If it is an original work of art, clearly the original artist can have a copyright on that work of art.
In this particular case, I am supportive of the sculptor and think that he should be compensated in this particular case.
I'd be curious how many contracts for "3-D public art" have a sale of copyright that goes with that artwork when it is purchased. If that is something which comes from this particular case where such copyright sales must be explicit, I'm all supportive of such an arrangement.
On the other hand, if a work of art is commissioned by a public organization such as the federal government in this case, it certainly could implied that such a copyright transfer was done to the government as a "work for hire". That would simply put the sculpture in the public domain due to the nature of all works of art done by public employees. There are some amazing photos made by Ansel Adams for the U.S. Department of the Interior during the 1930's and 1940's that are thankfully in the public domain for this very reason, even though there are other photos which are clearly still under copyright by this very talented photographer.
This case would be much more cut and dried if it was a sculpture that was placed on private property such as a business and both the business and the artist was seeking enforcement of copyright status. The public work for hire and/or possible "donation to the public" certainly is a fly in the ointment here.
What kills me is those museums and art galleries who assert copyright on works of art that were clearly made more than 100 years ago.... hence the copyright claim ought to be considered expired. I understand the desire for a museum to try and make a little bit of money on the side, but charging patrons for taking photographs and demanding royalties on photos of such works of art is a bit over the top. That, to me, is where it goes over the line.
Pah, from this side of the Atlantic Ocean, it looked like Reagan/Bush 1 were big spenders, Clinton then fixed the budget, and then Bush 2 spent money in a way that paled even the Reagan years. http://bethemedia.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/deficits.jpg
Clinton was admittedly a fiscal conservative, even if I didn't agree with his lifestyle nor his social policies. Also missing here is that unlike what happens in Britain, the "chief of government" often tends to have the opposition party in control of the purse strings. Reagan only had a Republican majority for two years, it never happened at all with Bush Senior, and W had some particularly nasty political fights with congress in the opposition party too. I could also point out the same thing with Clinton and that he had to work with a Republican controlled congress for most of his tenure.
Only Jimmy Carter and now Obama have had a congress that was of their same political viewpoint to pass legislation that reflected their governing style that made a difference with influencing spending.
BTW, if you used that graph, the current deficits by Obama simply fall off the chart completely.
The final funding bill to allocate the required funds is what ultimately failed in congress. No, the funds really weren't allocated, but the project had started earlier and the land purchased to get the project built.
As for why they didn't use the grounds of Fermilab, that is located in the middle of Illinois and the real estate was valuable enough that they couldn't afford to buy out the required land to get it built. The land for the SCSC was available in Texas, which is why it was done there. Yes, I know that CERN was built in land that was about as valuable as that found in Illinois, but that was a European decision and not an American one.
This is actually a pretty good analogy, although at the time I was a supporter of the SCSC and let my elected representatives know that too. Little good that did.
As for the "Blame Bush" crowd.... I should point out that Bush knew full well that he was not going to be the president to see people get back to the Moon and that any such program would be at least a couple of presidencies beyond his own. The time to make decisions on this is now, and that onus belongs to Obama... for good or ill. Bush did what he could at the time, as did his father before him. Neither were willing to do a JFK-type moment and strongly commit a substantial fraction of the federal budget to spaceflight activities like the Apollo program.
Keep in mind that the Apollo project ate up about 5% of the federal budget. At the moment, NASA is only 0.5% of the budget. That is a huge difference and something that I don't see Obama changing either.
"Many of the deals are called 'undefinitized contracts,' meaning that the terms, conditions -- and price -- had not been set before NASA ordered the work to start."
Oh, that sort of thing always ends well./sarcasm
I thought the previous administration had thought itself good at business dealings?
I suppose it is all relative. The U.S. Federal government is so screwed up fiscally that perhaps the Bush Administration was better at management compared to the previous presidencies. In other words, they got a "D" grade instead of an "F".
You are also forgetting that the point of contracts like this is to reward political constituencies, not to necessarily save money or to find the best contractor for the job. The only thing that really matters in Washington is if the elected official can make it to the next term and get re-elected. They seem to do a pretty good job of getting that to happen too.
Is anyone surprised shutting down Constellation isn't any easier than shutting down any other government program? How often does that happen?
OTOH, I suppose if they're successful, it's a one-time cost. But I'm skeptical that it will ever actually be shut down. There's too much pork for too many districts for Congress to ever let that happen. The cost of the political horse-trading to make it happen will probably be expensive enough that it would be cheaper just to complete the damn program.
In this case, it is debatable if letting the Constellation program continue will be cheaper in the long run. Perhaps some interesting R&D can come from the development effort, but as was said in the Augustine Commission report, "if Constellation was ready to go and already developed, it would have to be canceled tomorrow because we can't afford it."
It shouldn't be surprising, however, that the contracts were set up in such a way that it couldn't be easily canceled. Many government projects are set up in a similar manner.... which is why it would be impossible to shut down Head Start centers or repeal the Social Security Act.
Hard to say whether that's better or worse than the common NASA "cost plus" contract where they agree to pay development costs plus an agreed profit margin. Where's the incentive for the developer to keep cost under control?
None at all. Well, relatively little incentive.
There is the potential for somebody to come in that will do the job for such a drastically cheaper price (*cough* SpaceX *cough*) that it starts to get the attention of the powers that be in the government.
Of course this is where you have military bases now authorized to head over to the local Wal-Mart or Home Depot to purchase things like hammers and toilet paper, when they can buy it from local suppliers cheaper than from a central military logistics command.
There are many reasons why spaceflight continues to be expensive, and this is a good example of why.
Because of sarbanes oxley, all of the companies would have impeccable records of time and materials spent on projects so it would be a simple matter of billing what was used. Time and materials contracts get cut short all the time, I'm not sure how this will be very complicated, unless the contractors are out to fuck NASA over. But you can't blame Obama for that
If in real life it were so simple. Depending on the contract that was signed and the interpretation of that contract in courts or by attorneys for both the contractor and the government, there is a whole lot of gray area to wiggle around here. It certainly is not so simple as to say "show me how much you spent, we will pay for that".
As for who to blame for this, I suppose we could blame the Roosevelt administration, who came up with these kind of contracts for World War II. It wouldn't surprise me if some of the contracts were mostly broilerplate that was originally written in the 1940's.
Whenever somebody suggests that space-based solar power should be used, they keep forgetting to mention the largest solar panel installation ever put into orbit:
The International Space Station
The solar panels are the defining feature to the structure, and what sets it apart from all previous space vehicles. I think the power generated on the ISS is something on the order of about 50 kilowatts.... which certainly is a fair bit to consider and something akin to a small-town power plant. Running a power cable from the Earth to the ISS is not practical, so clearly solar power is the cheapest alternative (instead of using fuel cells... the only other realistic alternative up there). If you want to see a solar power satellite, any study that ignores the ISS and the technical issues they have discovered in its construction is to me a study not even worth reading in the first place.
Arizona has some innovative solar power generation facilities, including some that are "on the grid" right now. I'd have to say though that the economics really aren't there except for those who are looking for self-sufficiency. There are some companies like Solar City which has a product that certainly is interesting and is just on the threshold of being competitive with other forms of power generation. There are also some other manufacturers of solar panel equipment, and certainly the economics of solar panels and power generation make sense in rural areas where the expense of running a power line out to a remote place is cost prohibitive.
No, because the laws of physics in Trek universe aren't stable, but change unpredictably from time to time. The locals have adapted to that and update their thinking without even noticing; those of us outside the continuum perceive changes as discontinuity.
Of course, you are missing the point that the physics in the Trek universe are unstable due to economics of Paramount Studios and the casual whims of the screenplay writers who may need a plot devices of some sort or another. Forgetting that the Trek universe is mostly explained by the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition is a mistake that most Trek fans seem to miss. I think secretly the Trek writers simply discovered a hidden tome buried in the Paramount executive suite and simple pretended that those rules were fictional.
If you can even remotely define consciousness in terms of a mathematical formula or something that can be put into a clearly defined algorithm, I might be able to bite on this concept of projecting our consciousness onto a robot of some kind.
To me, that is a couple of millenia away, not something which can be done next week. We know so stinking little about artificial intelligence that those who claim otherwise are simply raving lunatics. What we know about intelligence and sentient thought is mostly what we don't know.... sort of like what Aristotle knew about nuclear physics. He guessed correctly that there were atoms, but that was about the limit of correct understanding. I'd put our understanding of AI at about that level.
Still, no matter how hard you upgrade equipment and deal with processing delays, there is still the raw physics that must be addressed.
I admit that some of the hardware is using radio receivers which have vacuum tubes and computers processing data with core memory. This is a sort of thing that comes with "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality. It is also something that comes from government service, where it can take several different budget cycles to update equipment in a program like the Deep Space Network that generally doesn't scream for attention.
Another aspect of the Deep Space Network that needs to be considered is that it supposedly is being replaced by the "interplanetary internet" or whatever the current acronym and terminology is at the moment for the concept (it has changed a couple of times and I don't bother keeping track any more). There still is legacy hardware that is incompatible with this new communications scheme, so the DSN must be kept for awhile longer, but the money is getting dumped into the newer concept. While incredibly useful as a concept, the idea of sending internet packets around to planetary "nodes" is also going to introduce additional communications delays that simply weren't there before. Hopefully there won't be packets getting shipped off to Mars first before they go to the Moon, but that can be at least in theory happen with the routing protocols.
I would presume that "waldo" communication systems would have a more direct link to the surface of the Moon if it was to be something used on a regular basis.
What you describe sounds like space communism, complete with a politburo and five year plans.
In America, we don't have 5 year plans, they are instead eight-year plans (usually with sub-goals @ 4 years). If it can't be built or done before the next presidential administration comes to power, it will likely be canceled. Ultimately, that has been the fate of a great many NASA launchers that have been attempted since the 1970's, with more than a dozen different rocket programs that have been started and then at various stages have been shut down along the way.
When viewed from this perspective, the cancellation of Constellation is but one of many different projects which are roadkill. The one huge difference this time is that there is no "alternative" from the perspective of something designed and operated by NASA personnel.
BTW, I am a huge proponent of private industry, particularly in what should be a proven technology domain of launching vehicles into low-earth orbit. If there was something new and original in getting into orbit around the Earth, I'm all for NASA working on that. The construction of the Constellation program doesn't seem to me as something novel or original. If NASA would have built something like the original Orion spaceship (not merely spacecraft.... it was to have a crew of about 50), that would have been impressive, novel, and would have advanced spaceflight technology on a grand scale. Re-doing the Apollo project on a shoestring budget doesn't seem like a good idea in this perspective.
Anyway, 0.5% of the federal budget isn't peanuts. I think that it comes back to a lack of vision with regard to what we're trying to accomplish, so the various programs and initiatives just sort of drift on, burning money. The Apollo program was targeted and specific in what it was trying to achieve (a man on the moon) and lavishly funded as it was more to one up the USSR than achieve scientific goals. It succeeded at it's core goal, but seeing as there wasn't really a solid vision beyond that, it just petered out once we'd "been there, done that".
While I agree that the 0.5% of the federal budget is still a whole lot of money, compared to the 4%-5% of the federal budget that NASA got during the Apollo program it is not a whole lot. I think the actual figure is closer to 0.3% of the budget right now, but that is quibbling over details, and if you include "non-discretionary spending" it would be even less. The point is that most voters and folks who deride NASA think that it is getting the same funding levels that it got during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and that hasn't been the case for several decades now.
On the whole NASA does at least average if not better than that in terms of being productive and doing something with the money that it receives. What goes for gilding the lily in NASA is for most other public agencies merely normal practices. If you want to see throwing money around with no accountability, try the Department of Agriculture instead.... which BTW has a larger budget than NASA.
Robert Byrd has so many buildings and parks named after him that I'm surprised that West Virginia isn't simply renamed as the State of Byrd.
Ted Stevens, until he got essentially kicked out of office by the democrats in Alaska on false and abusive prosecution, was one of those who were a republican with massive tenure. Another that I can think of off the top of my head is Orrin Hatch (R- Utah) who has been around forever.
Living in Utah, I just about puked with the last campaign by Senator Hatch. The campaign slogan was more or less "Bringing the Bacon Home to Utah!" His campaign was essentially "Look at me! I saved Hill Air Force Base from getting closed, I brought in a whole bunch of federal programs, and isn't it cool that Utah gets a huge hunk of the Federal budget on so many programs... all because of me!"
It is one thing to deride such campaigning in another state, but until voters are willing to kick out politicians who do this sort of thing in their own state, such practices I'm sure will continue. This said, I don't think Senator Hatch would even win the nomination of his own political party right now if he were running this year.
The largest problem with term limits is that it makes for weak politicians and strong staffers.... where the "staff" of the congressmen and those who serve the political body as a whole end up doing most of the work and making the decisions on the behalf of those who are serving in supposedly the role of being a decision maker.
I have served on a political body that had extreme term limits (1 year terms with a maximum of 3 years to serve on the body) and saw that situation precisely happen. The staff who support the organization are so strong that essentially it is the staffers that run the show, as by the time anybody gets a clue about how to push back and put the staff in their place they are on their way out of the position.
That is already a major problem in the U.S. Congress, where congressional staffers write the legislation, propose the amendments, and do most of the negotiations with other congressional staffers supposedly on behalf of their elected officials. The role of a congressmen in Washington D.C. is now more of a manager than a legislator. Often, when they have to cast their vote on the floor, they act upon the advise of their staffers as the legislation is so complex that they can't possibly have understood much less actually read the legislation they are asking to vote upon. This is on top of current practices that seem to push this sort of behavior up to the next level by the current U.S. Congress.
Sometimes I wonder how much more effective Congress would be if the staff consisted of just the doorman, the capitol police, and the cafeteria workers, with perhaps a few pages to keep life interesting.
Where are politicians with guts who care more about the future of the country than getting elected with phony promises and posturing?
If you find any in D.C., let me know.
Two problems with this:
Most congressmen with this attitude are usually freshmen congressmen that are usually ignored due to seniority practices that silence their voice on matters of consequence
If they aren't concerned about being re-elected, they usually get kicked out of office by those who make that a priority... or they simply "retire" having been fed up with the games of getting elected in the first place
There are some "politicians" like Colin Powell who simply don't give a damn about elections and partisan politics, but then again a guy like General Powell is as often as not telling people off when his name is even suggested as a potential candidate for public office. I'm using this as an example of a leader very capable of doing the job and making a difference... in either Congress or in the White House, but somebody who doesn't want to go through the meat grinder to get there in the first place. He has the name recognition and even the general political philosophies that could even get him elected, but it is unlikely he would ever get there to do it.
So yeah, you'll see upper NASA management (and bad middle management) making decisions just as idiotic as the elected politicians - but only as a result of the politicians and NASA being a government agency.
I've seen some incredibly boneheaded decisions made by for-profit private corporations, so I don't think this is a problem restricted just to government agencies.... although I will agree that to cull this out of a government agency is borderline difficult to impossible (requiring an act of God to make changes.... as Congress won't ever get its act together to fix things).
A significant problem comes when you have a manager who has to make a decision for a technical issue that is well beyond their skill sets to even understand the problems on a realistic level. Yes, the subordinate engineers can usually try to explain the issue in simplified terms that a manager can grasp, but analogies often break down eventually where such an example doesn't really work.
It becomes even harder still when you have managers who have the technical background and expertise to be able to grasp the problem, but then those engineers have a political agenda and are masking other real problems that come up. As you said, being a politician in an environment which requires hard science to work is not necessarily compatible.
That particular experiment, to "buy out" HSX dollars, was tried back in the early days of HSX. I think the going rate at the time was 1 cent per 1m HSX bucks or something like that, with a minimum payment of $100 USD (presuming you were good enough to get into the "billionaires" club with HSX).
That particular experiment is dead and doesn't appear to be something to be revived.
No, we are talking about folks who invest real money into real movies that get spent on real actors and producers to be shown on real movie theaters. It is different here, not the virtual money.
If you would read my reply, it is essentially the same thing. BTW, even if it may not be "illegal" according to federal law, it may be according to state or local laws.
So even if you may be transferring funds from an account in say the UK or Switzerland into the on-line gambling site (so you avoid the restrictions), it may still be illegal in many localities simply for being connected at all as an individual.
Still, by prohibiting banks from the USA to process money transfers to the on-line gambling companies, it effectively eliminates the customer base from America... shy of some creative book keeping and financial gymnastics.
There are some sites that allow you to "play" with virtual money (in other words, no actual money changes hands and therefore is "legal") but then have a link from within the site that goes to the "real" on-line gambling site. A sizable amount of money still somehow makes its way out of the USA to these on-line sites regardless, including some rather interesting television advertisements and some other strange things connected to these websites.
The point of the article is that real money is going to be used and that they have filed with the SEC for "approval" as a real exchange.
As for what these guys are going to be actually buying and selling on the exchange, that is a different issue. On that, I have my doubts. It sounds like something even more intangible than the marginal insurance on Collateralized mortgage obligations that caused this current recession in the first place. The article about this concept doesn't really go into enough detail to really know what it is that is being sold here.
Hollywood Stock Exchange is a fair bit older: It dates back to the mid 1990's.
What is new here is the filing with the U.S. securities officials to be able to legally take money and to pretend it is a real stock exchange rather than a virtual one.
It is illegal to do on-line gambling in the USA. It is even more sinister than that: Any debts that happen via on-line gambling are legally unenforceable. In other words, if you run up a huge tab on your credit card for on-line gambling, all you have to do is simply assert that the debt was done for the purposes of gambling on-line and the debt will be instantly forgiven by the bank (or take the bank to court for dismissal of the debt... the same thing after a fashion). The bank either writes off the debt or does a charge-back to the on-line casino.
Funny thing about "online weed distribution businesses" (presuming that the "weed" is marijuana): In California it is legal... as long as the customer and the buyer are both in California and a medical prescription has been properly filed with the seller.
Unless I'm reading this article wrong, what is suggested here is nothing different than a sports bookie who takes bets on winners of sporting events. IMHO that is gambling, even if it isn't quite so clear from the SEC filings. It will be interesting to see how these guys get around those gambling laws.
On the "virtual" side of the Hollywood Stock Exchange, the "dividends" are paid based upon ticket sales after 4 weeks. Whatever the movie has made is then given to the "investors" which can then be re-invested into other issues.
As for the real-money aspect, the original founders of Hollywood Stock Exchange always intended to get into the real-world side of the market by trying to set up an investment market for film makers that would be based upon the same general principles, where a film project could be submitted as an IPO of sorts and have some real-world investment into the actual film via micro-transaction. In other words, mere mortals could "invest" into the actual film making costs as a sort of corporate entity.
In theory, some films might end up turning a tremendous profit, and some of the early fans of the concept could pool their money together to get the financing of some interesting project off the ground through some financing scheme like this. The stocks, when they closed under this model, would pay out based strictly on what revenue comes in.... keeping in mind Hollywood financing tricks and other garbage that would have to be reviewed incredibly closely on something like this too.
Something of this nature would be certainly interesting. Unfortunately, based on this very limited information in this article it doesn't sound like that is going to be the route this particular group will be going. It sounds more like something more akin to what Las Vegas casinos do with sports events and people betting on the success or failure of a given team winning a game. If that is the case, this would most certainly have to be classified as a gambling activity and not a legitimate security exchange.
Efficiency can be measured with many different metrics, of which fiscal cost alone is not often the primary measurement.
Particularly with vehicle going into space, the pressing need to get there and to fit within a very narrow range of parameters (such as a missile reaching the target and fitting in a certain dimension of a missile silo or submarine) that cost considerations are often secondary. Other considerations for launches from NASA also include being able to lift a substantial payloads such as those intended to reach the outer Solar System (aka probes to Jupiter and Saturn) or to lift spy satellites that weight more than a Greyhound bus.
Again, cost is not the primary factor. The question is if it can do the job, and get it up there reliably now instead of 10 years from now.
With a consistent lack of trying for a reduced cost approach to spaceflight, all that is necessary for proving fiscal responsibility is that a company building spacecraft merely get close to what their competitors have been making. It also doesn't hurt that the number of companies actually building aircraft and missiles has effectively dropped to about three: Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and ATK. Boeing and Lock-Mart are already partnered together, so who else is the government going to turn to?
The move to commercial spaceflight has been a slow and painful one for NASA. I admit that some significant effort has been made over the past decade or so in that direction, so in some ways the current shift to completely abandon the Earth to LEO launches to private industry has already been well under way for some time.
It should be noted that when the Space Shuttle was originally launched, it was not the current arrangement that exists with ULA. Instead, everybody on the pad except for some "consultants" and some who were on the payroll of the Department of Defense were all NASA employees. The bulk of the folks were doing things that are now mostly contracted out. Yes, Rockwell International built the Shuttle and certainly had their engineers on site, but it was a NASA show all the way.
I'm really curious about where ULA is going to go from here. They have the experience and through their parent companies even some vehicles like the Atlas V and the Delta IV to work with.
I've looked at the Atlas V on paper, and I'm very impressed. So much so that I wonder very much why the Ares I was even started in the first place when such a vehicle was already developed. I know the answer to that question too, but that is besides the point.
The company being left out in the cold right now is Alliant Techsystems. It was an interesting idea to turn an SRB into a manned spacelauch vehicle, but I think it may have been a mistake. Certainly there were relatively few components in common between the Ares I and the Ares V (or 6), so those were effectively separate rockets.
Anyway, I agree that there have been some efforts by some companies to avoid the cost-plus system, in part because it gives those companies some flexibility with their customers. It looks like that effort is going to pay off handsomely too. Good for ULA to be ready to take advantage of this new opportunity before them, which it looks like it will do too.
Slashdot Mirror
If it is an original work of art, clearly the original artist can have a copyright on that work of art.
In this particular case, I am supportive of the sculptor and think that he should be compensated in this particular case.
I'd be curious how many contracts for "3-D public art" have a sale of copyright that goes with that artwork when it is purchased. If that is something which comes from this particular case where such copyright sales must be explicit, I'm all supportive of such an arrangement.
On the other hand, if a work of art is commissioned by a public organization such as the federal government in this case, it certainly could implied that such a copyright transfer was done to the government as a "work for hire". That would simply put the sculpture in the public domain due to the nature of all works of art done by public employees. There are some amazing photos made by Ansel Adams for the U.S. Department of the Interior during the 1930's and 1940's that are thankfully in the public domain for this very reason, even though there are other photos which are clearly still under copyright by this very talented photographer.
This case would be much more cut and dried if it was a sculpture that was placed on private property such as a business and both the business and the artist was seeking enforcement of copyright status. The public work for hire and/or possible "donation to the public" certainly is a fly in the ointment here.
What kills me is those museums and art galleries who assert copyright on works of art that were clearly made more than 100 years ago.... hence the copyright claim ought to be considered expired. I understand the desire for a museum to try and make a little bit of money on the side, but charging patrons for taking photographs and demanding royalties on photos of such works of art is a bit over the top. That, to me, is where it goes over the line.
Pah, from this side of the Atlantic Ocean, it looked like Reagan/Bush 1 were big spenders, Clinton then fixed the budget, and then Bush 2 spent money in a way that paled even the Reagan years.
http://bethemedia.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/deficits.jpg
Clinton was admittedly a fiscal conservative, even if I didn't agree with his lifestyle nor his social policies. Also missing here is that unlike what happens in Britain, the "chief of government" often tends to have the opposition party in control of the purse strings. Reagan only had a Republican majority for two years, it never happened at all with Bush Senior, and W had some particularly nasty political fights with congress in the opposition party too. I could also point out the same thing with Clinton and that he had to work with a Republican controlled congress for most of his tenure.
Only Jimmy Carter and now Obama have had a congress that was of their same political viewpoint to pass legislation that reflected their governing style that made a difference with influencing spending.
BTW, if you used that graph, the current deficits by Obama simply fall off the chart completely.
The final funding bill to allocate the required funds is what ultimately failed in congress. No, the funds really weren't allocated, but the project had started earlier and the land purchased to get the project built.
As for why they didn't use the grounds of Fermilab, that is located in the middle of Illinois and the real estate was valuable enough that they couldn't afford to buy out the required land to get it built. The land for the SCSC was available in Texas, which is why it was done there. Yes, I know that CERN was built in land that was about as valuable as that found in Illinois, but that was a European decision and not an American one.
This is actually a pretty good analogy, although at the time I was a supporter of the SCSC and let my elected representatives know that too. Little good that did.
As for the "Blame Bush" crowd.... I should point out that Bush knew full well that he was not going to be the president to see people get back to the Moon and that any such program would be at least a couple of presidencies beyond his own. The time to make decisions on this is now, and that onus belongs to Obama... for good or ill. Bush did what he could at the time, as did his father before him. Neither were willing to do a JFK-type moment and strongly commit a substantial fraction of the federal budget to spaceflight activities like the Apollo program.
Keep in mind that the Apollo project ate up about 5% of the federal budget. At the moment, NASA is only 0.5% of the budget. That is a huge difference and something that I don't see Obama changing either.
"Many of the deals are called 'undefinitized contracts,' meaning that the terms, conditions -- and price -- had not been set before NASA ordered the work to start."
Oh, that sort of thing always ends well. /sarcasm
I thought the previous administration had thought itself good at business dealings?
I suppose it is all relative. The U.S. Federal government is so screwed up fiscally that perhaps the Bush Administration was better at management compared to the previous presidencies. In other words, they got a "D" grade instead of an "F".
You are also forgetting that the point of contracts like this is to reward political constituencies, not to necessarily save money or to find the best contractor for the job. The only thing that really matters in Washington is if the elected official can make it to the next term and get re-elected. They seem to do a pretty good job of getting that to happen too.
Is anyone surprised shutting down Constellation isn't any easier than shutting down any other government program? How often does that happen?
OTOH, I suppose if they're successful, it's a one-time cost. But I'm skeptical that it will ever actually be shut down. There's too much pork for too many districts for Congress to ever let that happen. The cost of the political horse-trading to make it happen will probably be expensive enough that it would be cheaper just to complete the damn program.
In this case, it is debatable if letting the Constellation program continue will be cheaper in the long run. Perhaps some interesting R&D can come from the development effort, but as was said in the Augustine Commission report, "if Constellation was ready to go and already developed, it would have to be canceled tomorrow because we can't afford it."
It shouldn't be surprising, however, that the contracts were set up in such a way that it couldn't be easily canceled. Many government projects are set up in a similar manner.... which is why it would be impossible to shut down Head Start centers or repeal the Social Security Act.
Hard to say whether that's better or worse than the common NASA "cost plus" contract where they agree to pay development costs plus an agreed profit margin. Where's the incentive for the developer to keep cost under control?
None at all. Well, relatively little incentive.
There is the potential for somebody to come in that will do the job for such a drastically cheaper price (*cough* SpaceX *cough*) that it starts to get the attention of the powers that be in the government.
Of course this is where you have military bases now authorized to head over to the local Wal-Mart or Home Depot to purchase things like hammers and toilet paper, when they can buy it from local suppliers cheaper than from a central military logistics command.
There are many reasons why spaceflight continues to be expensive, and this is a good example of why.
Because of sarbanes oxley, all of the companies would have impeccable records of time and materials spent on projects so it would be a simple matter of billing what was used. Time and materials contracts get cut short all the time, I'm not sure how this will be very complicated, unless the contractors are out to fuck NASA over. But you can't blame Obama for that
If in real life it were so simple. Depending on the contract that was signed and the interpretation of that contract in courts or by attorneys for both the contractor and the government, there is a whole lot of gray area to wiggle around here. It certainly is not so simple as to say "show me how much you spent, we will pay for that".
As for who to blame for this, I suppose we could blame the Roosevelt administration, who came up with these kind of contracts for World War II. It wouldn't surprise me if some of the contracts were mostly broilerplate that was originally written in the 1940's.
Whenever somebody suggests that space-based solar power should be used, they keep forgetting to mention the largest solar panel installation ever put into orbit:
The International Space Station
The solar panels are the defining feature to the structure, and what sets it apart from all previous space vehicles. I think the power generated on the ISS is something on the order of about 50 kilowatts.... which certainly is a fair bit to consider and something akin to a small-town power plant. Running a power cable from the Earth to the ISS is not practical, so clearly solar power is the cheapest alternative (instead of using fuel cells... the only other realistic alternative up there). If you want to see a solar power satellite, any study that ignores the ISS and the technical issues they have discovered in its construction is to me a study not even worth reading in the first place.
Arizona has some innovative solar power generation facilities, including some that are "on the grid" right now. I'd have to say though that the economics really aren't there except for those who are looking for self-sufficiency. There are some companies like Solar City which has a product that certainly is interesting and is just on the threshold of being competitive with other forms of power generation. There are also some other manufacturers of solar panel equipment, and certainly the economics of solar panels and power generation make sense in rural areas where the expense of running a power line out to a remote place is cost prohibitive.
Of course, you are missing the point that the physics in the Trek universe are unstable due to economics of Paramount Studios and the casual whims of the screenplay writers who may need a plot devices of some sort or another. Forgetting that the Trek universe is mostly explained by the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition is a mistake that most Trek fans seem to miss. I think secretly the Trek writers simply discovered a hidden tome buried in the Paramount executive suite and simple pretended that those rules were fictional.
If you can even remotely define consciousness in terms of a mathematical formula or something that can be put into a clearly defined algorithm, I might be able to bite on this concept of projecting our consciousness onto a robot of some kind.
To me, that is a couple of millenia away, not something which can be done next week. We know so stinking little about artificial intelligence that those who claim otherwise are simply raving lunatics. What we know about intelligence and sentient thought is mostly what we don't know.... sort of like what Aristotle knew about nuclear physics. He guessed correctly that there were atoms, but that was about the limit of correct understanding. I'd put our understanding of AI at about that level.
Still, no matter how hard you upgrade equipment and deal with processing delays, there is still the raw physics that must be addressed.
I admit that some of the hardware is using radio receivers which have vacuum tubes and computers processing data with core memory. This is a sort of thing that comes with "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality. It is also something that comes from government service, where it can take several different budget cycles to update equipment in a program like the Deep Space Network that generally doesn't scream for attention.
Another aspect of the Deep Space Network that needs to be considered is that it supposedly is being replaced by the "interplanetary internet" or whatever the current acronym and terminology is at the moment for the concept (it has changed a couple of times and I don't bother keeping track any more). There still is legacy hardware that is incompatible with this new communications scheme, so the DSN must be kept for awhile longer, but the money is getting dumped into the newer concept. While incredibly useful as a concept, the idea of sending internet packets around to planetary "nodes" is also going to introduce additional communications delays that simply weren't there before. Hopefully there won't be packets getting shipped off to Mars first before they go to the Moon, but that can be at least in theory happen with the routing protocols.
I would presume that "waldo" communication systems would have a more direct link to the surface of the Moon if it was to be something used on a regular basis.
What you describe sounds like space communism, complete with a politburo and five year plans.
In America, we don't have 5 year plans, they are instead eight-year plans (usually with sub-goals @ 4 years). If it can't be built or done before the next presidential administration comes to power, it will likely be canceled. Ultimately, that has been the fate of a great many NASA launchers that have been attempted since the 1970's, with more than a dozen different rocket programs that have been started and then at various stages have been shut down along the way.
When viewed from this perspective, the cancellation of Constellation is but one of many different projects which are roadkill. The one huge difference this time is that there is no "alternative" from the perspective of something designed and operated by NASA personnel.
BTW, I am a huge proponent of private industry, particularly in what should be a proven technology domain of launching vehicles into low-earth orbit. If there was something new and original in getting into orbit around the Earth, I'm all for NASA working on that. The construction of the Constellation program doesn't seem to me as something novel or original. If NASA would have built something like the original Orion spaceship (not merely spacecraft.... it was to have a crew of about 50), that would have been impressive, novel, and would have advanced spaceflight technology on a grand scale. Re-doing the Apollo project on a shoestring budget doesn't seem like a good idea in this perspective.
Anyway, 0.5% of the federal budget isn't peanuts. I think that it comes back to a lack of vision with regard to what we're trying to accomplish, so the various programs and initiatives just sort of drift on, burning money. The Apollo program was targeted and specific in what it was trying to achieve (a man on the moon) and lavishly funded as it was more to one up the USSR than achieve scientific goals. It succeeded at it's core goal, but seeing as there wasn't really a solid vision beyond that, it just petered out once we'd "been there, done that".
While I agree that the 0.5% of the federal budget is still a whole lot of money, compared to the 4%-5% of the federal budget that NASA got during the Apollo program it is not a whole lot. I think the actual figure is closer to 0.3% of the budget right now, but that is quibbling over details, and if you include "non-discretionary spending" it would be even less. The point is that most voters and folks who deride NASA think that it is getting the same funding levels that it got during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and that hasn't been the case for several decades now.
On the whole NASA does at least average if not better than that in terms of being productive and doing something with the money that it receives. What goes for gilding the lily in NASA is for most other public agencies merely normal practices. If you want to see throwing money around with no accountability, try the Department of Agriculture instead.... which BTW has a larger budget than NASA.
Robert Byrd has so many buildings and parks named after him that I'm surprised that West Virginia isn't simply renamed as the State of Byrd.
Ted Stevens, until he got essentially kicked out of office by the democrats in Alaska on false and abusive prosecution, was one of those who were a republican with massive tenure. Another that I can think of off the top of my head is Orrin Hatch (R- Utah) who has been around forever.
Living in Utah, I just about puked with the last campaign by Senator Hatch. The campaign slogan was more or less "Bringing the Bacon Home to Utah!" His campaign was essentially "Look at me! I saved Hill Air Force Base from getting closed, I brought in a whole bunch of federal programs, and isn't it cool that Utah gets a huge hunk of the Federal budget on so many programs... all because of me!"
It is one thing to deride such campaigning in another state, but until voters are willing to kick out politicians who do this sort of thing in their own state, such practices I'm sure will continue. This said, I don't think Senator Hatch would even win the nomination of his own political party right now if he were running this year.
The largest problem with term limits is that it makes for weak politicians and strong staffers.... where the "staff" of the congressmen and those who serve the political body as a whole end up doing most of the work and making the decisions on the behalf of those who are serving in supposedly the role of being a decision maker.
I have served on a political body that had extreme term limits (1 year terms with a maximum of 3 years to serve on the body) and saw that situation precisely happen. The staff who support the organization are so strong that essentially it is the staffers that run the show, as by the time anybody gets a clue about how to push back and put the staff in their place they are on their way out of the position.
That is already a major problem in the U.S. Congress, where congressional staffers write the legislation, propose the amendments, and do most of the negotiations with other congressional staffers supposedly on behalf of their elected officials. The role of a congressmen in Washington D.C. is now more of a manager than a legislator. Often, when they have to cast their vote on the floor, they act upon the advise of their staffers as the legislation is so complex that they can't possibly have understood much less actually read the legislation they are asking to vote upon. This is on top of current practices that seem to push this sort of behavior up to the next level by the current U.S. Congress.
Sometimes I wonder how much more effective Congress would be if the staff consisted of just the doorman, the capitol police, and the cafeteria workers, with perhaps a few pages to keep life interesting.
Where are politicians with guts who care more about the future of the country than getting elected with phony promises and posturing?
If you find any in D.C., let me know.
Two problems with this:
There are some "politicians" like Colin Powell who simply don't give a damn about elections and partisan politics, but then again a guy like General Powell is as often as not telling people off when his name is even suggested as a potential candidate for public office. I'm using this as an example of a leader very capable of doing the job and making a difference... in either Congress or in the White House, but somebody who doesn't want to go through the meat grinder to get there in the first place. He has the name recognition and even the general political philosophies that could even get him elected, but it is unlikely he would ever get there to do it.
So yeah, you'll see upper NASA management (and bad middle management) making decisions just as idiotic as the elected politicians - but only as a result of the politicians and NASA being a government agency.
I've seen some incredibly boneheaded decisions made by for-profit private corporations, so I don't think this is a problem restricted just to government agencies.... although I will agree that to cull this out of a government agency is borderline difficult to impossible (requiring an act of God to make changes.... as Congress won't ever get its act together to fix things).
A significant problem comes when you have a manager who has to make a decision for a technical issue that is well beyond their skill sets to even understand the problems on a realistic level. Yes, the subordinate engineers can usually try to explain the issue in simplified terms that a manager can grasp, but analogies often break down eventually where such an example doesn't really work.
It becomes even harder still when you have managers who have the technical background and expertise to be able to grasp the problem, but then those engineers have a political agenda and are masking other real problems that come up. As you said, being a politician in an environment which requires hard science to work is not necessarily compatible.
That particular experiment, to "buy out" HSX dollars, was tried back in the early days of HSX. I think the going rate at the time was 1 cent per 1m HSX bucks or something like that, with a minimum payment of $100 USD (presuming you were good enough to get into the "billionaires" club with HSX).
That particular experiment is dead and doesn't appear to be something to be revived.
No, we are talking about folks who invest real money into real movies that get spent on real actors and producers to be shown on real movie theaters. It is different here, not the virtual money.
If you would read my reply, it is essentially the same thing. BTW, even if it may not be "illegal" according to federal law, it may be according to state or local laws.
So even if you may be transferring funds from an account in say the UK or Switzerland into the on-line gambling site (so you avoid the restrictions), it may still be illegal in many localities simply for being connected at all as an individual.
Still, by prohibiting banks from the USA to process money transfers to the on-line gambling companies, it effectively eliminates the customer base from America... shy of some creative book keeping and financial gymnastics.
There are some sites that allow you to "play" with virtual money (in other words, no actual money changes hands and therefore is "legal") but then have a link from within the site that goes to the "real" on-line gambling site. A sizable amount of money still somehow makes its way out of the USA to these on-line sites regardless, including some rather interesting television advertisements and some other strange things connected to these websites.
The point of the article is that real money is going to be used and that they have filed with the SEC for "approval" as a real exchange.
As for what these guys are going to be actually buying and selling on the exchange, that is a different issue. On that, I have my doubts. It sounds like something even more intangible than the marginal insurance on Collateralized mortgage obligations that caused this current recession in the first place. The article about this concept doesn't really go into enough detail to really know what it is that is being sold here.
Hollywood Stock Exchange is a fair bit older: It dates back to the mid 1990's.
What is new here is the filing with the U.S. securities officials to be able to legally take money and to pretend it is a real stock exchange rather than a virtual one.
It is illegal to do on-line gambling in the USA. It is even more sinister than that: Any debts that happen via on-line gambling are legally unenforceable. In other words, if you run up a huge tab on your credit card for on-line gambling, all you have to do is simply assert that the debt was done for the purposes of gambling on-line and the debt will be instantly forgiven by the bank (or take the bank to court for dismissal of the debt... the same thing after a fashion). The bank either writes off the debt or does a charge-back to the on-line casino.
Funny thing about "online weed distribution businesses" (presuming that the "weed" is marijuana): In California it is legal... as long as the customer and the buyer are both in California and a medical prescription has been properly filed with the seller.
Unless I'm reading this article wrong, what is suggested here is nothing different than a sports bookie who takes bets on winners of sporting events. IMHO that is gambling, even if it isn't quite so clear from the SEC filings. It will be interesting to see how these guys get around those gambling laws.
On the "virtual" side of the Hollywood Stock Exchange, the "dividends" are paid based upon ticket sales after 4 weeks. Whatever the movie has made is then given to the "investors" which can then be re-invested into other issues.
As for the real-money aspect, the original founders of Hollywood Stock Exchange always intended to get into the real-world side of the market by trying to set up an investment market for film makers that would be based upon the same general principles, where a film project could be submitted as an IPO of sorts and have some real-world investment into the actual film via micro-transaction. In other words, mere mortals could "invest" into the actual film making costs as a sort of corporate entity.
In theory, some films might end up turning a tremendous profit, and some of the early fans of the concept could pool their money together to get the financing of some interesting project off the ground through some financing scheme like this. The stocks, when they closed under this model, would pay out based strictly on what revenue comes in.... keeping in mind Hollywood financing tricks and other garbage that would have to be reviewed incredibly closely on something like this too.
Something of this nature would be certainly interesting. Unfortunately, based on this very limited information in this article it doesn't sound like that is going to be the route this particular group will be going. It sounds more like something more akin to what Las Vegas casinos do with sports events and people betting on the success or failure of a given team winning a game. If that is the case, this would most certainly have to be classified as a gambling activity and not a legitimate security exchange.
Efficiency can be measured with many different metrics, of which fiscal cost alone is not often the primary measurement.
Particularly with vehicle going into space, the pressing need to get there and to fit within a very narrow range of parameters (such as a missile reaching the target and fitting in a certain dimension of a missile silo or submarine) that cost considerations are often secondary. Other considerations for launches from NASA also include being able to lift a substantial payloads such as those intended to reach the outer Solar System (aka probes to Jupiter and Saturn) or to lift spy satellites that weight more than a Greyhound bus.
Again, cost is not the primary factor. The question is if it can do the job, and get it up there reliably now instead of 10 years from now.
With a consistent lack of trying for a reduced cost approach to spaceflight, all that is necessary for proving fiscal responsibility is that a company building spacecraft merely get close to what their competitors have been making. It also doesn't hurt that the number of companies actually building aircraft and missiles has effectively dropped to about three: Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and ATK. Boeing and Lock-Mart are already partnered together, so who else is the government going to turn to?
The move to commercial spaceflight has been a slow and painful one for NASA. I admit that some significant effort has been made over the past decade or so in that direction, so in some ways the current shift to completely abandon the Earth to LEO launches to private industry has already been well under way for some time.
It should be noted that when the Space Shuttle was originally launched, it was not the current arrangement that exists with ULA. Instead, everybody on the pad except for some "consultants" and some who were on the payroll of the Department of Defense were all NASA employees. The bulk of the folks were doing things that are now mostly contracted out. Yes, Rockwell International built the Shuttle and certainly had their engineers on site, but it was a NASA show all the way.
I'm really curious about where ULA is going to go from here. They have the experience and through their parent companies even some vehicles like the Atlas V and the Delta IV to work with.
I've looked at the Atlas V on paper, and I'm very impressed. So much so that I wonder very much why the Ares I was even started in the first place when such a vehicle was already developed. I know the answer to that question too, but that is besides the point.
The company being left out in the cold right now is Alliant Techsystems. It was an interesting idea to turn an SRB into a manned spacelauch vehicle, but I think it may have been a mistake. Certainly there were relatively few components in common between the Ares I and the Ares V (or 6), so those were effectively separate rockets.
Anyway, I agree that there have been some efforts by some companies to avoid the cost-plus system, in part because it gives those companies some flexibility with their customers. It looks like that effort is going to pay off handsomely too. Good for ULA to be ready to take advantage of this new opportunity before them, which it looks like it will do too.