I can't help but agree that "the right stuff" is no longer there. There are a few still, and it will never go away completely, but too many are just sitting on their fat bottoms smoking pot.
Today you are more successful in the US if you work as a lawyer, work as a stock broker or is a criminal than anything else. And none of the occupations are really building any future.
Of course - this is cynic...
If you are saying that the best and brightest are no longer working for NASA, I would have to completely agree. They don't get the best any more.
For some time, the best and brightest engineers have been snagged up by Wall Street. Wall Street even uses the term "rocket scientist" for the software developers and engineers who tweak the computers for automated trading at the brokerage houses. Good for those guys too, as Wall Street pays good money for those kind of services.
In terms of lawyers being successful, there certainly are plenty of starving lawyers around, even if there are also some who do quite well. Of course that game is rigged as a majority of those who write the laws and get judges into their offices are lawyers themselves. It is unfortunate that more legislators (on both state and federal levels) in America aren't from more ordinary professions besides the legal profession. We could certainly use more in legislative bodies that are physicians or engineers.
Apollo-era NASA was not a collection of scientists and researchers. It was an engineering job, first and foremost. They took stuff that was learned in 1943 Germany and applied it on a larger scale. Big engineering job, no research at all.
It isn't exactly true that there was no research at all. There was a whole bunch of it, but I'll admit that it was applied sciences (material science and engineering research) rather than "pure" science like what was done for the planetary science expeditions of the Mariner and Voyager space probes.
The V-2 rocket had about as much in common with the Saturn V as the ENIAC has with the computer you are reading this from... other than the same lead engineer was in charge of the design of both the V-2 and the Saturn V.
All that more of a pity that the USA threw away Von Braun and his engineering team like yesterday's newspaper after Apollo 11 landed on the Moon.
I think it is worthy to note that he also achieved the rank of Major General (two-star general)... in of all things the U.S. Marine Corps. That is also by itself an impressive accomplishment in a branch that is loathsome to do promotions of any kind... at least compared to the other military branches. If it were merely for his accomplishments as an astronaut, he should have been merely a full Colonel, as it typical for most retired astronauts.
This also indicates a level of leadership skills, showing that the Marine Corps would be willing to trust him with a group of Marines at least as numerous as the number of employees that can be found at NASA. The NASA administrator and a division commander (often a Major General) could be considered quite comparable in terms of responsibilities.
Why this might be a point of contention to show a lack of qualifications boggles my mind.
I could give a point by point response on this by directly comparing the GFDL and CC-BY-SA to each other. They are different, although in the long run those difference are only enough to just fuel a flame war between those who like the GFDL and those who stand in support of the CC-BY-SA.
The invariant sections to have a purpose, as do the retitling requirements. Perhaps it takes a historical reading of those requirements to understand them, and I don't care to defend them at this time and place, other than they do serve a purpose. Perhaps not for something like Wikipedia, but there is a role to be played there to have those sections. Lawyers who laugh at this license should spend their time laughing at things even more incredulous, like the Microsoft EULA. At least the GFDL was meant to be read by mere mortals.
The GFDL was written for books, and for books it seems to work out best... even if that book is set up to be edited and developed on a wiki. There is a sense of who do you trust more, the Creative Commons governing board or the Free Software Foundation board of trustees. IMHO both are rather respectable groups of individuals and the rest is merely political infighting. Both the CC-BY-SA and the GFDL do in the long run the same thing and I do agree that for shorting things like encyclopedia articles or news reports that something like the CC-BY-SA is a much better license for textual content.
Perhaps I'm just tilting at windmills here, but I just happen to like the GFDL better and trust the FSF more. I'm not saying that everybody has to, but that I happen to. Why is that such a terrible thing?
You hit upon something that does need to be made apparent to other American taxpayers here:
NASA is not only smaller than the U.S. Air Force's space program, it is also smaller than the National Security Agency's space program as well. That is right, not just the #2 space program in America but actually it is #3... in terms of dollars spent and personnel employed on making things that go into space. That should be a hugely sobering thought by itself.
I hope that Obama actually does take a stronger interest in setting space policy, but his efforts to date seem rather lame and more resembling a policy of maintenance rather than trying to boldly set out a new course for NASA.
Well, frankly, NASA's the only part of the budget I don't mind seeing my tax dollars go to.
You go ahead believing your taxes go to Congressmen's paychecks and welfare and food stamps and Medicare...I'll hold out hoping that mine's being diverted to Orion.
I think you need to look a little closer to what is going on at NASA then. I love the idea of a government space exploration program. Having a bunch of heroes that do things like repairing a telescope in orbit and fixing it to be able to peer back in time to the very creation of the universe is something I find outstanding. This last shuttle flight was outstanding.
Unfortunately, there is no follow-up flight planned or anything like unto that to be done. The Space Shuttle program is canceled, and all that is left is to decide if perhaps one more flight might be added to the manifest.
Orion... the capsule itself... is something that may have a little bit of merit. It is essentially a revised and revamped Apollo command module capsule. The Ares rocket on the other hand is something that leaves much to be desired and is a step backward in terms of technological development. There is nothing novel or original going into that rocket and looks worse and worse as I dig into the details and how it got proposed in the first place.
No, I'm not necessarily a DIRECT fanboi either, as even that concept has its own set of problems, but at least they are trying to use some rational explanation for why they are building that vehicle. The Ares (I and V... or is that VI or IX) is merely a way to to keep folks employed at NASA who have been designing rockets. As the panic over the fact that NASA will have no manned spaceflight vehicle soon, and that it will be years before they will be able to get back up there (along with unrealistic expectations of congressional funding levels in the future) it all seems doomed to nearly certain failure.
I suppose in the grand scheme of things dumping money into Orion is still better spend taxpayer money than getting dumped into a socialized medicine feasibility study and pilot project. That I might agree with. Still, there is so much better work that could be done with those funds that it makes me cry thinking about what could be done and comparing that to what is being done with that money.
There are a number of valuable aspects to space exploration.
First and foremost, there are more and better accessible resources of nearly every kind to be found in space. Contrary to detractors of this issue, the problem isn't getting the stuff to the Earth, but rather getting there in the first place with enough equipment to obtain those resources in the first place.
By resources, I mean heavy metals (gold, silver, platinum, iron, copper, aluminum, uranium, and much more) and energy that is available in such staggering amounts that it boggles the mind to even comprehend what is available. All of these can be obtained using existing technologies, or with technologies that have at least had some minor demonstration projects that aren't really exotic or different from what we are already doing on the Earth. Indeed, reducing iron oxide to pure iron is much, much easier to do in space and even beneficial for its "pollutants" (mainly oxygen).
On top of all this, these minerals and resources can be obtained with a much more minimal impact on the environment here on the Earth. If you genuinely are concerned about global warming, trying to figure out how to feed a growing global population, learning how to predict and avoid natural disasters like tsuamis and hurricanes.... all of this demands a strong and growing presence in space.
If that weren't enough, the countries and peoples that "control the high ground" will also have the military advantage in any future conflicts. Simply put, if the country you are in doesn't have a strong presence in space (or have a strong ally in space), you are screwed and doomed to be invaded or destroyed as a nation. The economic rationale is a strong one and has a huge and more immediate impact, but this military issue is all that more important to remember, and ultimately the one that got America and Russia into space in the first place. Worries about weapons in space are misplaced.... they are already there and have been deployed there for decades, regardless of what governments may have said in the past.
In addition to all of the above reasons, whenever people get into a new situation and have to work on solutions for new problems, that knowledge gained from living in that new environment can be adapted to other situations back in more familiar territory. Just being in a new situation will allow neural synapses to be organized in a new configuration within your brain, meaning that you are literally going to be thinking differently than others who have not been in that situation, such as being an astronaut in space. This is going to give a diversity of experience that will ultimately enrich all of humanity just simply by being there at all. For this reason alone, it is a pity that more people have not been to the Moon than the dozen men that went there.... we certainly don't have a female perspective of what it is like to walk on the Moon.
The scientific, political, and cultural knowledge that can be gained by going into space is something that is literally immeasurable. If we don't get into space and stay there... and expand our presence in space, humanity is doomed to extinction. It will have also been a waste of life for us to not get there.
Now as to if NASA is the best way to accomplish the task of going into space for Americans, that is something of a much more worthy debate. The key to unleashing the potential of space exploration is to drastically reduce the cost of getting up there in the first place. Common ordinary citizens need to have the ability to go up there and become prospectors, settlers, amateur explorers, and artists... and do so without having a government hand-out to get there.
NASA has supposedly been trying to reduce the cost of going into space with multiple vehicle prototypes like the Space Shuttle, Venture Star, DC-X, and so many other vehicles that it is nearly impossible to name all of the vehicle designs that have been proposed and in many cases had some initial hardware built for those designs. It
It is a series of somewhat or even merely marginally related pork barrel projects created to provide economic stimulus to the aerospace engineering field. Each feast/famine cycle creates enough new engineers that when the next bust cycle happens there are enough unemployed engineers and technicians to start the next round of technology start-ups at pitiful wages.
Does it have much if anything to do with space itself? Not really. Since NASA is now going to be without a spacecraft to send up astronauts for the next dozen years or so (assuming that the Orion/Ares vehicles ever even get built) they might as well kill off the astronaut corp while they are at it.
I hate to be this pessimistic about NASA, and they did a lot of good back in the day. It is increasingly becoming ossified with institutional paranoia about trying anything new or even remotely dangerous (called risk aversion) and so much political in-fighting about a host of problems that for me it would be better to simply kill NASA as an agency altogether.
This is hardly the first time I've said this as well, but it is increasingly becoming more and more apparent all of the time. The aviation research could be done by the National Science Foundation (the first "A" in NASA) or reassigned to the FAA instead. Let the Jet Propulsion Lab be an independent agency with its own budget and a couple of the more valuable parts of NASA kept in the hands of other agencies (like NOAA) and then there is no reason at all to keep NASA.
There is no reason to care about space because there is nothing in NASA to care about other than NASA pork-barrel jobs in your own congressional district. That and that alone is all that is keeping NASA going at the moment.
From my point of view, it was a sort of take over of the content by the Creative Commons governing board. While the ultimate achievement may be in the long run a good thing, the back room politics involved in getting this to happen involved a whole bunch of self-interested folks who not just disliked the GFDL but viscerally hated the license to its core.
This is something that has been an on going fight on Wikimedia projects for some time, but at the moment those in support of the Creative Commons licensing seem to have the upper hand, and this is an irreversible decision.
For myself, I have been presented the choice of going with the GFDL or with CC-BY-SA, and by deliberate choice and understanding both licenses I have chosen the GFDL on more than one occasion. No, I'm not enamored with the Free Software Foundation, but I do appreciate some of the aspects of the GFDL that are being lost with this move.
I would have preferred a wiki-oriented fork of the license that remained within the scope of a GNU license, and I suppose that Richard Stallman considered that approach as well. In fact, that was mentioned in some of the discussion of the last round of revising the GFDL.
The point is though that a fork of the GFDL is essentially what has happened here, but that the Creative Commons governing board is now in control rather than the Free Software Foundation in terms of the future of this wiki-oriented fork of the GFDL.
BTW, while there may be problems with the GFDL in regards to wiki development, at least it gave some structure to the discussion about wiki licensing and a basis to see what a future license of wiki content might look like.
While I do think what you were describing here is of a trollish nature (by trying to follow your interpretation of the GFDL to the letter and being disruptive), I will agree that commentary about the GFDL and discussion of its finer points on Wikipedia leave much to be desired.
I have also been concerned about author citations on Wikipedia, and there has been a rather relaxed attitude about the whole process of citing those authors. That this may backfire some day when authorship can be proven but no possible means of citing that author on Wikipedia using existing software tools can be reasonably found is of concern. All it takes is one author to push the point and turn it into an issue, although that may require going through the judicial process.
IMHO, this license switch is only going to make an ugly situation in this case only worse, where a judge and jury unfamiliar with the nuances of various free content licenses are forced to examine the differences in an even more complicated legal maze.
Have you read section 11 of the GFDL, version 1.3?
There is no possible way to read that section without realizing it is specifically tailored to Wikipedia and only Wikipedia, even though other wikis that fit in the time frame of having been established prior to November 1st, 2008 and make the switch prior to August 1st, 2009 can also fit through the crack. The purpose of the vote is to make sure Wikipedia makes the switch before the August deadline.
This is a one-time only thing and was written into the GFDL explicitly due to pressure from the Wikimedia Foundation. After this deadline, you won't be able to make the switch, and it doesn't allow relicensing of content as you are suggesting here. It doesn't matter if it is on a publiclly editable website, nor if there is similar intent.
The FSF actually got the GFDL changed so that Wikipedia would be able to ditch it.
Correct that:
The Wikimedia Foundation got the FSF to change the GFDL so Wikipedia could ditch it.
There are a bunch of Creative Commons fanbois on the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees and in the Wikipedia community at large, and it is those fans that have been pushing for this change for some time. This vote being referenced is merely the last chance for Wikipedia to remain under the umbrella of the GFDL and a license under control of the Free Software Foundation. The move to make this happen in the first place happened more than a year ago and arguably even much longer before that.
"Massive Multiauthor Collaboration Site" (or "MMC Site") means any World Wide Web server that publishes copyrightable works and also provides prominent facilities for anybody to edit those works. A public wiki that anybody can edit is an example of such a server. A "Massive Multiauthor Collaboration" (or "MMC") contained in the site means any set of copyrightable works thus published on the MMC site.
"CC-BY-SA" means the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license published by Creative Commons Corporation, a not-for-profit corporation with a principal place of business in San Francisco, California, as well as future copyleft versions of that license published by that same organization.
"Incorporate" means to publish or republish a Document, in whole or in part, as part of another Document.
An MMC is "eligible for relicensing" if it is licensed under this License, and if all works that were first published under this License somewhere other than this MMC, and subsequently incorporated in whole or in part into the MMC, (1) had no cover texts or invariant sections, and (2) were thus incorporated prior to November 1, 2008.
The operator of an MMC Site may republish an MMC contained in the site under CC-BY-SA on the same site at any time before August 1, 2009, provided the MMC is eligible for relicensing.
This really ought to be called the Wikipedia clause, and likely will be if it is discussed in the future. The purpose of the date is to say "good riddens" to Wikipedia and explicitly allow for this licensing change. The Wikimedia Foundation pressured the Free Software Foundation to put this clause in, so the decision to switch licenses is really a fairly old issue.
The only rule on Wikipedia in this regard is that all content added to Wikipedia must be licensed under the terms of the GFDL.... although many users have explicitly dual and multi licensed their content under other licenses, including CC-BY-SA well before changes in the GFDL allowed this switch to happen.
BTW, on the Wikimedia Commons site, if you uploaded images and other non-textual content, you are free to select whatever license for that content you wanted to upload... as long as you are the original artist that created the content. The license must be one of the "open source" licenses, but there is a huge variety of options to choose from there. The main rule of thumb is that the image must be somewhat compatible with the GFDL and now the CC-BY-SA license to not cause too much grief.
This isn't even something new, and has been a long-standing practice on Wikipedia as well... at least for images. The one restriction on Wikipedia is that it must be something actually used in an article or something constructive toward building the encyclopedia. Random snapshots are discouraged if the only reason you are throwing the image onto Wikipedia is to find a website willing to host the image.
The point of the GFDL was to provide a licensing approach to textual content that was compatible in philosophy to the GPL. More specific, the GPL was simply inappropriate to be used in a text-only type document and something more needed to be made so user documentation of GPL'd software could be distributed under similar terms.
If you dive into the fine minutiae of the GFDL, there are some terms and clauses (especially the much maligned invariant sections) that do offer some value and offer licensing terms that are not offered in any of the Creative Commons licenses. If you are publishing a book-length document, you may still want to strongly consider the current GFDL for that document... particularly if you are already committed to the GPL and things tied to the Free Software Foundation.
For my own perspective, the GFDL also goes more into the exceptions and has stronger language to strengthen the viral nature of that license. In other words, content written under the terms of the GFDL strongly encourages additions and similar content to remain in the scope of the GFDL and not change licenses. It is subtle and ultimately something that only lawyers would genuinely appreciate, but there are some larger differences.
BTW, the CC-BY-SA license and the GPL are still mutually exclusive licenses... where content under one can't be used at all in the other except under terms of fair-use and fair-dealing. That is a legal ouch that should be addressed in the future.
I'm not saying there should only be one free-as-in-speech license for written materials. We do need at least two, because there are real philosophical differences between BSD-style licenses and GPL-style licenses.
CC-BY and CC-BY-SA appear to nicely fit the roles you mention. But the credit removal requirement in even CC-BY might cause license incompatibility if a free program under a GNU license uses CC-BY images, audio, etc. Or am I misreading the definition of "aggregate" in the GPL?
This is the one thing that IMHO is one of the things that makes working with any of the Creative Commons licenses so difficult.
CC-BY != CC-BY-SA != CC-SA != CC-SA-NC
I've been caught in the trap of referencing one license by shorthand when it really is another license that is being discussed, and getting into philosophical discussions about each of the various Creative Commons licenses.
Or to put it more bluntly, there is no "Creative Commons license".... there is a whole bunch of 'em and they are mostly incompatible with each other. At least if you were referencing the GFDL, you knew you were talking about a specific document that was well defined without this sort of ambiguity.
Yes, I do understand the rationale for all of the different licenses, and there are good things to be had from each variant. Still, this ambiguity is going to be only a larger source of frustration in the future and IMHO is only going to get worse with Wikipedia joining the ranks of Creative Commons-licensed content.
I assume this includes all the talk pages, user profile pages, votes for deletion pages, nerd rage about pictures of a human turd and pages outlining wikipedia policies right?
This is a fair question, actually, even if it is posed in a rough AC manner.
The short answer is yes, it includes all of these other pages as well, including stuff subject to deletion and spam put on Wikipedia by vandals.
That doesn't make goatse.cx now available under the terms of the CC-BY-SA license, but it does make this page available under those terms, and any side commentaries on the topic as well, even if it is otherwise off-topic on other pages of Wikipedia.
GNU FDL was chosen as CC was not available at the time. Now CC has additionally become an accepted standard with a lot of material out there. It is great news as this makes it easier to mix content from and to their projects.
While that may have been Jimbo Wales motivation for the GNU FDL, the real truth goes a bit deeper than even that. This is far too simple of an explaination.
There was another encyclopedia effort called the GNU-pedia being led by none other than Richard Stallman who tried to start an open-source collaboratively written encyclopedia. This was started about the same time that Nupedia was just getting off the ground as well. Nupedia had a slight head-start in terms of getting going a little bit earlier, although the licensing terms for Nupedia were not nailed down as the whole concept of an open-source encyclopedia was still getting established.
Due to the bureaucratic overhead in Nupedia, a much more free-form wiki-style encyclopedia was created by many of the participants in this early encyclopedia effort, and that became what we know today as Wikipedia. Again, with the already established crowd with ties to GNU projects and committed to the general philosophy of the GPL, the GNU FDL was a natural choice... where that document license was just being released. Having Richard Stallman brow beat Jimmy Wales certainly didn't hurt either, although I don't think it was that hard of a decision to be made at the time.
BTW, there were other "open source" type licenses at the time besides the GFDL, even if what we know today as the "Creative Commons" suite of licenses didn't really exist in its current form.
All that has really happened here is the "or later version" clause of the GFDL has been allowed to include a somewhat similar philosophical Creative Commons license as something considered a later version or edition of this particular license. What the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees has done is to make a political move to explicitly move the content of the Wikimedia projects (not just Wikipedia) to the Creative Commons license explicitly mentioned in that new clause.
That the WMF board also helped to write that clause of the GFDL due to placing political pressure on Richard Stallman and those involved in the Free Software Foundation sort of brings this thing full circle as well. A lot more is happening here besides "the folks at Wikipedia seeing the light" and suddenly deciding to switch licenses.
BTW, I do think harmonization of the various free document licenses is on the whole a good thing, and having the weight of the Wikipedia editors and enthusiasts championing a broader license in terms of something used in more documents can only make that resulting license a much more stable license and less likely to be modified to something generally unacceptable to that community.
Still, to suggest that the GFDL was chosen only because the CC-BY-SA license was not yet written is a gross oversimplification of what really happened and doesn't tell the true story. Those who put reliance on the GPL, however, beware. That license could have the same thing happen in the future, based on whatever whim or political winds happen that can influence the Free Software Foundation.
The one thing that I do regret never happened is some sort of harmonization between the GPL and GFDL.... primarily in regards to open source textbooks and commentaries on software design. It at least had a shot with the licensing staying within the scope of the Free Software Foundation, but now that the Creative Commons governing body is in charge, it seems like something that will never happen. This is still a problem with the CC-BY-SA license and won't get resolved any time in the near future.
I'm just saying that it seems there's a better use for your tax dollars than making sure your government doesn't work.
As long as you understand the basic principle that governments... at least "liberal" western democracies... are explicitly by design to be inefficient and wasteful with both manpower and all other standards, go ahead and try to streamline them. It is a futile effort or it will be destructive of basic freedoms.
The best use for a tax dollar is to keep it in the hands of a taxpayer whenever possible. There are valid purposes of government, but far too often (even within the law enforcement community, BTW) the role of governance is expanded far beyond its original intended purpose.
In this case, it is a matter of trust that the ordinary citizens will get things right if left to themselves. This is just as valid for airport security as it is for neighborhood watch patrols of fellow citizens.
A cost-efficient law enforcement agency is what you had in Nazi Germany, or in Soviet Russia. During the Soviet era, the police was one of the few agencies that actually worked, and is still one of the reasons why people in Russia long to have the old Communist government get back into power. In both of these governments, the trust in the ordinary citizen was not only lost, but axiomatically never there in the first place.
They are not "forcing" people to do anything. If they don't want to be groped or have their clothing seen through, then they have a choice to not fly commercial airlines.
Right. What is the alternative? Seriously?
Can you get on a train and travel to your destination in under a day or so? Across the ocean? Oh, I guess you are going to travel by ship from New Orleans to Honolulu and make it there in under a day or so?
This is an absurd response hardly worthy of reply, other than the fact that it is an erosion of personal liberties. While not expressly listed in the Bill of Rights, the "right to travel" certainly is something that could be considered a personal liberty.
I would love to see an experiment done where you would have two terminals... one with pre-9/11 security screenings (heck, make it pre-Gulf War airport security), and one with this current TSA stuff. Have flights to the same or similar destinations. Which airport and flights would you think people would be willing to fly out of? Too bad such an experiment would never be tried.
The entire situation is idiotic anyway. 9/11 won't happen again because people aren't going to sit there while someone takes over a plane again. People let it happen then because it was always understood that you just got flown somewhere and probably ended up being ok.
I mention this time and again myself. Airline policy for hijackers pre-9/11 was to give the hijacker whatever they wanted... and if they are in the air to let them go to just about anywhere they wanted to go. The passengers mostly thought of it as going on an unexpected vacation to someplace like Havana.
One other thing that is missing from this whole picture is that 9/11 was caused by state-sponsored terrorist. They were essentially soldiers fighting a war using methods that are essentially prohibited under the Geneva Convention, and given a free pass to engage in those methods and given formal government-sponsored training, leadership, and logistical support to perform those acts of war.
Al-Qaeda was essentially a free-lance paramilitary group who was formally sponsored by both the Afghanistan (via the Taliban) and Saudi governments. They could not have done the things they did without the explicit support of those governmental authorities. You could argue Al-Qaeda also had support from Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and Iran, but that just suggests that other governments were also interested in seeing the USA get knocked down a few pegs.
If the point is that the 9/11 attacks were part of a deliberate act of war by one government against another government.... it is that government who initiated the attacks that should be held accountable for that act. The airport security "improvements" might be useful for a short period of time to stop an infiltration of critical infrastructure by a foreign government, but there is no reason to believe that a determined enemy government is going to try the same tactic again. Most military planners are not that stupid.
A lone idiot wanting to "go postal" and take a few people with him? Yeah, airport security does stop that sort of lone idiot. But that isn't what caused 9/11 or why these security measures are being put into place.
You seem to contradict yourself here. If it isn't for show, then it wouldn't be for CYA either.
BTW, I do agree that this is a politician's way of doing CYA... or at least the way for the elected leaders to "demonstrate" to their constituents that they are "doing something" to fix the situation. It doesn't apply just to terrorist incidents and airport security either... can you say say "economic bailout"?
The next time there is a major terrorist incident in the USA, it won't happen on an airplane. It will be on a ship or with a truck bomb like the one that took out the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Will it mean that you have to get a full body scan just to use the on-ramp of a freeway?
In counter point, the purpose of the U.S. Constitution is explicitly to make the job of governing more difficult... indeed much more difficult. The founders of the American Republic knew from first hand experience that tyrants and individuals in high positions of authority tend to abuse that authority. So the constitution tried to set up policies and procedures of governance that would diffuse that authority to as many people as possible, with the understanding that from time to time you do need somebody in a position to make a decision that is hard to make.
This is not restricted to the Bill of Rights, but the whole concept and philosophy of government. Any kind of legislation that promotes this general philosophy is in my opinion something to be admired, and legislation that concentrates authority something to be feared.
I also find that making life difficult for police officers is typically not nearly as bad as police associations want you to think it may be. If there is any position in society that concentrates authority in regards to an individual citizen, it is the law enforcement officers. They are judge, jury, and prosecutor simultaneously, and from a certain point of view what happens in the court room when they are through is merely an appellate review of their decision... mostly by people who are already close friends with the officer and willing to take the officer's viewpoint of events.
Generally, a truly professional law enforcement officer will understand legitimate restrictions of their authority and be willing to work within those restraints... realizing that it could be themselves in the same situation in the future. Yes, there are stupid regulations made up by somebody completely unfamiliar with law enforcement responsibilities that do get made by an anonymous bureaucrat that seem to defy reality. Even then, I'd suggest most of those rules were set up to deal with past abuses that you may not be aware of.
Ordinary Occam's Razor parsimony says that it is far more likely that multi-trillion dollar financial interests in fossil fuel use are actively manipulating public perception and government science (read Bush Administration), than that nickel and dime enterprises profiting from trading carbon credits have managed to dupe the overwhelming majority of scientists, the public, and all of the world's governments.
"Who benefits?" When we ask this simple question we see that the bias is very strong for denial of climate change because so many benefit so largely from denying that CO2 is involved.
I don't get it. If there really has been peak oil production as claimed, and that oil production is going down world-wide, it would seem to me that it would be in the best interests of "big oil" to engage in energy production technologies that will help them out when that oil finally stops flowing. Furthermore, there are a great many chemicals and substances created from petroleum (and from coal) that have absolutely nothing to do with energy production and distribution... and in fact are far more valuable as well to be used in non-energy related areas.
IMHO, it is the "multi-trillion dollar financial interests in fossil fuel use" that stand to benefit economically if the carbon credit trading takes place.
QED, it is obvious that "big oil" is financing the environmental movement... if you use the same logic as described above. It is "big oil" that will benefit the most... or at least will still make billions of dollars in profit regardless of what political philosophy wins out in the end.
This isn't a grand conspiracy, but rather a pure political issue that should be debated in political terms. Also, don't be so critical of the Bush administration until after you've seen the garbage being produced by the Obama administration and the sewage that left the Clinton administration. The differences might not be all that much in the long run anyway.
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I can't help but agree that "the right stuff" is no longer there. There are a few still, and it will never go away completely, but too many are just sitting on their fat bottoms smoking pot.
Today you are more successful in the US if you work as a lawyer, work as a stock broker or is a criminal than anything else. And none of the occupations are really building any future.
Of course - this is cynic...
If you are saying that the best and brightest are no longer working for NASA, I would have to completely agree. They don't get the best any more.
For some time, the best and brightest engineers have been snagged up by Wall Street. Wall Street even uses the term "rocket scientist" for the software developers and engineers who tweak the computers for automated trading at the brokerage houses. Good for those guys too, as Wall Street pays good money for those kind of services.
In terms of lawyers being successful, there certainly are plenty of starving lawyers around, even if there are also some who do quite well. Of course that game is rigged as a majority of those who write the laws and get judges into their offices are lawyers themselves. It is unfortunate that more legislators (on both state and federal levels) in America aren't from more ordinary professions besides the legal profession. We could certainly use more in legislative bodies that are physicians or engineers.
Apollo-era NASA was not a collection of scientists and researchers. It was an engineering job, first and foremost. They took stuff that was learned in 1943 Germany and applied it on a larger scale. Big engineering job, no research at all.
It isn't exactly true that there was no research at all. There was a whole bunch of it, but I'll admit that it was applied sciences (material science and engineering research) rather than "pure" science like what was done for the planetary science expeditions of the Mariner and Voyager space probes.
The V-2 rocket had about as much in common with the Saturn V as the ENIAC has with the computer you are reading this from... other than the same lead engineer was in charge of the design of both the V-2 and the Saturn V.
All that more of a pity that the USA threw away Von Braun and his engineering team like yesterday's newspaper after Apollo 11 landed on the Moon.
I think it is worthy to note that he also achieved the rank of Major General (two-star general)... in of all things the U.S. Marine Corps. That is also by itself an impressive accomplishment in a branch that is loathsome to do promotions of any kind... at least compared to the other military branches. If it were merely for his accomplishments as an astronaut, he should have been merely a full Colonel, as it typical for most retired astronauts.
This also indicates a level of leadership skills, showing that the Marine Corps would be willing to trust him with a group of Marines at least as numerous as the number of employees that can be found at NASA. The NASA administrator and a division commander (often a Major General) could be considered quite comparable in terms of responsibilities.
Why this might be a point of contention to show a lack of qualifications boggles my mind.
I could give a point by point response on this by directly comparing the GFDL and CC-BY-SA to each other. They are different, although in the long run those difference are only enough to just fuel a flame war between those who like the GFDL and those who stand in support of the CC-BY-SA.
The invariant sections to have a purpose, as do the retitling requirements. Perhaps it takes a historical reading of those requirements to understand them, and I don't care to defend them at this time and place, other than they do serve a purpose. Perhaps not for something like Wikipedia, but there is a role to be played there to have those sections. Lawyers who laugh at this license should spend their time laughing at things even more incredulous, like the Microsoft EULA. At least the GFDL was meant to be read by mere mortals.
The GFDL was written for books, and for books it seems to work out best... even if that book is set up to be edited and developed on a wiki. There is a sense of who do you trust more, the Creative Commons governing board or the Free Software Foundation board of trustees. IMHO both are rather respectable groups of individuals and the rest is merely political infighting. Both the CC-BY-SA and the GFDL do in the long run the same thing and I do agree that for shorting things like encyclopedia articles or news reports that something like the CC-BY-SA is a much better license for textual content.
Perhaps I'm just tilting at windmills here, but I just happen to like the GFDL better and trust the FSF more. I'm not saying that everybody has to, but that I happen to. Why is that such a terrible thing?
You hit upon something that does need to be made apparent to other American taxpayers here:
NASA is not only smaller than the U.S. Air Force's space program, it is also smaller than the National Security Agency's space program as well. That is right, not just the #2 space program in America but actually it is #3... in terms of dollars spent and personnel employed on making things that go into space. That should be a hugely sobering thought by itself.
I hope that Obama actually does take a stronger interest in setting space policy, but his efforts to date seem rather lame and more resembling a policy of maintenance rather than trying to boldly set out a new course for NASA.
Well, frankly, NASA's the only part of the budget I don't mind seeing my tax dollars go to.
You go ahead believing your taxes go to Congressmen's paychecks and welfare and food stamps and Medicare...I'll hold out hoping that mine's being diverted to Orion.
I think you need to look a little closer to what is going on at NASA then. I love the idea of a government space exploration program. Having a bunch of heroes that do things like repairing a telescope in orbit and fixing it to be able to peer back in time to the very creation of the universe is something I find outstanding. This last shuttle flight was outstanding.
Unfortunately, there is no follow-up flight planned or anything like unto that to be done. The Space Shuttle program is canceled, and all that is left is to decide if perhaps one more flight might be added to the manifest.
Orion... the capsule itself... is something that may have a little bit of merit. It is essentially a revised and revamped Apollo command module capsule. The Ares rocket on the other hand is something that leaves much to be desired and is a step backward in terms of technological development. There is nothing novel or original going into that rocket and looks worse and worse as I dig into the details and how it got proposed in the first place.
No, I'm not necessarily a DIRECT fanboi either, as even that concept has its own set of problems, but at least they are trying to use some rational explanation for why they are building that vehicle. The Ares (I and V... or is that VI or IX) is merely a way to to keep folks employed at NASA who have been designing rockets. As the panic over the fact that NASA will have no manned spaceflight vehicle soon, and that it will be years before they will be able to get back up there (along with unrealistic expectations of congressional funding levels in the future) it all seems doomed to nearly certain failure.
I suppose in the grand scheme of things dumping money into Orion is still better spend taxpayer money than getting dumped into a socialized medicine feasibility study and pilot project. That I might agree with. Still, there is so much better work that could be done with those funds that it makes me cry thinking about what could be done and comparing that to what is being done with that money.
There are a number of valuable aspects to space exploration.
First and foremost, there are more and better accessible resources of nearly every kind to be found in space. Contrary to detractors of this issue, the problem isn't getting the stuff to the Earth, but rather getting there in the first place with enough equipment to obtain those resources in the first place.
By resources, I mean heavy metals (gold, silver, platinum, iron, copper, aluminum, uranium, and much more) and energy that is available in such staggering amounts that it boggles the mind to even comprehend what is available. All of these can be obtained using existing technologies, or with technologies that have at least had some minor demonstration projects that aren't really exotic or different from what we are already doing on the Earth. Indeed, reducing iron oxide to pure iron is much, much easier to do in space and even beneficial for its "pollutants" (mainly oxygen).
On top of all this, these minerals and resources can be obtained with a much more minimal impact on the environment here on the Earth. If you genuinely are concerned about global warming, trying to figure out how to feed a growing global population, learning how to predict and avoid natural disasters like tsuamis and hurricanes.... all of this demands a strong and growing presence in space.
If that weren't enough, the countries and peoples that "control the high ground" will also have the military advantage in any future conflicts. Simply put, if the country you are in doesn't have a strong presence in space (or have a strong ally in space), you are screwed and doomed to be invaded or destroyed as a nation. The economic rationale is a strong one and has a huge and more immediate impact, but this military issue is all that more important to remember, and ultimately the one that got America and Russia into space in the first place. Worries about weapons in space are misplaced.... they are already there and have been deployed there for decades, regardless of what governments may have said in the past.
In addition to all of the above reasons, whenever people get into a new situation and have to work on solutions for new problems, that knowledge gained from living in that new environment can be adapted to other situations back in more familiar territory. Just being in a new situation will allow neural synapses to be organized in a new configuration within your brain, meaning that you are literally going to be thinking differently than others who have not been in that situation, such as being an astronaut in space. This is going to give a diversity of experience that will ultimately enrich all of humanity just simply by being there at all. For this reason alone, it is a pity that more people have not been to the Moon than the dozen men that went there.... we certainly don't have a female perspective of what it is like to walk on the Moon.
The scientific, political, and cultural knowledge that can be gained by going into space is something that is literally immeasurable. If we don't get into space and stay there... and expand our presence in space, humanity is doomed to extinction. It will have also been a waste of life for us to not get there.
Now as to if NASA is the best way to accomplish the task of going into space for Americans, that is something of a much more worthy debate. The key to unleashing the potential of space exploration is to drastically reduce the cost of getting up there in the first place. Common ordinary citizens need to have the ability to go up there and become prospectors, settlers, amateur explorers, and artists... and do so without having a government hand-out to get there.
NASA has supposedly been trying to reduce the cost of going into space with multiple vehicle prototypes like the Space Shuttle, Venture Star, DC-X, and so many other vehicles that it is nearly impossible to name all of the vehicle designs that have been proposed and in many cases had some initial hardware built for those designs. It
What is NASA?
It is a series of somewhat or even merely marginally related pork barrel projects created to provide economic stimulus to the aerospace engineering field. Each feast/famine cycle creates enough new engineers that when the next bust cycle happens there are enough unemployed engineers and technicians to start the next round of technology start-ups at pitiful wages.
Does it have much if anything to do with space itself? Not really. Since NASA is now going to be without a spacecraft to send up astronauts for the next dozen years or so (assuming that the Orion/Ares vehicles ever even get built) they might as well kill off the astronaut corp while they are at it.
I hate to be this pessimistic about NASA, and they did a lot of good back in the day. It is increasingly becoming ossified with institutional paranoia about trying anything new or even remotely dangerous (called risk aversion) and so much political in-fighting about a host of problems that for me it would be better to simply kill NASA as an agency altogether.
This is hardly the first time I've said this as well, but it is increasingly becoming more and more apparent all of the time. The aviation research could be done by the National Science Foundation (the first "A" in NASA) or reassigned to the FAA instead. Let the Jet Propulsion Lab be an independent agency with its own budget and a couple of the more valuable parts of NASA kept in the hands of other agencies (like NOAA) and then there is no reason at all to keep NASA.
There is no reason to care about space because there is nothing in NASA to care about other than NASA pork-barrel jobs in your own congressional district. That and that alone is all that is keeping NASA going at the moment.
From my point of view, it was a sort of take over of the content by the Creative Commons governing board. While the ultimate achievement may be in the long run a good thing, the back room politics involved in getting this to happen involved a whole bunch of self-interested folks who not just disliked the GFDL but viscerally hated the license to its core.
This is something that has been an on going fight on Wikimedia projects for some time, but at the moment those in support of the Creative Commons licensing seem to have the upper hand, and this is an irreversible decision.
For myself, I have been presented the choice of going with the GFDL or with CC-BY-SA, and by deliberate choice and understanding both licenses I have chosen the GFDL on more than one occasion. No, I'm not enamored with the Free Software Foundation, but I do appreciate some of the aspects of the GFDL that are being lost with this move.
I would have preferred a wiki-oriented fork of the license that remained within the scope of a GNU license, and I suppose that Richard Stallman considered that approach as well. In fact, that was mentioned in some of the discussion of the last round of revising the GFDL.
The point is though that a fork of the GFDL is essentially what has happened here, but that the Creative Commons governing board is now in control rather than the Free Software Foundation in terms of the future of this wiki-oriented fork of the GFDL.
BTW, while there may be problems with the GFDL in regards to wiki development, at least it gave some structure to the discussion about wiki licensing and a basis to see what a future license of wiki content might look like.
While I do think what you were describing here is of a trollish nature (by trying to follow your interpretation of the GFDL to the letter and being disruptive), I will agree that commentary about the GFDL and discussion of its finer points on Wikipedia leave much to be desired.
I have also been concerned about author citations on Wikipedia, and there has been a rather relaxed attitude about the whole process of citing those authors. That this may backfire some day when authorship can be proven but no possible means of citing that author on Wikipedia using existing software tools can be reasonably found is of concern. All it takes is one author to push the point and turn it into an issue, although that may require going through the judicial process.
IMHO, this license switch is only going to make an ugly situation in this case only worse, where a judge and jury unfamiliar with the nuances of various free content licenses are forced to examine the differences in an even more complicated legal maze.
Have you read section 11 of the GFDL, version 1.3?
There is no possible way to read that section without realizing it is specifically tailored to Wikipedia and only Wikipedia, even though other wikis that fit in the time frame of having been established prior to November 1st, 2008 and make the switch prior to August 1st, 2009 can also fit through the crack. The purpose of the vote is to make sure Wikipedia makes the switch before the August deadline.
This is a one-time only thing and was written into the GFDL explicitly due to pressure from the Wikimedia Foundation. After this deadline, you won't be able to make the switch, and it doesn't allow relicensing of content as you are suggesting here. It doesn't matter if it is on a publiclly editable website, nor if there is similar intent.
The FSF actually got the GFDL changed so that Wikipedia would be able to ditch it.
Correct that:
The Wikimedia Foundation got the FSF to change the GFDL so Wikipedia could ditch it.
There are a bunch of Creative Commons fanbois on the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees and in the Wikipedia community at large, and it is those fans that have been pushing for this change for some time. This vote being referenced is merely the last chance for Wikipedia to remain under the umbrella of the GFDL and a license under control of the Free Software Foundation. The move to make this happen in the first place happened more than a year ago and arguably even much longer before that.
The exact clause is this:
11. RELICENSING
"Massive Multiauthor Collaboration Site" (or "MMC Site") means any World Wide Web server that publishes copyrightable works and also provides prominent facilities for anybody to edit those works. A public wiki that anybody can edit is an example of such a server. A "Massive Multiauthor Collaboration" (or "MMC") contained in the site means any set of copyrightable works thus published on the MMC site.
"CC-BY-SA" means the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license published by Creative Commons Corporation, a not-for-profit corporation with a principal place of business in San Francisco, California, as well as future copyleft versions of that license published by that same organization.
"Incorporate" means to publish or republish a Document, in whole or in part, as part of another Document.
An MMC is "eligible for relicensing" if it is licensed under this License, and if all works that were first published under this License somewhere other than this MMC, and subsequently incorporated in whole or in part into the MMC, (1) had no cover texts or invariant sections, and (2) were thus incorporated prior to November 1, 2008.
The operator of an MMC Site may republish an MMC contained in the site under CC-BY-SA on the same site at any time before August 1, 2009, provided the MMC is eligible for relicensing.
This really ought to be called the Wikipedia clause, and likely will be if it is discussed in the future. The purpose of the date is to say "good riddens" to Wikipedia and explicitly allow for this licensing change. The Wikimedia Foundation pressured the Free Software Foundation to put this clause in, so the decision to switch licenses is really a fairly old issue.
The only rule on Wikipedia in this regard is that all content added to Wikipedia must be licensed under the terms of the GFDL.... although many users have explicitly dual and multi licensed their content under other licenses, including CC-BY-SA well before changes in the GFDL allowed this switch to happen.
BTW, on the Wikimedia Commons site, if you uploaded images and other non-textual content, you are free to select whatever license for that content you wanted to upload... as long as you are the original artist that created the content. The license must be one of the "open source" licenses, but there is a huge variety of options to choose from there. The main rule of thumb is that the image must be somewhat compatible with the GFDL and now the CC-BY-SA license to not cause too much grief.
This isn't even something new, and has been a long-standing practice on Wikipedia as well... at least for images. The one restriction on Wikipedia is that it must be something actually used in an article or something constructive toward building the encyclopedia. Random snapshots are discouraged if the only reason you are throwing the image onto Wikipedia is to find a website willing to host the image.
The point of the GFDL was to provide a licensing approach to textual content that was compatible in philosophy to the GPL. More specific, the GPL was simply inappropriate to be used in a text-only type document and something more needed to be made so user documentation of GPL'd software could be distributed under similar terms.
If you dive into the fine minutiae of the GFDL, there are some terms and clauses (especially the much maligned invariant sections) that do offer some value and offer licensing terms that are not offered in any of the Creative Commons licenses. If you are publishing a book-length document, you may still want to strongly consider the current GFDL for that document... particularly if you are already committed to the GPL and things tied to the Free Software Foundation.
For my own perspective, the GFDL also goes more into the exceptions and has stronger language to strengthen the viral nature of that license. In other words, content written under the terms of the GFDL strongly encourages additions and similar content to remain in the scope of the GFDL and not change licenses. It is subtle and ultimately something that only lawyers would genuinely appreciate, but there are some larger differences.
BTW, the CC-BY-SA license and the GPL are still mutually exclusive licenses... where content under one can't be used at all in the other except under terms of fair-use and fair-dealing. That is a legal ouch that should be addressed in the future.
I'm not saying there should only be one free-as-in-speech license for written materials. We do need at least two, because there are real philosophical differences between BSD-style licenses and GPL-style licenses.
CC-BY and CC-BY-SA appear to nicely fit the roles you mention. But the credit removal requirement in even CC-BY might cause license incompatibility if a free program under a GNU license uses CC-BY images, audio, etc. Or am I misreading the definition of "aggregate" in the GPL?
This is the one thing that IMHO is one of the things that makes working with any of the Creative Commons licenses so difficult.
CC-BY != CC-BY-SA != CC-SA != CC-SA-NC
I've been caught in the trap of referencing one license by shorthand when it really is another license that is being discussed, and getting into philosophical discussions about each of the various Creative Commons licenses.
Or to put it more bluntly, there is no "Creative Commons license".... there is a whole bunch of 'em and they are mostly incompatible with each other. At least if you were referencing the GFDL, you knew you were talking about a specific document that was well defined without this sort of ambiguity.
Yes, I do understand the rationale for all of the different licenses, and there are good things to be had from each variant. Still, this ambiguity is going to be only a larger source of frustration in the future and IMHO is only going to get worse with Wikipedia joining the ranks of Creative Commons-licensed content.
I assume this includes all the talk pages, user profile pages, votes for deletion pages, nerd rage about pictures of a human turd and pages outlining wikipedia policies right?
This is a fair question, actually, even if it is posed in a rough AC manner.
The short answer is yes, it includes all of these other pages as well, including stuff subject to deletion and spam put on Wikipedia by vandals.
That doesn't make goatse.cx now available under the terms of the CC-BY-SA license, but it does make this page available under those terms, and any side commentaries on the topic as well, even if it is otherwise off-topic on other pages of Wikipedia.
GNU FDL was chosen as CC was not available at the time. Now CC has additionally become an accepted standard with a lot of material out there. It is great news as this makes it easier to mix content from and to their projects.
While that may have been Jimbo Wales motivation for the GNU FDL, the real truth goes a bit deeper than even that. This is far too simple of an explaination.
There was another encyclopedia effort called the GNU-pedia being led by none other than Richard Stallman who tried to start an open-source collaboratively written encyclopedia. This was started about the same time that Nupedia was just getting off the ground as well. Nupedia had a slight head-start in terms of getting going a little bit earlier, although the licensing terms for Nupedia were not nailed down as the whole concept of an open-source encyclopedia was still getting established.
Due to the bureaucratic overhead in Nupedia, a much more free-form wiki-style encyclopedia was created by many of the participants in this early encyclopedia effort, and that became what we know today as Wikipedia. Again, with the already established crowd with ties to GNU projects and committed to the general philosophy of the GPL, the GNU FDL was a natural choice... where that document license was just being released. Having Richard Stallman brow beat Jimmy Wales certainly didn't hurt either, although I don't think it was that hard of a decision to be made at the time.
BTW, there were other "open source" type licenses at the time besides the GFDL, even if what we know today as the "Creative Commons" suite of licenses didn't really exist in its current form.
All that has really happened here is the "or later version" clause of the GFDL has been allowed to include a somewhat similar philosophical Creative Commons license as something considered a later version or edition of this particular license. What the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees has done is to make a political move to explicitly move the content of the Wikimedia projects (not just Wikipedia) to the Creative Commons license explicitly mentioned in that new clause.
That the WMF board also helped to write that clause of the GFDL due to placing political pressure on Richard Stallman and those involved in the Free Software Foundation sort of brings this thing full circle as well. A lot more is happening here besides "the folks at Wikipedia seeing the light" and suddenly deciding to switch licenses.
BTW, I do think harmonization of the various free document licenses is on the whole a good thing, and having the weight of the Wikipedia editors and enthusiasts championing a broader license in terms of something used in more documents can only make that resulting license a much more stable license and less likely to be modified to something generally unacceptable to that community.
Still, to suggest that the GFDL was chosen only because the CC-BY-SA license was not yet written is a gross oversimplification of what really happened and doesn't tell the true story. Those who put reliance on the GPL, however, beware. That license could have the same thing happen in the future, based on whatever whim or political winds happen that can influence the Free Software Foundation.
The one thing that I do regret never happened is some sort of harmonization between the GPL and GFDL.... primarily in regards to open source textbooks and commentaries on software design. It at least had a shot with the licensing staying within the scope of the Free Software Foundation, but now that the Creative Commons governing body is in charge, it seems like something that will never happen. This is still a problem with the CC-BY-SA license and won't get resolved any time in the near future.
I'm just saying that it seems there's a better use for your tax dollars than making sure your government doesn't work.
As long as you understand the basic principle that governments... at least "liberal" western democracies... are explicitly by design to be inefficient and wasteful with both manpower and all other standards, go ahead and try to streamline them. It is a futile effort or it will be destructive of basic freedoms.
The best use for a tax dollar is to keep it in the hands of a taxpayer whenever possible. There are valid purposes of government, but far too often (even within the law enforcement community, BTW) the role of governance is expanded far beyond its original intended purpose.
In this case, it is a matter of trust that the ordinary citizens will get things right if left to themselves. This is just as valid for airport security as it is for neighborhood watch patrols of fellow citizens.
A cost-efficient law enforcement agency is what you had in Nazi Germany, or in Soviet Russia. During the Soviet era, the police was one of the few agencies that actually worked, and is still one of the reasons why people in Russia long to have the old Communist government get back into power. In both of these governments, the trust in the ordinary citizen was not only lost, but axiomatically never there in the first place.
They are not "forcing" people to do anything. If they don't want to be groped or have their clothing seen through, then they have a choice to not fly commercial airlines.
Right. What is the alternative? Seriously?
Can you get on a train and travel to your destination in under a day or so? Across the ocean? Oh, I guess you are going to travel by ship from New Orleans to Honolulu and make it there in under a day or so?
This is an absurd response hardly worthy of reply, other than the fact that it is an erosion of personal liberties. While not expressly listed in the Bill of Rights, the "right to travel" certainly is something that could be considered a personal liberty.
I would love to see an experiment done where you would have two terminals... one with pre-9/11 security screenings (heck, make it pre-Gulf War airport security), and one with this current TSA stuff. Have flights to the same or similar destinations. Which airport and flights would you think people would be willing to fly out of? Too bad such an experiment would never be tried.
The entire situation is idiotic anyway. 9/11 won't happen again because people aren't going to sit there while someone takes over a plane again. People let it happen then because it was always understood that you just got flown somewhere and probably ended up being ok.
I mention this time and again myself. Airline policy for hijackers pre-9/11 was to give the hijacker whatever they wanted... and if they are in the air to let them go to just about anywhere they wanted to go. The passengers mostly thought of it as going on an unexpected vacation to someplace like Havana.
One other thing that is missing from this whole picture is that 9/11 was caused by state-sponsored terrorist. They were essentially soldiers fighting a war using methods that are essentially prohibited under the Geneva Convention, and given a free pass to engage in those methods and given formal government-sponsored training, leadership, and logistical support to perform those acts of war.
Al-Qaeda was essentially a free-lance paramilitary group who was formally sponsored by both the Afghanistan (via the Taliban) and Saudi governments. They could not have done the things they did without the explicit support of those governmental authorities. You could argue Al-Qaeda also had support from Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and Iran, but that just suggests that other governments were also interested in seeing the USA get knocked down a few pegs.
If the point is that the 9/11 attacks were part of a deliberate act of war by one government against another government.... it is that government who initiated the attacks that should be held accountable for that act. The airport security "improvements" might be useful for a short period of time to stop an infiltration of critical infrastructure by a foreign government, but there is no reason to believe that a determined enemy government is going to try the same tactic again. Most military planners are not that stupid.
A lone idiot wanting to "go postal" and take a few people with him? Yeah, airport security does stop that sort of lone idiot. But that isn't what caused 9/11 or why these security measures are being put into place.
You seem to contradict yourself here. If it isn't for show, then it wouldn't be for CYA either.
BTW, I do agree that this is a politician's way of doing CYA... or at least the way for the elected leaders to "demonstrate" to their constituents that they are "doing something" to fix the situation. It doesn't apply just to terrorist incidents and airport security either... can you say say "economic bailout"?
The next time there is a major terrorist incident in the USA, it won't happen on an airplane. It will be on a ship or with a truck bomb like the one that took out the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Will it mean that you have to get a full body scan just to use the on-ramp of a freeway?
In counter point, the purpose of the U.S. Constitution is explicitly to make the job of governing more difficult... indeed much more difficult. The founders of the American Republic knew from first hand experience that tyrants and individuals in high positions of authority tend to abuse that authority. So the constitution tried to set up policies and procedures of governance that would diffuse that authority to as many people as possible, with the understanding that from time to time you do need somebody in a position to make a decision that is hard to make.
This is not restricted to the Bill of Rights, but the whole concept and philosophy of government. Any kind of legislation that promotes this general philosophy is in my opinion something to be admired, and legislation that concentrates authority something to be feared.
I also find that making life difficult for police officers is typically not nearly as bad as police associations want you to think it may be. If there is any position in society that concentrates authority in regards to an individual citizen, it is the law enforcement officers. They are judge, jury, and prosecutor simultaneously, and from a certain point of view what happens in the court room when they are through is merely an appellate review of their decision... mostly by people who are already close friends with the officer and willing to take the officer's viewpoint of events.
Generally, a truly professional law enforcement officer will understand legitimate restrictions of their authority and be willing to work within those restraints... realizing that it could be themselves in the same situation in the future. Yes, there are stupid regulations made up by somebody completely unfamiliar with law enforcement responsibilities that do get made by an anonymous bureaucrat that seem to defy reality. Even then, I'd suggest most of those rules were set up to deal with past abuses that you may not be aware of.
Ordinary Occam's Razor parsimony says that it is far more likely that multi-trillion dollar financial interests in fossil fuel use are actively manipulating public perception and government science (read Bush Administration), than that nickel and dime enterprises profiting from trading carbon credits have managed to dupe the overwhelming majority of scientists, the public, and all of the world's governments.
"Who benefits?" When we ask this simple question we see that the bias is very strong for denial of climate change because so many benefit so largely from denying that CO2 is involved.
I don't get it. If there really has been peak oil production as claimed, and that oil production is going down world-wide, it would seem to me that it would be in the best interests of "big oil" to engage in energy production technologies that will help them out when that oil finally stops flowing. Furthermore, there are a great many chemicals and substances created from petroleum (and from coal) that have absolutely nothing to do with energy production and distribution... and in fact are far more valuable as well to be used in non-energy related areas.
IMHO, it is the "multi-trillion dollar financial interests in fossil fuel use" that stand to benefit economically if the carbon credit trading takes place.
QED, it is obvious that "big oil" is financing the environmental movement... if you use the same logic as described above. It is "big oil" that will benefit the most... or at least will still make billions of dollars in profit regardless of what political philosophy wins out in the end.
This isn't a grand conspiracy, but rather a pure political issue that should be debated in political terms. Also, don't be so critical of the Bush administration until after you've seen the garbage being produced by the Obama administration and the sewage that left the Clinton administration. The differences might not be all that much in the long run anyway.