combatant" stuff we have now, and I think that's pretty disturbing though not actionable. He also mutters something about an invalid search warrant being used' but even if he's correct, what's his injury? Getting caught? Did he even use the alleged defect to exclude evidence?
It's also pretty damn hard to sue a judge; they have nearly absolute immunity, for fear they'd otherwise be unable to do their jobs. Believe me, nearly every convict thinks he got screwed by the judge. The court of appeals is supposed to keep the trial judge in line. Mitnick made MANY appeals to the 9th Circuit without success -- is he going to sue them, too?
Mitnick was indeed barred from "profiting from his crimes" -- like the famous "Son of Sam" law (was unconstitutional as a bar to free speech, but the idea was revived by assigning all profits first to victim restitution). However, Mitnick's profit restriction expired along with his supervised release. Burning with curiosity, I made some calls about his recent book on security and a reliable source (heh-heh) suggested because it wasn't "about" his offenses it fell outside the restriction. If true, this might explain why the highly personal first chapter was dropped. If you look at the book, it does use a lot of "hypotheticals" instead of reminisces.
(Dear ex-felons out there -- this is not intended to be legal advice, consult your own shyster.)
* I don't think he has a viable libel claim. As I mentioned somewhere else here, he would have trouble showing economic damages to his "reputation," for get pain and suffering, and as a public figure he would have a very high burden of proof re Markoff's intent. Interestingly, with all he's saying about Markoff, if Mitnick is wrong he's probably libeling Markoff. So Markoff could countersue and, well, maybe it's just not worth it. Also, don't forget Mitnick's talent for plucking things out of context. An outrageous sentence plunked out of a 2,000 article may not carry much punch.
Most of Markoff's errors appear due to sloppy reporting. It's not like everything he reported was wrong, just that some whoppers were woven in there. Unfortunately, going with the rumors when a source won't talk to you is common journalistic practice; unless the journalist has good reasonsto believe the rumors false, the 1st A. protects this, though i think it's unethical.
Mitnick's principal claim appears to be that Markoff injured him by focusing so much attention on his case and indirectly goading DOJ to make an example of him. Well, that's not a real injury. If DOJ chose to single him out to make an example of him, that's their responsibility. Mitnick's punishment, given his priors (IIRC one juvenile sentence and one felony, all for computer crimes), number of separate offenses, and flight to avoid prosecution, was not illegal or even excessive; the way the case was handled perhaps was. Mitnick has no claim to the more lenient sentence someone else got, and notice he doesn't mention the aggravating factors when he complains about the excessive monetary loss estimate. The prosecutors have discretion to pursue cases as they choose, short of constitutional limits such as the government deciding to "get Mitnick" because he's Jewish. He doesn't allege anything of the kind.
Even with Wen Ho Lee, a case that made me sick to my stomach, I blame NYT for bad reportage (a major sin) but DOJ for what happened to the defendant (a mortal sin). It was political cowardice that put a middle-aged scientist in solitary for nearly a year, advanced nonsense about losing "the crown jewels" of nuclear technology, then dismissed virtually all charges.
Maybe Mitnick got a raw deal, but not so raw as he paints it. As a three-time loser, hopefully he won't get himself there again.
Jim, your comment is the sort of firsthand insight that I hang out here to find. A few dozen words of history is worth more than thousands of words of handwaving speculation. Thx.
I'm astounded by the hordes who angrily respond that it was your fault because of poor security and inefficient procedures. It's like getting blasted because someone broke your Schlage lock (what? Medeco didn't exist yet??) to rifle through your house, and stole nothing but condemned you to hours of sifting through everything to be sure (what? you don't inventory all your stuff daily?) and put it all away (what? you did have highspeed room tidiers?).
The $64,000 question: How much do you think DEC *really* spent? I can attest from working for the courts that the Department of Justice plays with the number of grams (drugs) or value of intangibles (cybercrime) all the time in order to make the charging document come out with the sentence they want. How much did all those DEC salaries cost? You say yourself that the few people qualified to do the heavy lifting also drew down the serious money.
It is a scary domino effect the way someone experimenting semi-innocently can cause massive problems. Robert Morris is the example I remember, and the person Mitnick has tried to compare himself to. They don't seem the same at all to me (I'm sympathetic to Morris), but see how Mitnick's poor judgment could cause harm all of proportion to his acts -- yet harm due entirely to his acts nonetheless. I don't know how to calibrate the law to a situation was a mouse can bring down a house.
You forget option #4: the lawsuit might be meritless.
Yes, the government is held to the Constitution, in fact they are the ONLY one bound by it. That's the whole point of the Bill of Rights, to prevent government overreaching. And while there are some very strange things in the Mitnick case, the scale of his punishment is not one of them. Teenagers who get busted with a few grams of crack get more time.
For example:
Perhaps the single most disturbing fact is the denial of a bail hearing. The statute on point and probably the Constitution apparently expect the court to at least go through the motions and get the facts in the record, and I'd like a damn good explanation why this court felt entitled to be different. BUT... where are the damages? Mitnick was NOT going to get bail. Besides his prios convictions, he'd fled his supervised release (like parole)! He'd been a fugitive for two years! He was the epitome of "flight risk." Finally, the very core of his offenses was deception and prevarication. This was not someone who could be given bail, regardless of who he was.
If the sentence he received was authorized by Congress, then there was no fault in assigning him a sentence consistent with the statute. Whether the sentence was "fair" is not a legal argument, and there are far more unjust criminal punishments. See "crack," above.
The misdeeds of others in unrelated matters, even if worthy of prosecution, are irrelevant to whether Mitnick was treated fairly. Whether he got what he deserved should be judged by looking at the facts of his case. Try defending your next speeding ticket by talking about all the murderers out there.
Mitnick has little if any remorse. He can't even acknowledge his crimes without launching into a tirade about his victimhood. This is a guy who kept committing the same kinds of offenses despite getting caught, prosecuted, and punished TWICE. This was the single largest factor in the length of his time in detention and the record long denial of bail.
Let's not forget the third option, that Mitnick and Markoff are BOTH jerks. There is no reason to assume one is better than the other. That goes for the Department of Justice, too. All THREE can be jerks, it is not a zero-sum game.
Also, Mitnick is by prior trade a con man, an expert in getting people to see things a certain way in order to manipulate them. His major tactic seems to be to provide true facts out of context. So every detail about press coverage and his criminal prosecution may be true (they're not) but may be presented in such a slanted way as to be falsehoods. Or, again, all sides could smell bad.
Mitnick sure hasn't mentioned suing, has he? Instead he chants "false and defamatory" in the hope they'll stick, rather than develop the facts. He also has two principle problems -- under the First Amendment, he's a public figure and would have to show actual malice (he appears aware of this). Also, what are his damages? As a multiple felon -- this was not his first time in lockup -- and career computer trespasser (or whatever you want to call it), his would have trouble establishing much of anything. These sorts of problems with suing for libel are undeniably unfortunate for the victims of the press. The alternative, the reasoning goes, is a press so cowed by threats of lawsuits that they'd not push the envelope on things like the Pentagon Papers and Watergate and perhaps now the NASA Columbia investigation. Even a meritless libel suit costs a fortune to defend. It's also sadly true some reporters abuse this umbrella out of plain old laziness.
Frankly, the newspapers print falsehoods every single day. And IMHO the august NYT -- or more to the point, two particular NYT reporters given too much latitude -- really did a number on Wen Ho Lee. But the papers also prints many truths, and the NYT prints more of them on compelling topics than most. We must not let our guard down against the lies, not raise our suspicions so high that we lose the truth.
An object falling through wind shear accelerates up to the speed of the air mass, like a boat in a current. How quickly it does so depends on the object's mass and drag. A bowling ball is pretty dense (hard to accelerate) and low drag (hard to accelerate), and it won't even be in the air very long. Airplanes are mostly air, thus lots of cross section, so they pretty much instantly become part of the air movement. However, they also (hopefully) have more than enough thrust to pick their own heading.
The big deal with the Norden bombsight was its oversold ability to compensate for airspeed (the inital velocity and vector of the bomb) and wind speed/direction after the bomb was released. The same would be true of the bowling ball. I'd think the meteor would have a higher terminal velocity -- some of them are basically chunks of metal.
Incidentally, the Bernoulli effect is only a percentage of a wing's lift. I figured out recently that the textbooks make this hard to understand by always depicting the airfoil at a zero angle of attack, at which few planes could stay aloft. Military jets and aerobatic planes and paper airplanes don't rely on it as much, and most planes can fly upside-down provided the gas and oil keep flowing....
Ever handled the tile material? I have. They had a neat demonstration where they heated a cube of it cherry-red with a torch and then handed it around a moment later. Incredible material, light and essentially fireproof.
But also brittle and fragile as hell, comparable to styrofoam or balsa wood. I've handled this stuff and it would have been trivial to damage with my bare hands. Armor against a blowtorch, but not a pebble.
NASA apparently has had a number of incidents involving damage to the belly of the orbiter from separated insulation and ice on launch. Apparently the polyurethane (or whatever it is) can become ice-impregnated, too, with the hardness of a brick. The report I read reported that on one occasion 300 tiles were damaged beyond repair, and that tiles had been sliced as deep as 1 1/2" out of 2" -- "enough" for re-entry, but there's always the next time. Perhaps Columbia was that next time and your random chance came up.
There have only been a bit over 100 missions, and the composition of the foam has changed over time -- perhaps also the tiles? Yes, the Shuttle was designed for brutal re-entry, but not to HIT anything at supersonic speeds. The tile would be destroyed by mere rain. Apollo by contrast launched in just about anything. Apollo 12 even survived a lightning strike (barely -- the capsule guidance system was scrambled, which would have led to a breakup of the launch vehicle had it not had its own redundant guidance).
I'm unwilling to draw any conclusions this early, but the damaged-tile theory is plausible. If we're lucky we'll recover that wing.
I don't mean to be opportunistic, but I think your typo (?) "astronaughts" aptly captures the relevance of manned spaceflight to scientific progress.
I do think you vastly overestimate the competence of NASA to believe they even had the information to make this coldhearted analysis. They did analyze the problem and came to the wrong conclusion. You know, Occam's Razor beats a conspiracy theory 99 times out of 100. Personally I'd hope they botched it rather than played god.
No, you are missing the crux that every useless pound displaces a useful pound. Sacrificing resources and endangering lives because "manned space travel is cool" is irresponsible, there need to be real justifications and there aren't. I'm not saying we should necessarily reduce launches, I think we're launching the wrong stuff. Anything that can be done without people should be done without people, and that's a lot more than we have been led to believe.
In the 70's the shuttle program rapidly siphoned money off from hard science programs to the resentment of scientists. They didn't applaud the manned space program, except for that fraction that need humans to do experiments that current technology can do on the ground or in unmanned vehicles.
We don't have to spend any money to know we can lighten payloads immensely by eliminating the humans -- and fewer people will get killed to boot.
You're totally right, except maybe on the Wallpaper thing (I use a Mac and we called them "Desktop Pictures" first -- what the heck is this "wallpaper" thing anyway? It's a desktop, not a wall.:) I thought of Voyager later. A lot of Voyager was overshadowed by the Shuttle, both its successes and, directly, the Challenger catastrophe.
Viking had more of that "defining moment" quality with the actual landings (two!). The idea of these robotic human-designed craft setting down on MARS was amazing to me in a way I suppose Apollo touchdown to have been. I thought the Pathfinder "hard landings" were cheating a little.:)
Yet I don't have any real interest in sending humans to Mars, not because I'm older and wiser but because the inefficiency and mortal risk are just too huge for a "gee whiz" moment. Apollo can be described uncharitably as a "stunt" -- a damn cool one but also a damn lucky one for loss of life. Apollo 13 wasn't the only close call; Apollo 12 avoided total breakup when it was struck by lightning because of accident of design. Look at the extremely expensive double failure in 1999 -- at least no one was killed. Even NASA's unmanned plans for Mars are stumbling badly.
Voyager -- that those things are still functioning 25 years later! -- and doddering Galileo -- also well past its design life -- are what draw my attention. The brilliant Galileo tape recorder repair is mentioned here.
Manned spaceflight, specifically the Moon landing, is an amazing accomplishment that will always symbolize so much, but it can't compete now with the performance of the engineers in these ingenious probe projects. I don't want the the program gutted, I want it refocused and improved with modern sensibilities adn technologies.
Even ISS can be serviced mostly by "dumb" rockets, as was Mir, if we must go the route of a space station. (Yes, the Mir resupply vehicle had a fender-bender, but humans could have done that, too.) The shuttle's role there has been overemphasized so that the shuttle would have a role as all.
In the interest of excruciating accuracy, 2 techs were also killed during the shuttle program when they were accidentally caught in a nitrogen atmosphere. They weren't trying to get in space, but they were in service of it. I think the on-ground safety record of the program is said to be fairly good.
The Challenger was a big shock because we were quite proud never to have lost anyone in flight. The "in flight" qualifier I think had more to do with distinguishing ourselves from the Soviets than any real logic. If we are desperate, and I hope we are not, we will fall back on the claim we have lost no one in space.
Here's a Q: how many people have died in the unmanned space program?
From the other end of the political spectrum, Paul Krugman says pretty much the same thing in yesterday's NYT. I'm surprised he said it so soom after the tragedy, but then Tuesday is his column day and people are actually listening. This is when we can get people thinking.
BTW, both Paul and Gregg can get pretty snitty when they think everyone else is an idiot (usually). But they both have some great insights.
The timing here is eerie for me, becuase I've been hashing out in my own mind whether manned spaceflight is worthwhile, specifically the shuttle. Just a few weeks ago I was figuring the odds of 100 successful shuttle missions in a row with NASA's own predicted failure rate of 1-in-500 (about 70%, not great). Then a week ago the teacher-in-space thing reappeared, which to me is the pinnacle of unnecessary threats to human life. Then I looked at NASA's deficit out of a $14 billion budget.
Now is the time to reform our expectations. Manned space flight has for so long been held out as the way things would be done, but most of the reason for it -- any actual need to have humans in space to manipulate things -- has largely disappeared. The Hubble telescope repair might be one exception, but that's a big exception and we could have just sent up another for the cost of an orbiter (indeed, the next-gen NGST has been in the works for several years and if anything is delayed by Hubble).
Unlike the 70's, when a glacially slow personal computer was exotic stuff, machines can do most of the astronaut tasks now, and that's cause for celebration. The most honest consensus that there is nearly no valid scientific reason to pursue manned spaceflight except the circular desire to pursue manned spaceflight. Much as I like manned spaceflight, I scads of data from unmanned probes is a lot sexier. I have trouble thinking of many accomplishments that are uniquely thanks to the shuttle.
The past leaves an impression on us. The older generation remembers Apollo 11 as a defining moment. I was 2. For me, it was the wildly successful twin Viking landings in 1977. Mind you, I was there in person for the first Columbia landing, and I still think Viking was more memorable -- those pictures! The deep red cover of National Geographic!
Robots are cool (think of the advances in robotics if we emphasized them for spaceflight?) and relatively cheap; they accept one-way missions with alacrity; and if we lose a shuttle full of robots it's not a moral quandary but a pocketbook issue and maybe a spectator sport. We can always come back to manned flight later.
Let's study space for now, conquer it later, if we even feel it needs conquering in person at that time. That we have learned is a just way to honor those whom we have lost.
Let NASA make what decision? In whose benefit? They've done a mediocra job so far, except in self-promotion -- except for the occasional shuttle accident of roughly 2 in 100.
Neither science nor democracy nor human safety will benefit from giving NASA free reign. We who pay the bills have to decide what the goals our and then work with the engineers to realize them. NASA has focused on self-promotion for too long, though it does a good job of it; its contractors do the work. I am astonished to hear insinuations that NASA budget cuts were behind Challenger, because they didn't have enough money to do it safely. Well, if true, they shouldn't have done it at all.
Frankly, I think watching too much Star Trek and Star Wars is what perpetuates the manned space program. There is very little real science that can only be accomplished with manned flight, except perhaps research to support manned flight, and the circularity of that argument is obvious. The ISS practically exists to justify the shuttle program. We are squandering the opportunity to accomplish more in space and on the ground by funding an extravagantly expensive program based on the assumptions of 70's technology. The capabilities of robotics and automation, and our understanding of science, has advanced far since then.
If decionmaking were placed in the hands of scientists (not NASA) instead of voters, if anything manned spaceflight would suffer the most. Many scientists have been furious for decades at the Shuttle for siphoning money off from useful research, especially interplanetary probes like the ones that brought us so much, Pioneer and Voyager and Mariner and Viking and so on.
The shuttle is not financially justified, especially given its incredibly poor return, when they are many other projects in health, research, and education threatened with cuts because the U.S. faces a record budget deficit. It is hard to shrug off NASA's budget as "only" $14 billion (plus billions in cost overruns) when programs like Head Start that cost "only" $2 billion are criticized as too expensive. Certainly there are a lot of roads that could be built, too; a billion buys a lot unless it's unnecessary space travel.
Absolutely, manned space travel is neat stuff, and I love it. As a kid I paid rapt attention to the shuttle's development, toured a mock-up at Rockwell, and trekked out to the desert to see Columbia land after its very first mission. I am shocked to see it destroyed in 2003, possibly for some the same reasons of mismanagement as Challenger (if it proves relevant, similar but nonlethal tile damage had occurred before, just as known O-ring malfunctions predated Challenger). But we can not let this tragedy spur us into the totally illogical course of wasting even more money on a program that will inevitably lead to more deaths for no reason better than "space is neat stuff."
Is our goal manned space flight for its own sake? *That* is the kind of bad decision democracy can make.
I don't represent that page as the gold standard, but do notice it is headed:
~ excerpted from the US Department of Energy Publication ~ Nonproliferation and Arms Control Assessment of Weapons-Usable Fissile Material Storage and Excess Plutonium Disposition Alternatives
It's an excerpt of a Lawrence Livermore publication, and believe me *they* ("the bomb factory") are not anti-nuclear. Anyway, what it says is in accord with what I've read elsewhere, and the critical bit of data is the feasibility of a fuel-grade Pu detonation, that is, the proliferation risk.
Slashdot Mirror
If makes you feel any better, when our parked '96 Mazda Protege was low-speed sideswiped by a drunk going *the wrong way* on a 2-way street, the front and back door panels were ruined but internally everything worked, even the windows. It was drivable. $3000. 3 week wait (not clear why). I think our real enemy is body shops, regardless of whatever material they work in, and worse the manufacturers who sell replacement parts for astronomical prices.
Your cost was very high for a domestic car. We had a $200 deductible, that's the only nice thing I can say.
Maybe elastic or clay-like cars? Cars that bounce like beach balls?
The colored plastic bumper covers on our conventional Mazda Protege get black scuff marks. The thing to do is to pick a color similar to the default plastic. :) (Ours is dark blue, works well.)
Not so simple. I grew up in L.A., where you virtually had to have a car, and that was by design: the city was designed around the car, when it represented the gateway to luxury, your own single-family home, and so on. Soon they had the literally lethal smog of the 50's, and it wan't so hot in the 70's. Now L.A. has a half-hearted subway system, but I don't know if they will overcome the fundamentals of teh city's design philosophy.
:). So .... on point, plastic paint may distract from lighter, rustproof composites instead of steel. Or not. But the risk is there.
I don't want a horse-and-buggy, or to be Amish; my point is that you don't *have* to live the way we take for granted. Endless technological fixes to the car may miss the forest, same for the internal combustion engine. The emmissions control were a good thing, but staved off dealing with the inevitable, and even now the committment to alternatives is pathetic (President Bush's fuel-cell initiative is a pittance).
I have since lived in three eastern cities with good public transit. These are, in many cases, smarter transit solutions that cars. We also have stores we can walk to. That didn't exist most places in L.A. A lot of this has been driven by congestion, and local resistance to enlarging the interstates to accommodate ever increasing traffic.
Think of it as a binary tree. Going off on a bad fork just gets worse unless you think to reconsider that earlier choice of path (is that CS enough?
Interesting, and good, point about the Ivory Coast. It immediately comes ot mind that the Ivory Coast is a former French colony. This doesn't justify them doing whatever they choose, but does lay a framework. One wishes Beligium had taken a more intelligent role in its former colony, Rwanda, regardless of international inattention.
With France/Germany's relevance here (when THOSE two agree, watch out), I'd like to hear them out. Instead we dispense a "you're either with us or against us" sort of doctrine; if you're against, you're "old Europe," whatever that means. If I were French I'd be pissed even if I thought Bush was right.
The international law of intervening in another country's internal affairs is complicated and ill-defined. But with Iraq we have not a former colony (though one could argue western meddling has a lot to do with Middle Eastern borders and problems) but a nation that is supposedly threatening *us* in the U.S. with some imminence. Alternatively, he is apparently in violation of UN resolutions dating from the last gulf war, and that should give us jurisdiction to coerce inspections or, if necessary, more. But the administration instead argues something called "pre-emptive self defense" that would supposedly authorize attacking anyone who could pose a threat to you some day. Imagine how many wars we would have if this were broadly applied -- India and Pakistan anyone? North and South Korea? I bet there are a dozen more. Hey, the longer we wait, the more bombs North Korea will have, and those bombs or bomb material may be for sale. They are already collaborating with the Pakistanis, our (ahem) ally.
Worst of all this, however, is that the proof is just not there. Yes, Hussein is interfering with our search for proof, but that doesn't prove he's got what we're looking for. And at the outset the Administration was pepared to act unilaterally and hastily; though they've backed a bit I think they revealed their basic philosophy and indifference to proof right there. That Saddam is a slimeball -- heck, my six year-old could prove that with a couple of press clippings. We have rarely intervened on the humanitarian basis alone, and here would kill thousands of Iraqi conscripts before getting anywhere near Hussein. Thousands of the people we are supposedly liberating. The Iraqi people, sadly, bear the burden of either Saddam or our invasion.
Speaking of bad guys, what happened to Osama bin Laden? And again, what about that nut in desperately poor North Korea who may have the bomb? Anyone else uncomfortable with the words "desperate" and "the bomb" in one sentence?
I can understand why you're on the fence. In a way I am, too. But I'd be all the more so if I thought the Administration were on the fence, too, rather than heeding the advice of neocons over generals. Notice that Powell, who was keeping a low profile is now center stage; the folly of ill-considered, unilateral action must have become clear. Notice Bush at least tentatively considering exile as an option for Hussein -- not that he'd ever accept it, but the consideration signals a retreat from wanting his head on a pike above all else.
Finally, and like the sole comment I should have made, absolutely yes bloodless methods of warfare are desirable, to save lives on both sides. After all, it is the victory and not the killing that, for us, is supposed to be the point. The violence diminshes su and our message. I was intrigued to learn that Timothy McVeigh was in a support role on the of the combat bulldozer (a specially outfitted tank) details that buried Iraqi conscripts alive in their trenches. He came away from it disillusioned, and crazier.
The paint-that-isn't technology of course bring Saturn to mind, and I mentioned them in another post. But I don't know much about them since shopping about 5 years ago (problem then was than it was a bit too small).
As an experienced Saturn driver who has perhaps hit something or been hit; or even if not, does the plastic sacrifice much in a collision, say to penetration? I couldn't get a satisfactory answer.
Also, it seemed that the panels were a lot noisier compared to steel, once they finally started welding the later. The noise was particularly dramatic on full-bore acceleration. Steel's rust resistance also improved a great deal over the years -- many of us will remember when rusted-through car doors were commonplace, a problem largely due I'm told to bad drainage.
I complement Saturn for doing a lot of things new, even as a spinoff of a company far more sluggish. I don't think they're there yet, but then they're the Henry Ford of body panels.
I don't mean to be a smart aleck -- well, maybe a little -- but do want to mention that the ever-increasing complexity of our lives is often good but not always necessary. If I could, I would like to get rid of my car altogether -- I'm no Luddite, but I think a lot of our technological improvements are aimed at correcting the problems introduced by our other technological improvement and distract us from fundamental goals. For example, we have for years been stalled with inefficient and polluting engines whose lifespan has been increased by ingenious inventions of emission control, electronic ignition, and so on, rather than inventing anew with fuel cells and the like (which are fundamentally not a new technology).
With respect to the improvement of paint, it is a wonderful idea that if successful would avoid a lot of waste in paint's first mission, preserving the vulnerable material underneath. But why don't we find ways to get rid of the sheet metal altogether? Saturn is the only one to have taken it really seriously, and I imagine part of that was the advantage of starting as a new company (yes, as a spinoff of a very old one, but you know what I mean -- UAW didn't even hold their new plant to the standard rules, and that was revolutionary!). They haven't beat the problems, but at least they've tried.
Here's a analogy I heard from a professor: Back in the days of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI used to hold up every year a graph of the steady increase in their interdiction of interstate stolen cars. Problem was, interstate theft was increasing even faster. Then Detroit went to ignition steering wheel locks, eliminating the simple way to steal a car by hot wiring. The rate of theft plummeted. Sometimes changing something fundamental is more efficient that layering on additional layer of protection. (I hope the analogy held, but you get the idea.)
I can understand how the duty of candor is generally important, and admire the forensic work of the wuthor, but don't understand how using a shell assignee is significant. Companies do this sort of thing to keep competitors in the dark, and I don't see how it is fraudulent.
... can anyone explain how this is significant? How can it be used to conceal prior art? Ideally, shouldn't the examiner be blind to the identity of the applicant/assignee, to avoid bias? It just seems like an academic Q.
So
"Inventiveness" is one of the last words I associate with Microsoft. While we're on the topic, and off topic, any predictions for the year Microsoft goes out of business or gets bough out? I'm thinking 2022.
You're confusing what the employer can do with what it should do. What it can do depends on the law, what it should on common sense and leverage.
There are limits, you do have some privacy rights as an employee. They can't surreptitiously tape your phone calls or videotape you in the bathroom, even if it reveals you're violating company policy.
People used to be a lot more upset about drug testing and I think it's a shame they gave in. Mandatory credit checks are similar. It's not that they're never relevant to employment, rather that is they become routine that we've lost one more bit of privacy for no good reason, and it will be too late to complain. "Because we do it to everyone" or "because it might turn up something interesting even though we have no clear policy on how we interpret these things and we made an offer you accepted without warning you we're a bunch of turkeys on a fishing expedition."
I'm thinking that your stance is partly abstract principle, not just concern for your individual privacy. If so, I think that's laudable.
You get an idea what I'd argue, though more diplomatically. I think it's a big deal that you accepted their offer -- it legalese, you relied on their offer -- only to face a condition of employment that (for the moment anyway) is atypical and invasive. They changing the conditions of your employment after the agreement was struck.
Odds are this is just a poorly thought-out policy that seemed good at the time. If you still want to work for them you need to work with them to help them see whay a credit check is not just invasive, but potentially risky for you if the report should fall into the wrong hands. The other poster who got his employer to set out in writing how the report should be handled was very clever.
I would expect them to destroy the credit report as soon as they had reviewed it to their satisfaction. I usually ask for a credit report on tenants but see no reason to keep it after scanning for red flags like bankruptcy.
I should throw in that your area might has specific laws concerning privacy and credit checks. An attorney could clear that up quickly.
Trilian home page: "One Messenger. A Trillian Possibilities" [groan]
Thx.
Now, if only encrypted email were the default. And automatic spam "feedback."
PS I'm just kidding and I didn't actually do anything that I've described in this post. By reading this post you agree that I didn't run a sniffer, or reverse engineer AIM's protocol just by watching it's traffic in a sniffer.
:)
Ah, you put your condition at the end. I can't agree to something by reading a post without knowing the condition first. Plus there's the questionable enforceability of ERLA's (end-reader user agreements).
But don't worry. You've already done far more to publish your self-incrimination than I could possibly expand upon. Besides, "gossip wants to be free."
Now, where do I pick up encrypted AIM?
I think you could enter into a real contract and agree to let the vendor come and inspect the machines at certain intervals, provided to got something in return like a discount or something. That is, the provision would have to be genuinely negotiated, not tucked away in the fine print of a boilerplate contract. I wonder how many businesses would voluntarily consent to something like this.
:o) I know for certain that the Seventh Circuit (Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana) ruled in favor of the vendors, but I don't know what even that court would think of gotcha inspection clauses buried in EULA's. In other words, we should I think be held to the expected stuff int he EULA's that are so mindnumbing and crammed into little boxes that we don't read them, but not any forfeit-your-life clauses without a heads-up.
Which brings us to EULA's or shrinkwrap license. They are kinda sorta enforceable, depending on where you are.
No, #3 was "he tried , and the lawyer & judge told him "the government can't get sued for doing its job." The writer was apparently thinking immunity, not lack of merit. I don't know what "the third was probably just a judge trying to adapt to the unknown" meant.
The misdeeds of others: I was referring to Mitnick's whine about how other instances of gov't misconduct (a judge denying bail or a prosector making charging or plea bargain decisions) in cases other than his (e.g., "folks have been held w/o bail hearings for centuries") are irrelevant. This sort of disparate treatment is generally not governmental misconduct. Mitnick may be correct to be the only recorded case of a defendant denied a bail hearing, except for this novel "illegal enemy combatant" stuff we have now, and I think that's pretty disturbing though not actionable. He also mutters something about an invalid search warrant being used' but even if he's correct, what's his injury? Getting caught? Did he even use the alleged defect to exclude evidence?
It's also pretty damn hard to sue a judge; they have nearly absolute immunity, for fear they'd otherwise be unable to do their jobs. Believe me, nearly every convict thinks he got screwed by the judge. The court of appeals is supposed to keep the trial judge in line. Mitnick made MANY appeals to the 9th Circuit without success -- is he going to sue them, too?
Mitnick was indeed barred from "profiting from his crimes" -- like the famous "Son of Sam" law (was unconstitutional as a bar to free speech, but the idea was revived by assigning all profits first to victim restitution). However, Mitnick's profit restriction expired along with his supervised release. Burning with curiosity, I made some calls about his recent book on security and a reliable source (heh-heh) suggested because it wasn't "about" his offenses it fell outside the restriction. If true, this might explain why the highly personal first chapter was dropped. If you look at the book, it does use a lot of "hypotheticals" instead of reminisces.
(Dear ex-felons out there -- this is not intended to be legal advice, consult your own shyster.)
*
I don't think he has a viable libel claim. As I mentioned somewhere else here, he would have trouble showing economic damages to his "reputation," for get pain and suffering, and as a public figure he would have a very high burden of proof re Markoff's intent. Interestingly, with all he's saying about Markoff, if Mitnick is wrong he's probably libeling Markoff. So Markoff could countersue and, well, maybe it's just not worth it. Also, don't forget Mitnick's talent for plucking things out of context. An outrageous sentence plunked out of a 2,000 article may not carry much punch.
Most of Markoff's errors appear due to sloppy reporting. It's not like everything he reported was wrong, just that some whoppers were woven in there. Unfortunately, going with the rumors when a source won't talk to you is common journalistic practice; unless the journalist has good reasonsto believe the rumors false, the 1st A. protects this, though i think it's unethical.
Mitnick's principal claim appears to be that Markoff injured him by focusing so much attention on his case and indirectly goading DOJ to make an example of him. Well, that's not a real injury. If DOJ chose to single him out to make an example of him, that's their responsibility. Mitnick's punishment, given his priors (IIRC one juvenile sentence and one felony, all for computer crimes), number of separate offenses, and flight to avoid prosecution, was not illegal or even excessive; the way the case was handled perhaps was. Mitnick has no claim to the more lenient sentence someone else got, and notice he doesn't mention the aggravating factors when he complains about the excessive monetary loss estimate. The prosecutors have discretion to pursue cases as they choose, short of constitutional limits such as the government deciding to "get Mitnick" because he's Jewish. He doesn't allege anything of the kind.
Even with Wen Ho Lee, a case that made me sick to my stomach, I blame NYT for bad reportage (a major sin) but DOJ for what happened to the defendant (a mortal sin). It was political cowardice that put a middle-aged scientist in solitary for nearly a year, advanced nonsense about losing "the crown jewels" of nuclear technology, then dismissed virtually all charges.
Maybe Mitnick got a raw deal, but not so raw as he paints it. As a three-time loser, hopefully he won't get himself there again.
Jim, your comment is the sort of firsthand insight that I hang out here to find. A few dozen words of history is worth more than thousands of words of handwaving speculation. Thx.
I'm astounded by the hordes who angrily respond that it was your fault because of poor security and inefficient procedures. It's like getting blasted because someone broke your Schlage lock (what? Medeco didn't exist yet??) to rifle through your house, and stole nothing but condemned you to hours of sifting through everything to be sure (what? you don't inventory all your stuff daily?) and put it all away (what? you did have highspeed room tidiers?).
The $64,000 question: How much do you think DEC *really* spent? I can attest from working for the courts that the Department of Justice plays with the number of grams (drugs) or value of intangibles (cybercrime) all the time in order to make the charging document come out with the sentence they want. How much did all those DEC salaries cost? You say yourself that the few people qualified to do the heavy lifting also drew down the serious money.
It is a scary domino effect the way someone experimenting semi-innocently can cause massive problems. Robert Morris is the example I remember, and the person Mitnick has tried to compare himself to. They don't seem the same at all to me (I'm sympathetic to Morris), but see how Mitnick's poor judgment could cause harm all of proportion to his acts -- yet harm due entirely to his acts nonetheless. I don't know how to calibrate the law to a situation was a mouse can bring down a house.
Yes, the government is held to the Constitution, in fact they are the ONLY one bound by it. That's the whole point of the Bill of Rights, to prevent government overreaching. And while there are some very strange things in the Mitnick case, the scale of his punishment is not one of them. Teenagers who get busted with a few grams of crack get more time.
For example:
Mitnick has little if any remorse. He can't even acknowledge his crimes without launching into a tirade about his victimhood. This is a guy who kept committing the same kinds of offenses despite getting caught, prosecuted, and punished TWICE. This was the single largest factor in the length of his time in detention and the record long denial of bail.
Let's not forget the third option, that Mitnick and Markoff are BOTH jerks. There is no reason to assume one is better than the other. That goes for the Department of Justice, too. All THREE can be jerks, it is not a zero-sum game.
Also, Mitnick is by prior trade a con man, an expert in getting people to see things a certain way in order to manipulate them. His major tactic seems to be to provide true facts out of context. So every detail about press coverage and his criminal prosecution may be true (they're not) but may be presented in such a slanted way as to be falsehoods. Or, again, all sides could smell bad.
Mitnick sure hasn't mentioned suing, has he? Instead he chants "false and defamatory" in the hope they'll stick, rather than develop the facts. He also has two principle problems -- under the First Amendment, he's a public figure and would have to show actual malice (he appears aware of this). Also, what are his damages? As a multiple felon -- this was not his first time in lockup -- and career computer trespasser (or whatever you want to call it), his would have trouble establishing much of anything. These sorts of problems with suing for libel are undeniably unfortunate for the victims of the press. The alternative, the reasoning goes, is a press so cowed by threats of lawsuits that they'd not push the envelope on things like the Pentagon Papers and Watergate and perhaps now the NASA Columbia investigation. Even a meritless libel suit costs a fortune to defend. It's also sadly true some reporters abuse this umbrella out of plain old laziness.
Frankly, the newspapers print falsehoods every single day. And IMHO the august NYT -- or more to the point, two particular NYT reporters given too much latitude -- really did a number on Wen Ho Lee. But the papers also prints many truths, and the NYT prints more of them on compelling topics than most. We must not let our guard down against the lies, not raise our suspicions so high that we lose the truth.
An object falling through wind shear accelerates up to the speed of the air mass, like a boat in a current. How quickly it does so depends on the object's mass and drag. A bowling ball is pretty dense (hard to accelerate) and low drag (hard to accelerate), and it won't even be in the air very long. Airplanes are mostly air, thus lots of cross section, so they pretty much instantly become part of the air movement. However, they also (hopefully) have more than enough thrust to pick their own heading.
The big deal with the Norden bombsight was its oversold ability to compensate for airspeed (the inital velocity and vector of the bomb) and wind speed/direction after the bomb was released. The same would be true of the bowling ball. I'd think the meteor would have a higher terminal velocity -- some of them are basically chunks of metal.
Incidentally, the Bernoulli effect is only a percentage of a wing's lift. I figured out recently that the textbooks make this hard to understand by always depicting the airfoil at a zero angle of attack, at which few planes could stay aloft. Military jets and aerobatic planes and paper airplanes don't rely on it as much, and most planes can fly upside-down provided the gas and oil keep flowing....
Ever handled the tile material? I have. They had a neat demonstration where they heated a cube of it cherry-red with a torch and then handed it around a moment later. Incredible material, light and essentially fireproof.
But also brittle and fragile as hell, comparable to styrofoam or balsa wood. I've handled this stuff and it would have been trivial to damage with my bare hands. Armor against a blowtorch, but not a pebble.
NASA apparently has had a number of incidents involving damage to the belly of the orbiter from separated insulation and ice on launch. Apparently the polyurethane (or whatever it is) can become ice-impregnated, too, with the hardness of a brick. The report I read reported that on one occasion 300 tiles were damaged beyond repair, and that tiles had been sliced as deep as 1 1/2" out of 2" -- "enough" for re-entry, but there's always the next time. Perhaps Columbia was that next time and your random chance came up.
There have only been a bit over 100 missions, and the composition of the foam has changed over time -- perhaps also the tiles? Yes, the Shuttle was designed for brutal re-entry, but not to HIT anything at supersonic speeds. The tile would be destroyed by mere rain. Apollo by contrast launched in just about anything. Apollo 12 even survived a lightning strike (barely -- the capsule guidance system was scrambled, which would have led to a breakup of the launch vehicle had it not had its own redundant guidance).
I'm unwilling to draw any conclusions this early, but the damaged-tile theory is plausible. If we're lucky we'll recover that wing.
I don't mean to be opportunistic, but I think your typo (?) "astronaughts" aptly captures the relevance of manned spaceflight to scientific progress.
I do think you vastly overestimate the competence of NASA to believe they even had the information to make this coldhearted analysis. They did analyze the problem and came to the wrong conclusion. You know, Occam's Razor beats a conspiracy theory 99 times out of 100. Personally I'd hope they botched it rather than played god.
No, you are missing the crux that every useless pound displaces a useful pound. Sacrificing resources and endangering lives because "manned space travel is cool" is irresponsible, there need to be real justifications and there aren't. I'm not saying we should necessarily reduce launches, I think we're launching the wrong stuff. Anything that can be done without people should be done without people, and that's a lot more than we have been led to believe.
In the 70's the shuttle program rapidly siphoned money off from hard science programs to the resentment of scientists. They didn't applaud the manned space program, except for that fraction that need humans to do experiments that current technology can do on the ground or in unmanned vehicles.
We don't have to spend any money to know we can lighten payloads immensely by eliminating the humans -- and fewer people will get killed to boot.
You're totally right, except maybe on the Wallpaper thing (I use a Mac and we called them "Desktop Pictures" first -- what the heck is this "wallpaper" thing anyway? It's a desktop, not a wall. :) I thought of Voyager later. A lot of Voyager was overshadowed by the Shuttle, both its successes and, directly, the Challenger catastrophe.
:)
Viking had more of that "defining moment" quality with the actual landings (two!). The idea of these robotic human-designed craft setting down on MARS was amazing to me in a way I suppose Apollo touchdown to have been. I thought the Pathfinder "hard landings" were cheating a little.
Yet I don't have any real interest in sending humans to Mars, not because I'm older and wiser but because the inefficiency and mortal risk are just too huge for a "gee whiz" moment. Apollo can be described uncharitably as a "stunt" -- a damn cool one but also a damn lucky one for loss of life. Apollo 13 wasn't the only close call; Apollo 12 avoided total breakup when it was struck by lightning because of accident of design. Look at the extremely expensive double failure in 1999 -- at least no one was killed. Even NASA's unmanned plans for Mars are stumbling badly.
Voyager -- that those things are still functioning 25 years later! -- and doddering Galileo -- also well past its design life -- are what draw my attention. The brilliant Galileo tape recorder repair is mentioned here.
Manned spaceflight, specifically the Moon landing, is an amazing accomplishment that will always symbolize so much, but it can't compete now with the performance of the engineers in these ingenious probe projects. I don't want the the program gutted, I want it refocused and improved with modern sensibilities adn technologies.
Even ISS can be serviced mostly by "dumb" rockets, as was Mir, if we must go the route of a space station. (Yes, the Mir resupply vehicle had a fender-bender, but humans could have done that, too.) The shuttle's role there has been overemphasized so that the shuttle would have a role as all.
In the interest of excruciating accuracy, 2 techs were also killed during the shuttle program when they were accidentally caught in a nitrogen atmosphere. They weren't trying to get in space, but they were in service of it. I think the on-ground safety record of the program is said to be fairly good.
The Challenger was a big shock because we were quite proud never to have lost anyone in flight. The "in flight" qualifier I think had more to do with distinguishing ourselves from the Soviets than any real logic. If we are desperate, and I hope we are not, we will fall back on the claim we have lost no one in space.
Here's a Q: how many people have died in the unmanned space program?
From the other end of the political spectrum, Paul Krugman says pretty much the same thing in yesterday's NYT. I'm surprised he said it so soom after the tragedy, but then Tuesday is his column day and people are actually listening. This is when we can get people thinking.
BTW, both Paul and Gregg can get pretty snitty when they think everyone else is an idiot (usually). But they both have some great insights.
The timing here is eerie for me, becuase I've been hashing out in my own mind whether manned spaceflight is worthwhile, specifically the shuttle. Just a few weeks ago I was figuring the odds of 100 successful shuttle missions in a row with NASA's own predicted failure rate of 1-in-500 (about 70%, not great). Then a week ago the teacher-in-space thing reappeared, which to me is the pinnacle of unnecessary threats to human life. Then I looked at NASA's deficit out of a $14 billion budget.
Now is the time to reform our expectations. Manned space flight has for so long been held out as the way things would be done, but most of the reason for it -- any actual need to have humans in space to manipulate things -- has largely disappeared. The Hubble telescope repair might be one exception, but that's a big exception and we could have just sent up another for the cost of an orbiter (indeed, the next-gen NGST has been in the works for several years and if anything is delayed by Hubble).
Unlike the 70's, when a glacially slow personal computer was exotic stuff, machines can do most of the astronaut tasks now, and that's cause for celebration. The most honest consensus that there is nearly no valid scientific reason to pursue manned spaceflight except the circular desire to pursue manned spaceflight. Much as I like manned spaceflight, I scads of data from unmanned probes is a lot sexier. I have trouble thinking of many accomplishments that are uniquely thanks to the shuttle.
The past leaves an impression on us. The older generation remembers Apollo 11 as a defining moment. I was 2. For me, it was the wildly successful twin Viking landings in 1977. Mind you, I was there in person for the first Columbia landing, and I still think Viking was more memorable -- those pictures! The deep red cover of National Geographic!
Robots are cool (think of the advances in robotics if we emphasized them for spaceflight?) and relatively cheap; they accept one-way missions with alacrity; and if we lose a shuttle full of robots it's not a moral quandary but a pocketbook issue and maybe a spectator sport. We can always come back to manned flight later.
Let's study space for now, conquer it later, if we even feel it needs conquering in person at that time. That we have learned is a just way to honor those whom we have lost.
Let NASA make what decision? In whose benefit? They've done a mediocra job so far, except in self-promotion -- except for the occasional shuttle accident of roughly 2 in 100.
Neither science nor democracy nor human safety will benefit from giving NASA free reign. We who pay the bills have to decide what the goals our and then work with the engineers to realize them. NASA has focused on self-promotion for too long, though it does a good job of it; its contractors do the work. I am astonished to hear insinuations that NASA budget cuts were behind Challenger, because they didn't have enough money to do it safely. Well, if true, they shouldn't have done it at all.
Frankly, I think watching too much Star Trek and Star Wars is what perpetuates the manned space program. There is very little real science that can only be accomplished with manned flight, except perhaps research to support manned flight, and the circularity of that argument is obvious. The ISS practically exists to justify the shuttle program. We are squandering the opportunity to accomplish more in space and on the ground by funding an extravagantly expensive program based on the assumptions of 70's technology. The capabilities of robotics and automation, and our understanding of science, has advanced far since then.
If decionmaking were placed in the hands of scientists (not NASA) instead of voters, if anything manned spaceflight would suffer the most. Many scientists have been furious for decades at the Shuttle for siphoning money off from useful research, especially interplanetary probes like the ones that brought us so much, Pioneer and Voyager and Mariner and Viking and so on.
The shuttle is not financially justified, especially given its incredibly poor return, when they are many other projects in health, research, and education threatened with cuts because the U.S. faces a record budget deficit. It is hard to shrug off NASA's budget as "only" $14 billion (plus billions in cost overruns) when programs like Head Start that cost "only" $2 billion are criticized as too expensive. Certainly there are a lot of roads that could be built, too; a billion buys a lot unless it's unnecessary space travel.
Absolutely, manned space travel is neat stuff, and I love it. As a kid I paid rapt attention to the shuttle's development, toured a mock-up at Rockwell, and trekked out to the desert to see Columbia land after its very first mission. I am shocked to see it destroyed in 2003, possibly for some the same reasons of mismanagement as Challenger (if it proves relevant, similar but nonlethal tile damage had occurred before, just as known O-ring malfunctions predated Challenger). But we can not let this tragedy spur us into the totally illogical course of wasting even more money on a program that will inevitably lead to more deaths for no reason better than "space is neat stuff."
Is our goal manned space flight for its own sake? *That* is the kind of bad decision democracy can make.
I don't represent that page as the gold standard, but do notice it is headed:
~ excerpted from the US Department of Energy Publication ~
Nonproliferation and Arms Control Assessment
of Weapons-Usable Fissile Material Storage
and Excess Plutonium Disposition Alternatives
It's an excerpt of a Lawrence Livermore publication, and believe me *they* ("the bomb factory") are not anti-nuclear. Anyway, what it says is in accord with what I've read elsewhere, and the critical bit of data is the feasibility of a fuel-grade Pu detonation, that is, the proliferation risk.