This is an incredibly brilliant suggestion here. Seriously. And this is also completely within the realm of technical capabilities as well.
One other "tweak" that I would add to this otherwise excellent suggestion is that a "standard operating procedure" at a viable airport/air control space where some event like this happens is that all other air traffic should be cleared out of the way and the runways cleared of EVERYTHING when an event like this happens. Even though I trust automated systems in many cases, it is best to reduce even the potential of error... and a hijacking should be something so unusual that other drastic actions would be justified as well like shutting down the airport where such a plane would land.
If it is attention that the hijacker is seeking, then why not give it to them in a huge dose. And give them a punishment deserving to such a major disruption afterward.... if they are still alive after the incident. An automated landing like this shouldn't be a cause for being mixed in normal air traffic, even at a busy airport like JFK or O'Hare.
Can you please show me where in the constitution it says that congress has the authority to authorize individuals who perform strip searches of individuals who have committed no crime? Or even to conduct these sort of transportation screenings?
I guess the interstate commerce regulation clause.... what an abused provision of the constitution that I have ever heard of.
I guess the "minority" of the signers of the U.S. Constitution who were worried that rights not explicitly enumerated in the constitution would get trampled upon have turned out to be correct. However even those rights that are explicitly enumerated aren't even followed, where even laws that regulate political speech are passed in the face of an explicit constitutional clause that says "congress shall make no law...".
Freedom of movement, BTW, is one of the presumed "rights" that isn't explicitly documented in the U.S. Constitution, but is recognized in U.S. Common Law. There may be regulations in place in terms of demonstrating competency and safety, but you do have a "right to fly" or travel in whatever form that pleases you. Most TSA agents have a hard time to even demonstrate where their authority to act even comes from... in terms of even congressional authorization and laws that they are working under.
The railroad companies themselves screwed this one up.... so I don't have too much sympathy here on this topic.
It is also a problem that urban design schools and municipal planners almost deliberately tried to kill passenger rail transportation as a viable alternative. More to the point, consider this huge problem:
Rail hubs for most cities are located at a considerable distance from other transportation hubs, such as airports, bus terminals, interstate highways, and even "municipal railroads" such as subways and light rail. You would be lucky to get a taxi at most rail terminals. There are some noted exceptions, but they are exceptions rather than the rule. Travel by rail is a miserable experience for most people due to lousy access of the vehicle itself. Law enforcement is also more stringent at airports as opposed to rail depots... which often means that you risk becoming a victim of a crime just by standing at the rail depots as well. If the depot even exists.
It is also incredibly expensive even if you can get to the destinations you are seeking (or close enough). Consistently, air travel is about half of the price or more to get from one destination to the next throughout most of the Western USA compared to rail transit. Economies of scale seem to work in the North-eastern urban corridor of the USA where rail transit does seem to work out as a rough competitor economically to air travel, so again there is some silver lining to the whole thing.
But simply expanding Amtrak isn't going to be a one-size fits all solution.
BTW, I agree that travel by rail is an incredibly enjoyable experience. I just wish it were affordable and that I could feel safe at the places I have to get onto and off of the train. Unfortunately the only way for me or my kids to even get a glimpse of rail travel is to use a "tourist" short line historical railroad. And that really isn't a genuine transportation solution.
As for the rationale and justification for all of this increased security.... I couldn't have said this any better myself. There have been a few "terrorist plots" that have been uncovered since 9/11 that perhaps could only have been thwarted due to the airport security clearances.... but I highly doubt that.
What doesn't get talked about here is the typical airline and even the "official U.S. government" position in relationship to terrorists on September 10th, 2001:
If somebody tried to hijack an airplane, pilots and even air traffic controllers were instructed to give into all of the demands that a hijacker would insist upon.... fly them to anyplace that they insisted (within mechanical limits of the vehicle), and if in the air try to get them to land the airplane. The presumption here was that most hijackers weren't suicidal and therefore had a stake in the overall safety of the airplane. Some people might die...sure, but most of the people would live if you simply let the hijacker do what they wanted. DB Cooper, is perhaps the most "famous" of this era of hijackers, and what was considered to be a classic and expected hijacking situation.
What 9/11 did was let you know that if you don't fight the hijackers, that you will likely be dead anyway, so you might as well go down fighting if some idiot decides to try and take over the airplane. There never was a need for M-16s in airports to "fight terrorists", and most of the current level of security is a waste of tax dollars.
Of course I feel that the best way to stop terrorists and other similar idiots is a well-armed population of otherwise law-abiding citizens, however that scares the daylights out of law enforcement officials. I don't think 9/11 would have happened in the way it did if half of the people on the airplanes that crashed into the World Trade Center had handguns and training on how to use them, but that gets into arguments about gun control and the 2nd Amendment.
In regards to PCP.... I guess you don't know what a bad trip is all about. I sure wouldn't want to be on board an airplane or for that matter anywhere else when somebody is having a bad trip and gets out of control... they may be thinking they are having a wonderful time, but it screws up everybody else around them. I've heard of police officers (first hand accounts at that, not just something from a book or the news media) that have fired multiple bullets into people high on PCP that can't be stopped, and even heavy tranquilizers don't seem to work. If that high person is carrying a weapon of some kind, they are simply an out of control and just a bomb that is in the process of going off. This is a horrible substance, and something that is justifiably illegal to own or produce.
This issue came up on the Tesla Motors (see http://teslamotors.com/) blog where a petrochemical engineer was trying to demonstrate what the MPG rating of the Tesla Roadster really could be compared to in terms of a more conventional automobile. All sorts of issues were addressed, including the assumption that 100% of the electricity was produced from burning carbon-based fuels such as fuel oil (or other from crude common extracts), tars, and coal. These operate at a pretty high efficiency rate in part because of the huge industrial size of these facilities, and the fact that most utility companies want to extract as much energy out of those fuels as possible. Face it, you can't possibly meet the energy extraction capability of a 500 MW generating plant in your backyard. Certainly not in a moving vehicle like your automobile.
Other issues came up, and even addressed the raw energy that is released from burning a gallon of gasoline. He also had at hand some figures in terms of how much electricity that his plant was consuming for producing the gasoline, and did a simple division of the number of gallons of gasoline his company produced vs. how much electricity that they were using, even independent of overhead like lighting the offices of the plant or other issues. Mind you, this was light, sweet crude oil he was processing here and wasn't even dealing with extraction costs. At the refinery he discovered that he was actually consuming far more energy than was possibly being produced in consumer-grade gasoline. That also sold him completely on the subject of buying an electric automobile, and made a purchase immediately with Tesla.
I do wish I could get some figures from a more reliable source than a blog, but for myself, this is sufficient. I will say that for now you can consider this to be merely a conjecture, but something that has some real weight behind it and may be worth a formal study... if you are in the market for something like this. For those who are pushing for alternative fuels, this is one sort of figure that certainly would prove a killer app for trying to select alternative fuels.
I also wish that the petroleum companies would elaborate on the fact that petroleum is really not an energy source but rather an energy storage medium, as it would really frame the whole debate over where investment really needs to take place, and kill the ethanol industry for once and for all (except in the case of perhaps Jack Daniels, but I digress here). Ethanol producers are attempting to get into the energy storage game as well, but it is incredibly expensive and they are masking the true costs of their efforts, including how it is significantly affecting the price of food due to diverting food production from grocery stores to fuel plants.
Obviously other alternative fuels/energy storage devices have their place, but energy legislation is dumping far more effort into areas that may in the long run prove to be dubious on their return. It also makes solar energy sources appear much more attractive if you can demonstrate that they are true energy sources and not just energy storage mediums, not to mention that solar energy can be transformed into storage media in one form or another.
Replying belatedly here, but I would like to know something?
What is your alternative here?
I'm not saying that we can't find some reasonable alternatives, but I don't see the huge need to be an alarmist and force me and others to make drastic changes in our lifestyles for what appears to me to be a political motivation, not something that has a sound scientific basis.
BTW, I was dead on about what would happen if we reverted back to a hunter/gatherer lifestyle... unless you can prove to me how this world can sustain itself with a population of over 10 billion people from a nearly pure agrarian lifestyle or even just "living off of the land". Sure, mankind did that for millions of years, but with a population that numbered in the low millions of people, and didn't even get to major regions of the world like America until about 20,000 years ago. If we abandon petroleum without replacing it with an even higher density storage medium, how far back in technological development do you really want to go? Middle ages? Roman technology? Even further? I don't even think a Middle-age (meaning c. 1000 A.D. Europe) level of technology is possible without at least some fossil fuel source... and even then it would mean a huge reduction in the population of mankind... simply because we couldn't possibly feed that many people with even that level of technology.
You are taking far too much for granted, and ignoring the very hard labors of your ancestors that got you to where you are today. I do have pity upon you for forgetting the lessons of history, and therefore are doomed to repeat them.
One nice thing about the "lighting the fires atop the walls" would do is not only notify that an attack is happening, but also the direction it is coming from.
The Internet Brain talks a little about this a little bit, including some potential references to look at.
Who are these poor people you know that make money on anything other than their labor? In the sum total of my life, I think I've made about $5 in interest income and about $20 on a savings bond; the rest was via elbow grease. Granted I'm young and just out of college, but I don't think too many people in downtown Cleveland are clamoring for reduced taxes on their non-existent stock dividends.
But it does matter to those who may be your prospective employers and those to whom you may want to get a little bit of money from if you want to have something other than the stupid return on investment that you are quoting.
Does it matter if a business can afford to hire one or two more people because they can keep a little bit more of their money? I think that "poor person" you are championing here is going to appreciate that job when the tax code is a little bit more sane.
On top of all of this, you are missing the whole point of the parent post..... that the double taxation of dividends has all but eliminated this form of investment return from public corporations. Even for companies who offer dividends, they usually have options available to have stock certificates in lieu of dividends (purchased at market rates) for investors who don't want them and are willing to take a hit on capital gains at a later date.
BTW, I wouldn't count out too many people in downtown Cleveland to not care about this issue either... as far more people than you would realize have fairly sizable 401(k) accounts and other retirement investments that depend on the health of the world financial markets, including stock dividends from public companies. This even includes several "homeless" people that I've met that don't want to cash out their retirement accounts for one reason or another (perhaps even very valid reasons at that). You won't stay a young and stupid recent college graduate for too long.
You know, I have a hard time remembering which store is circuit city, and I pride my self on remembering where I bought everything. Most every retail chain has a distinguishing quality about them that really etches in your memory, but I can't think of anything CC does which does.
You know, I think this hits the nail on the head squarely (or in the foot, as it may be with Circuit City).
When I think of Wal-mart, I think of (as my sister put it to me once) "a future landfill waiting to happen". You go to that store because it has dirt cheap prices on everything, even if they break tomorrow. Overhead is so low and they move so many semi-trucks of merchandise that it doesn't matter if their employees are as stupid as a cube of margarine. You know exactly what you are going to get when you go into that store.
Somehow, I don't think Circuit City can compete with Wal-mart....even if it is just the Wal-mart electronics departments.
Somehow this idea that you have to distinguish yourself and make you heard above the noise of the marketplace is lost on the board members and top executives of Circuit City. In some cases, I've seen a successful re-launch of a retail store concept, but that is something quite rare indeed. I agree that Circuit City doesn't have much of a hope for lasting to next Christmas, or perhaps just barely.
The execs aren't the ones they need to please in the end. I assume this is publicly held? Unless the board members have a controlling stake in this then the stockholders should be suitably outraged and start thinking about selling.
This is also something ripe for a shareholder suit against the board of directors. If there was a specific action that the board members performed that did not meet with the corporate charter (usually to maximize profit and minimize risk is stated explicitly in the corporate charter), there may be grounds to go after the personal wealth of the board members. "Honest" investing mistakes are fine, but in this case the shareholders could legitimately claim that by firing the experienced help, they shot themselves in the foot and caused the profits of the company to drop like a rock.
Usually, most experienced help has proven themselves worthy simply by longevity alone that they can keep their noses clean and are mostly good workers. Especially if they don't have "special" protections that keep them from getting fired, such as special contracts from labor unions that allow under-performing employees to remain on the job.
This is also something that has "class-action lawsuit" written all over it as well (the class being shareholders of record as of a certain date). As an investor going into one of these lawsuits, it is a bit tricky as you might just make more money by simply selling the stock and not bothering with the lawsuit, but if you think you can make more money from the lawsuit or simply want to get revenge from some stupid board members, it can be a shareholder tool to force the board to shape up.
Where a dropping share price starts to hurt is when the top tier of executives have a large number of stock options that are available to them, but the stock price is below the option price. Usually most executives like the situation to be the other way around (like being able to buy Microsoft or Apple stock for $10/share). For this reason, stock options are usually given as a performance bonus for top executives so their interests are also similar or the same as the shareholders. I don't know what options are available for Circuit City execs, but I would presume that they are worthless or nearly so at the moment.
Prophesying the end of the modern world is something so old that you can find contemporaries of Plato and Aristotle who also did the very same thing. This isn't really all that new.
I suppose that some of those predicting the end of the Roman Empire were correct.... but it took several hundred years to happen. In that case, I suppose it gave legitimacy to those doom and gloom experts too.
We need to solve the energy problem NOW. We need to learn how to extract most of our energy from renewable resources (solar, wind, tidal [and nuclear as a stopgap]), and then work out the bioengineering we will need to regulate the atmosphere, prevent undesirable climate change, and produce additional energy and the materials for 21st century manufacturing.
We don't even have an energy problem. Indeed, all of the problems you are complaining about here is due to an over abundance of energy, not a lack of it. The fact that a doom sayer of the finality of the world like yourself can name off at least 4 different sources of energy that can be tapped and transformed into useful forms needed in modern industrial societies speaks volumes about how much effort is going into identifying useful energy forms.
The one huge problem, if there is one, about energy production is not how to extract the most out of the energy sources, but how to keep idiots from extracting too much from those energy sources at once. You may ask "Huh?" here, but pay close attention.... an explosion is just the rapid release of large quantities of energy at once at a point source.... aka a "bomb". And those kill people == very bad technology (to some people's thinking). This is the primary reason why nuclear energy (both fusion and fission) is the big evil bad guy, in spite of the fact that a nuclear future really is the best way to protect the environment in the long run. Not only for waste disposal, but even for mineral extraction costs (including intangible costs like environmental damage) nuclear fission is several orders of magnitude more efficient than petroleum and coal production techniques. For crying out loud, the typical coal electric generating plant produces far more toxic nuclear waste per kWh than a typical nuclear fission power plant. That is completely discounting silly things like CO2 that are now getting everybody's panties in a bunch. Fusion sources, if developed, are just the icing on the cake and make the argument undeniable.
The goal should be, 20 years from now, that we don't need oil tankers anymore.
This still doesn't solve the problem of how you can concentrate energy into a useful and portable source that can be tapped by ordinary people, for things like transportation and commerce. And mass transportation isn't always the solution, as there are legitimate reasons why many people don't want to be in a herd and travel the same route and to the same places that 90% of the rest of humanity is at.
FYI, did you know that when you throw a gallon of gasoline into your automobile, that at the refinery more energy was consumed in the processing of the gasoline than is available for you when you burn that fuel? Most of that processing energy comes in the form of electricity, which the oil refineries get from the same sources that power your light bulbs... but the point is that most fuel sources are just energy concentration mediums. And it is important to separate energy production from energy storage. Until you can develop an energy storage medium that is more efficient than petroleum, we will continue to require petroleum or something very similar for a very long time to come. Lithium ion technology looks very promising at the moment, as are some other interesting energy storage devices. Ethanol is, IMHO, a horribly wasteful energy storage form but at least it is a semi-viable replacement for common uses of petroleum if you absolutely must stop the black fluid mineral extraction processes. And most alcohols don't
While Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites are certainly the focus of this particular article and thread, they are hardly the only commercial spacecraft corporation that is making some significant progress and will be making headlines in 2008 (assuming that everything is still working the way it should).
SpaceX, or Space Exploration Technologies, the company started by Paypal founder Elon Musk, is scheduled to perform their final test flight for the Falcon 1 in January, 2008. If all goes well, they may even get a flight of their larger Falcon 9 spacecraft before the end of the year. This is particularly significant for manned spaceflight, as their Dragon spacecraft is reliant upon the successful launches of these vehicles. Unlike the Virgin Galactic spacecraft, the Dragon spacecraft is going to have the capabilities of sending as many as six passengers to the ISS.... or anywhere else in Low-earth orbit. In many ways, I think this is going to be far more significant than what Branson is doing with Virgin Galactic.
In addition, the Lunar Landing Challenge will likely be "won" this time next year with the nearly dozen rocket teams competing for the purse. My heart broke when Armadillo Aerospace crashed and burned this year and failed to win the price objectives, but they certainly learned from their experience and will roll those designs into the next generation of their spacecraft. This particular challenge is certainly breeding many future commercial spaceflight companies that are flying real hardware, and not just some imaginative designs on paper that will never see the light of day.
I also don't know what Blue Origin is doing, but that is certainly a company to keep a close ear to the ground and at least try to watch for developments over this next year. Unlike several of the spacecraft manufacturers, they are avoiding the appearance of vaporware by simply not really announcing anything other than the fact that they own one heck of a lot of real estate in Texas and that they have had several successful test flights of their rocketry hardware.... and a long term goal of also doing commercial passenger space travel. They also have some investors with some deep pockets that can help get them there without having to "go public".
I'm just scratching the surface here as well, but there are some amazing groups of individuals who have been devoting resources to commercial spaceflight, and 2008 really could be "the year of the spacecraft", at least in terms of headlines generated by the mainstream press. Virgin Galactic certainly isn't going to be the only one in the headlines here, although they may be the first to send paying passengers into space on something other than a Soyuz capsule.
This whole space-tourism thing is at a precarious stage. Should there be just one freak accident, their revenue prospects would turn off like a Fossett.
The only way this would have a significant impact is on a political basis. That would be, some idiot of a bureaucrat who gums up the whole thing by holding hearings and stopping anybody in any situation from using a rocket of any design to get into space.
In fact, that is precisely the problem that the USA has been facing in manned spaceflight.... that there has been one "true" design of a spacecraft. When a major design flaw is found with that spacecraft design, it shuts down the whole "industry" and makes a huge mess of things.
If you make the comparison to commercial aviation, this would be like trying to conduct passenger air travel with everybody using the same type of airplane or even the very same (very large) airplane. Yeah, if there is a problem or an accident involving that design, perhaps a serious inquiry should occur and perhaps even shut down all of the airplanes of that particular design. Luckily, there are enough different kinds of airplanes flying with commercial aviation that passenger air travel would continue even if the FAA completely removed one type of airplane with a particularly fatal design flaw...or even removed all of the aircraft of a particular manufacturer (like Boeing, for instance). Would that put that particular manufacturer into bankruptcy if their aircraft were grounded for a significant amount of time? Yeah. No doubt. But it still wouldn't kill commercial aviation, and in the long run it would actually be healthier for the industry as others would try to fill the economic niche left by the removal of that company, specifically trying to overcome the problems discovered.
While nobody, and I mean nobody, really wants to see somebody die in space, and I'll admit that I really am concerned about commercial spaceflight safety, even having a full spacecraft of passengers dying would not necessarily be "the end of the world". People die in amusement parks, and fairly often on roller coasters. A curious thing happens when people die in an amusement park, however: The number of customers actually goes up! I'm not kidding here. And the lines to get on the ride where people died actually get longer (once, of course, the ride is fixed and the park officials claim to have fixed the problem).
If, when an accident occurs for the commercial spaceflight industry during actual operations of the spacecraft, there will be some very intelligent (they are rocket scientists, you know) people who will be able to calmly and completely explain where the safety protocols broke down, what was the real problem, and be able to honestly say that the problem has been corrected. This has been a pattern since the beginning of commercial aviation or even commercial shipping of any kind, and I simply don't see this one transportation method being openly dismissed to the degree you are suggesting if somebody dies. Do people still ride passenger cruise ships through the North Atlantic since the Titanic sank?
BTW, have you seen the size of a full data dump of the English Wikipedia?
It would fill much more than a typical thumb drive, and that is just the text alone. Add in the images, and you have many GB worth of data. I would be very surprised if you could fit all of that information onto a palm-sized device that could "fit in your pocket" (the iPhone connected to the 'net not withstanding).
Articles about living people do tend to have some substantial problems, and as a rule I stay away from them as much as I can...and treat the information on those kind of pages with a grain of salt (perhaps a whole shaker).
Still, I can understand why you feel upset when you find information that you know for a fact is inaccurate...particularly when it is about yourself.
IMHO Wikipedia has its strength in articles about technology and science, where there are resources available to do unbiased research and "facts" can be independently verified. Articles about pop culture and living people (like yourself) tend to be much weaker as there often aren't real sources for the information except for occasional news stories that in themselves have biases and shortcomings. In reading some of the historical editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica, I wouldn't say that unbiased articles about living people is any worse today than it was 100 years ago, and may in fact be slightly better in that people are aware of the biases instead of simply relying upon "authority" to get it correct.
In defense of Encyclopaedia Britannica, they did hire some of the very best scholars over the years that included Nobel Prize laureates and well respected authors and educators to help compile their content. Some of the authors involved are nearly a "who's who" of the best of the writing world, science, and theology.
Still, I would have to say that there still are bias even to this particular reference work, and it has its own limitation, including inaccuracies. To suggest that one is better than the other is just squabbling over details.
Once you open the wikipedia floodgates, all scientific rigor goes out the window because students don't think they still should have to do the heavy lifting. This is why I will never, ever allow it to be used in my classes.
So, do you allow references to any encyclopedia in any of your classes as a source?
As a parent and educator, I encourage my children and students to use Wikipedia as a starting off point to begin research. It is a wonderful place to find a brief overview of a topic, related concepts, and original sources of information. You don't use Wikipedia to be the source but rather use it to help find the sources that are relevant. Look up what the authors of the Wikipedia article used to justify the information in the article. For featured articles, this is actually a requirement.
Yes, there will be some weak articles in Wikipedia.... just as there would be in any general reference book like Encyclopedia Britannica as well. Even when I was a kid (well before Wikipedia), it was common in a high school level or younger to have kids simply copy whole paragraphs from an encyclopedia and call it "research" for papers written as an assignment. I (unfortunately) even saw it on a college level. Using Wikipedia makes this no different.
For some topics, you as a student may not even have a clue where to being on studying about the subject. A Google search is often a poor tool as it throws up all kinds of garbage and people using keywords inappropriately to advertise some website... often porn websites to boot. A good website like Wikipedia can certainly help in identifying what is something of quality you ought to consider as you begin a scholarly study of the topic.
One other thing that Wikipedia does: It allows your students to "give back" and offer to others some of the fruits of their labor, if they choose to add to the article or even just add a few extra references suggestions to look at which apply to a given topic. Wikipedia shouldn't be looked at with fear and dread by educators, but instead should be discussed as why tertiary sources aren't necessarily something you should use instead of primary sources. Wikipedia is a tertiary source and doesn't claim to be anything else.
Because there's no money in manned spaceflight. And it's extremely dangerous. NASA is the only one who's willing to spend the money and take the risks. We've had a hundred years to figure out how to fly planes, and the technology behind commercial airliners is utterly stagnant so there are no new risks. Hence reliable. The Concorde tended to explode, which we "rectified" by giving up on traveling faster than the speed of sound.
How do you know that manned spaceflight has no money?
As far as spaceflight being dangerous, so is flight of any kind in general. So I take it that you never fly commercial airliners and believe they should be shut down as well due to safety issues? And it wasn't risky in the 1920's just when commercial aviation was starting out?
Most of the reason why spaceflight is perceived to be so expensive has to do with the Kennedy Administration's attitude about going to the Moon: Waste everything but time. So of course with such an approach you would have something that worked, but would be incredibly expensive.
Keep in mind the classical engineering motto:
You can have your idea built with the following criteria:
Faster (sooner)
Cheaper
More Reliable
Please choose at most two of the above.
NASA choose to ignore cheaper in the quest for Apollo. Design compromises on the Space Shuttle ignored nearly all of these potential goals as they tried to do all three at the same time, together with a culture designing the space shuttle that was used to the Apollo goal of unlimited budgets.
We simply don't know if the design using a "cheaper" and "more reliable" approach that takes longer to build can be done at all without a huge pressure of national pride forcing them to be built yesterday. Elon Musk and Burton Rutan are certainly trying to find out.
There's a difference between chucking a satellite into LEO and sending astronauts up and *down*. Satellite are pretty damn big and are designed to withstand shock and turbulence. Even still, they sometimes break and sometimes rockets explode. Those are acceptable risks. But human beings are very fragile. And there's zero tolerance for fatalities in space. They don't do anything particularly useful when they get into space. Plus we need to send them back down safely, which is really hard. And to top it off there's only one customer: NASA. All in all, a very unprofitable venture. Even if you manage to pull it off, you're more than likely to be sued into bankruptcy once someone dies in space.
First of all, I was referring to not unmanned LEO travel, but manned spaceflight that has been done now by three nations, and the ESA is strongly looking at being nation/group #4 to have their own way into space. This isn't exactly something new, and was done by John Glenn in 1960. It isn't exactly cutting edge science here and knowledge of how to send people up and down is pretty well established. How to do that cheaply is another issue, but actually getting it accomplished isn't.
As far as a "zero tolerance" of fatalities, I certainly don't see that from NASA. I still think it was stupid to have the Columbia go back to the Earth, other than the fact that NASA didn't want a bunch of corpses floating in a gradually decaying orbit over the course of several years after those astronauts died of starvation and oxygen deprevation. Even so, NASA has had several fatalities due to manned spaceflight operations, not all of which have been counted in the "official" statistics of astronauts who died during the actual launch or landing of the spacecraft. The Russians have had even higher levels of fatalities, even though the Soyuz seems to be more reliable now than the Space Shuttle...especially on a per flight basis. Commercial aviation was much worse than spaceflight when it first started, with an incredibly high rate of death for pilots. That is one of the reasons why the Federal Aviation Ad
Well, if NASA were to be privatized, there would need to be a new military space program. National security interests aren't always profitable and are too important to be left to the whims of things like market forces.
There is a "military space program". It is called the United States Air Force. They have full jurisdiction over military assets that go into space, and have a rather large fleet of satellites and when NASA sends up "classified" cargos on the Space Shuttle, it is done with 100% Air Force crews. There are some NASA astronauts from other branches of the miltary, but that is irrelevant here.
As for an established manned military presence in space, I have no doubt that the Department of Defense will come up with whatever spacecraft can work to fill its needs. If that is the Scaled Composite's Space Ship Five, I have no doubt that there will be a military contract for something like that to fill their needs.
This isn't a "privatization of NASA", but letting NASA be what it should be: An advanced aviation and space research and development organization that stays on the cutting edge of new technologies and pushes the frontiers of both knowledge and physical territory. A NASA astronaut shouldn't be the thousandth person on Mars, he should be the first. At NASA's current rate of progress I have my doubts about even coming in on the first thousand.
Certainly coming up with a new spacecraft that only makes it from the ground to low-earth orbit is hardly cutting edge engineering here, and for nearly the same cost as flying the space shuttle at the same time. I have deep reservations about cost estimates for the Ares spacecraft, especially given the previous track record NASA has for similar programs.
Sure, the market is there for supersonic flight. We can also build a machine that can make it happen. (So long as you constrain it to essentially transatlantic ranges.) What can't do is build said machine at a price the (fairly small) market will support.
Supersonic civil aviation is one of those technologies that was hyped long before the reality was known.
You miss the point I was trying to make here. I'm suggesting that the price that people were willing to pay for commercial point to point services at high speed can be derived from the price they were willing to pay for a Concorde. Not that I was defending the costs of the next generation of super-sonic aircraft or the technical challenges that would go into building them.
If you have at least a rough idea what people will pay for these services, at least you can begin to come up with a business plan if you want to even design something like a sub-orbital spacecraft.
In addition, sub-orbital can do distances much larger than just trans-atlantic travel, which in comparison is a trivial distance. This makes for a much larger time savings that can be justified for paying yet higher prices.
This still says nothing about if a particular spacecraft design can be financially successful, but I am suggesting that there is a non-zero dollar figure you can use right now to make a business case for making a competitor to Virgin Galactic that would do a trans-atlantic flight hop... provided you could bring the cost of the aircraft/spaceship down to something under the budget based on these numbers.
It is entirely a different issue if such a spacecraft could be built for that cost.
When was the last time you flew in a commercial airliner during bad weather?
I remember one particularly nasty flight that went through what I swear was a hurricane that was essentially a 3 hour ride in a roller coaster. And that was a regularly scheduled commercial flight with over 300 passengers on board. I'm sure the pilots of that plane weren't exactly having an easy time on the flight either, but the point is that even existing transportation systems experience some interesting acceleration forces. This particular flight lasted nearly 10 hours (going from the USA to Brazil) but for at least 3 hours it was a real wild ride. And I experienced G forces that were very much equivalent of what I would have in a roller coaster... including some very unpredictable direction changes going up, down, and side to side, that simply wouldn't be found in a rocket. In some ways, going into space is quite a bit more predictable than air travel.
I know that most air travel happens at high altitudes that try to get "above the weather", but my point is that I don't think most of those passengers of nearly every age that I was traveling with (newborns to senior citizens...certainly not all of them at peak physical fitness) ever considered that it would be their last flight when the plane landed on the ground. And this isn't an isolated experience.
I just don't buy this argument against people going into space even for point to point travel on the Earth.
I'll be the first to admit that some aspects of "privatization of government" simply don't make sense. Private security guards instead of police, and a private "security patrol" instead of military units...essentially the classical "mercenaries" is just insane. These by their very nature really require some sort of governmental "authority" in order to not only enforce decisions made by government employees in this sort of position, but to also keep people in these positions from abusing their authority.
Still, when it comes to NASA and building the next version of a transportation system, this is something that governments, particularly the U.S. Federal Government, has a miserable track record on delivering. And something which "private industry" has a very long and well established record of providing at a very reasonable price along with excellent performance. NASA isn't in the commercial passenger airline industry, why should they be doing the same thing for spaceflight?
More to the point, travel to and from the Earth to Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) is hardly cutting edge in terms of discovering how it can be done, if it can be done, or what the environment is like to even be there as an astronaut. This isn't science, this is engineering and mass-produced manufacturing technology. The Ares I spacecraft can't even really be called "cutting edge", other than some of the components are going to be a couple of generations more up-to-date than what NASA had in the 1960s...especially with things like replacing the Apollo Guidance Computer and using new composite materials for the structure of the spacecraft. But those were developed outside of NASA and nothing that NASA is doing now is really being innovative other than putting these existing technologies together. And even that isn't really new either, if you consider some of the private spacecraft manufacturers in the USA alone.
If on the next time you go on a flight across the world somewhere, would you be willing to fly in an airplane that was operated by the European Union (not just one country in Europe) and built by the lowest bid contractor that bribed EU officials to get the contract? That is what you get from NASA (substituting the EU with USA federal government). It might work, but it might crash 1%-5% of the time too... again like the Space Shuttle does. Not a good track record to compare against.
True but I don't think most people would really enjoy a ballistic arc. Now for next day or same day ship cargo this could be useful.
If it meant that I could travel from Chicago to Beijing in under 3 hours? Or London to Syndey in less than 5 hours?
You had better believe that there would be demand for genuine ballistic arcs around the world. Indeed there is demand for sub-orbital flights right now.... if the equipment technology (read safety concerns) and the costs dropped to something a little cheaper than the current $1 Billion USD per flight that NASA does for Shuttle flights.
Also, next day cargo is already being done by current air freight businesses. It is in fact a huge industry in its own right. "Previous day" shipment (crossing the international time line to travel to yesterday) suddenly becomes a reality when you include potential ballistic arcs for shipping cargo.
A hard data point on what people are willing to pay for high speed travel can be found with the Concorde super-sonic flights between New York and London. People were routinely paying $10,000 per seat, and strong sales whenever it was available. Certainly there were some sound business reasons why you might want to send a salesman or corporate executive on one of these high-speed flights instead of a sub-sonic commercial flight.
The reason the Concorde isn't flying any more had more to do with safety concerns and the age of the airplanes that were in service, rather than a lack of demand for something which could go that fast. The market certainly is there... if you can build the machine to make it happen.
Not only would I, myself, be willing to "volunteer" to take one of these flights, there certainly is a price well above normal commercial air travel that I'd be willing to pay for the privilege myself. I could also calculate and demonstrate from a raw energy and physics perspective how you could eventually save money and make a ballistic flight through the vacuum of space cheaper than plowing through the troposphere in an airplane, especially for longer flights. In other words, even for point to point travel from different locations on the Earth and nowhere else, you can make a hard case for space travel being something eventually routine.
And once you are already in space (essentially LEO), getting to the Moon is in comparison trivial. Or the rest of the Solar System. In fact, I've seen some good numbers that show it is easier to get to Phobos than to the Moon, but that is irrelevant to this discussion.
In regards to the Russian government, I had some high hopes that Yeltsin would have made some significant improvements in the system.
The most amazing thing for Yeltsin was when he went on a visit to Texas, and entered a grocery store, making note of a woman buying a large amount of food from a store that was obviously overflowing with goods. He thought she must have been some sort of high-level government employee because of all the nice stuff she was getting, and because the store was relatively empty at the time (no lines waiting to get in at all or even to the checkstand). It turns out that the woman was buying the food with Food Stamps, and was a single mother earning roughly minimum wage.
When Yeltsin realized that somebody on welfare in the USA was eating better than he was as the President of Russia, he realized that it would be nearly impossible to win a war against the USA, if the USA put up anything resembling a real fight. He also realized that some very significant reforms had to happen both politically and economically to Russian society if his country was to survive at all in the coming centuries.
I'll note that some much needed reforms have happened to Russia, and the overall standard of living in Russia is slightly better than before... even though there is a greater disparity between the rich and the poor now in Russia as well. Life is also much tougher as the current economic system in Russia is much more unpredictable than under the earlier Communist system, and I can understand why there are some Russians who hate the situation they are currently forced to live under right now.
As for China.... that is one really weird economy and political situation going on right now. In many ways you can compare the economic and political situation to a small town where the economy is dominated by one super-large employer. I'm talking something like a smaller mid-west town where a major manufacturing plant employs almost all private-sector jobs. There are hundreds of towns like this across America, and it is interesting to see how governments give in to that "company" whenever a political situation that affects that company shows up.
The reason I say that is because the Chinese "People's Army" is by far and away the largest employer in China. I'm not just talking the soldiers in uniform, but in nearly every other economic aspect of Chinese society. The Chinese Army owns and operates mines, smelting plants, manufacturing facilities, television stations, transportation systems, commercial shipping operations.... indeed nearly anything and everything that can be made or crafted in modern society. If you purchased something from Wal-mart that had "Made in China" on it, I would give it about a 50/50 odds or better that it was made by the Chinese Army either directly or indirectly. I'm not kidding here either. Oh, there are completely private companies in China too that aren't owned by the government, but the Army shows up in some way or another for nearly everything in China. It is also how the Chinese government can afford to support their standing army of 10's of millions of soliders, as the tax base in China isn't large enough to support the current level of military activity in China. A surprising amount of money gets transferred by the U.S. Army to the Chinese Army as well...through this economic activity. As a result, the Army in China tends to run the government and not the other way around. And THAT issue has some interesting political and economic consequences which go a long way to explain why China behaves as they do in the world trade markets.
An interesting historical note to use that actually supports your thesis here is what happened to the economies of Japan and Germany after World War II:
Think about it carefully here. Both countries not only lost major markets, but were nearly completely destroyed due to warfare, and they were defeated peoples as well, both economically, militarily, and emotionally in nearly every aspect. Japan was even nuked, for crying out loud, and Tokyo had been bombed so completely that a nuke really wouldn't have made that much of a difference.
Yet here we are in the 21st Century, and both of these countries are economic powerhouses (with Japan and Germany both in the top 10 largest and most powerful armies in the world today....look it up if you don't believe me!)
So how did Japan go from a country receiving economic aid from Ethiopia to what it is today after this mess? It sure wasn't technology, but rather a very skilled population of highly literate and well educated people that were able to pick up the pieces of their country not ruined from warfare and able to rebuild. In many ways and in the longer term way of thinking, WWII was one of the best things that Japan ever did. Losing the war helped them out in many more ways than had they succeeded in establishing a Japanese empire from Calcutta to Denver (somewhere between Denver and Omaha was supposed to be the border between Japan and Germany.... who knows?)
In some ways, Japan had it easier than Germany, as Japan was able to keep some of its previous government, and the Japanese economy did survive at least in some form or another after the peace treaty ending the war. Germany had to fact the task of completely restarting their economy from scratch through an interersting idea: Every German citizen was given 1000 marks that they could use in any way they wanted... and that initial bit of cash is what the German economy was based on ever since (until they moved to the Euro). And again, the German population was highly educated, trained in technical skills, and very literate.
The question that needs to be raised to any nation is if they can survive and thrive on this sort of disaster, or if instead what will happen is what did happen to the Roman empire after the invasions by the Goths and Vandals. Many people even during the early middle ages wondered deeply about what happened to Rome, and nearly all of European history up to the 21st Century can be read as a series of attempts to re-create that long-lost empire of old... including Hitler's Germany I might add.
China faces an interesting problem because while the Chinese people are very literate, they have traditionally lacked many of the technological skills necessary for industrialized societies. Due to becoming the manufacturing center for North America, China is, for better or for worse, getting those basic skills necessary to compete. Many of the environmental and economic problems of today are in part due to how China has become an industrialize nation, and the billion Chinese citizens throwing gasoline into their vehicles.
While I admit that the Chinese have copied many things, they also have some incredibly bright and well educated individuals that certainly can compete with the best of "western" society. At best, this whole thing about the messing up of the photo is more a lack of experience than a criticism that they can't create these ideas and products in the first place.
My concern isn't about China trying to get to the Moon, but rather the American government's apparent apathy about returning to the Moon or trying to even set any strong goals of any kind with space technology. Seven years from now (more or less), when the Space Shuttle retires, there doesn't really appear to be any likelihood of there even being a manned astronaut corps of any kind at all with experience in space. I have deep doubts about the Ares spacecraft program, and my gut tells me that NASA is going to screw this program up, like the last dozen spacecraft proposals that
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This is an incredibly brilliant suggestion here. Seriously. And this is also completely within the realm of technical capabilities as well.
One other "tweak" that I would add to this otherwise excellent suggestion is that a "standard operating procedure" at a viable airport/air control space where some event like this happens is that all other air traffic should be cleared out of the way and the runways cleared of EVERYTHING when an event like this happens. Even though I trust automated systems in many cases, it is best to reduce even the potential of error... and a hijacking should be something so unusual that other drastic actions would be justified as well like shutting down the airport where such a plane would land.
If it is attention that the hijacker is seeking, then why not give it to them in a huge dose. And give them a punishment deserving to such a major disruption afterward.... if they are still alive after the incident. An automated landing like this shouldn't be a cause for being mixed in normal air traffic, even at a busy airport like JFK or O'Hare.
Can you please show me where in the constitution it says that congress has the authority to authorize individuals who perform strip searches of individuals who have committed no crime? Or even to conduct these sort of transportation screenings?
I guess the interstate commerce regulation clause.... what an abused provision of the constitution that I have ever heard of.
I guess the "minority" of the signers of the U.S. Constitution who were worried that rights not explicitly enumerated in the constitution would get trampled upon have turned out to be correct. However even those rights that are explicitly enumerated aren't even followed, where even laws that regulate political speech are passed in the face of an explicit constitutional clause that says "congress shall make no law...".
Freedom of movement, BTW, is one of the presumed "rights" that isn't explicitly documented in the U.S. Constitution, but is recognized in U.S. Common Law. There may be regulations in place in terms of demonstrating competency and safety, but you do have a "right to fly" or travel in whatever form that pleases you. Most TSA agents have a hard time to even demonstrate where their authority to act even comes from... in terms of even congressional authorization and laws that they are working under.
The railroad companies themselves screwed this one up.... so I don't have too much sympathy here on this topic.
It is also a problem that urban design schools and municipal planners almost deliberately tried to kill passenger rail transportation as a viable alternative. More to the point, consider this huge problem:
Rail hubs for most cities are located at a considerable distance from other transportation hubs, such as airports, bus terminals, interstate highways, and even "municipal railroads" such as subways and light rail. You would be lucky to get a taxi at most rail terminals. There are some noted exceptions, but they are exceptions rather than the rule. Travel by rail is a miserable experience for most people due to lousy access of the vehicle itself. Law enforcement is also more stringent at airports as opposed to rail depots... which often means that you risk becoming a victim of a crime just by standing at the rail depots as well. If the depot even exists.
It is also incredibly expensive even if you can get to the destinations you are seeking (or close enough). Consistently, air travel is about half of the price or more to get from one destination to the next throughout most of the Western USA compared to rail transit. Economies of scale seem to work in the North-eastern urban corridor of the USA where rail transit does seem to work out as a rough competitor economically to air travel, so again there is some silver lining to the whole thing.
But simply expanding Amtrak isn't going to be a one-size fits all solution.
BTW, I agree that travel by rail is an incredibly enjoyable experience. I just wish it were affordable and that I could feel safe at the places I have to get onto and off of the train. Unfortunately the only way for me or my kids to even get a glimpse of rail travel is to use a "tourist" short line historical railroad. And that really isn't a genuine transportation solution.
As for the rationale and justification for all of this increased security.... I couldn't have said this any better myself. There have been a few "terrorist plots" that have been uncovered since 9/11 that perhaps could only have been thwarted due to the airport security clearances.... but I highly doubt that.
What doesn't get talked about here is the typical airline and even the "official U.S. government" position in relationship to terrorists on September 10th, 2001:
If somebody tried to hijack an airplane, pilots and even air traffic controllers were instructed to give into all of the demands that a hijacker would insist upon.... fly them to anyplace that they insisted (within mechanical limits of the vehicle), and if in the air try to get them to land the airplane. The presumption here was that most hijackers weren't suicidal and therefore had a stake in the overall safety of the airplane. Some people might die...sure, but most of the people would live if you simply let the hijacker do what they wanted. DB Cooper, is perhaps the most "famous" of this era of hijackers, and what was considered to be a classic and expected hijacking situation.
What 9/11 did was let you know that if you don't fight the hijackers, that you will likely be dead anyway, so you might as well go down fighting if some idiot decides to try and take over the airplane. There never was a need for M-16s in airports to "fight terrorists", and most of the current level of security is a waste of tax dollars.
Of course I feel that the best way to stop terrorists and other similar idiots is a well-armed population of otherwise law-abiding citizens, however that scares the daylights out of law enforcement officials. I don't think 9/11 would have happened in the way it did if half of the people on the airplanes that crashed into the World Trade Center had handguns and training on how to use them, but that gets into arguments about gun control and the 2nd Amendment.
In regards to PCP.... I guess you don't know what a bad trip is all about. I sure wouldn't want to be on board an airplane or for that matter anywhere else when somebody is having a bad trip and gets out of control... they may be thinking they are having a wonderful time, but it screws up everybody else around them. I've heard of police officers (first hand accounts at that, not just something from a book or the news media) that have fired multiple bullets into people high on PCP that can't be stopped, and even heavy tranquilizers don't seem to work. If that high person is carrying a weapon of some kind, they are simply an out of control and just a bomb that is in the process of going off. This is a horrible substance, and something that is justifiably illegal to own or produce.
This issue came up on the Tesla Motors (see http://teslamotors.com/) blog where a petrochemical engineer was trying to demonstrate what the MPG rating of the Tesla Roadster really could be compared to in terms of a more conventional automobile. All sorts of issues were addressed, including the assumption that 100% of the electricity was produced from burning carbon-based fuels such as fuel oil (or other from crude common extracts), tars, and coal. These operate at a pretty high efficiency rate in part because of the huge industrial size of these facilities, and the fact that most utility companies want to extract as much energy out of those fuels as possible. Face it, you can't possibly meet the energy extraction capability of a 500 MW generating plant in your backyard. Certainly not in a moving vehicle like your automobile.
Other issues came up, and even addressed the raw energy that is released from burning a gallon of gasoline. He also had at hand some figures in terms of how much electricity that his plant was consuming for producing the gasoline, and did a simple division of the number of gallons of gasoline his company produced vs. how much electricity that they were using, even independent of overhead like lighting the offices of the plant or other issues. Mind you, this was light, sweet crude oil he was processing here and wasn't even dealing with extraction costs. At the refinery he discovered that he was actually consuming far more energy than was possibly being produced in consumer-grade gasoline. That also sold him completely on the subject of buying an electric automobile, and made a purchase immediately with Tesla.
I do wish I could get some figures from a more reliable source than a blog, but for myself, this is sufficient. I will say that for now you can consider this to be merely a conjecture, but something that has some real weight behind it and may be worth a formal study... if you are in the market for something like this. For those who are pushing for alternative fuels, this is one sort of figure that certainly would prove a killer app for trying to select alternative fuels.
I also wish that the petroleum companies would elaborate on the fact that petroleum is really not an energy source but rather an energy storage medium, as it would really frame the whole debate over where investment really needs to take place, and kill the ethanol industry for once and for all (except in the case of perhaps Jack Daniels, but I digress here). Ethanol producers are attempting to get into the energy storage game as well, but it is incredibly expensive and they are masking the true costs of their efforts, including how it is significantly affecting the price of food due to diverting food production from grocery stores to fuel plants.
Obviously other alternative fuels/energy storage devices have their place, but energy legislation is dumping far more effort into areas that may in the long run prove to be dubious on their return. It also makes solar energy sources appear much more attractive if you can demonstrate that they are true energy sources and not just energy storage mediums, not to mention that solar energy can be transformed into storage media in one form or another.
Replying belatedly here, but I would like to know something?
What is your alternative here?
I'm not saying that we can't find some reasonable alternatives, but I don't see the huge need to be an alarmist and force me and others to make drastic changes in our lifestyles for what appears to me to be a political motivation, not something that has a sound scientific basis.
BTW, I was dead on about what would happen if we reverted back to a hunter/gatherer lifestyle... unless you can prove to me how this world can sustain itself with a population of over 10 billion people from a nearly pure agrarian lifestyle or even just "living off of the land". Sure, mankind did that for millions of years, but with a population that numbered in the low millions of people, and didn't even get to major regions of the world like America until about 20,000 years ago. If we abandon petroleum without replacing it with an even higher density storage medium, how far back in technological development do you really want to go? Middle ages? Roman technology? Even further? I don't even think a Middle-age (meaning c. 1000 A.D. Europe) level of technology is possible without at least some fossil fuel source... and even then it would mean a huge reduction in the population of mankind... simply because we couldn't possibly feed that many people with even that level of technology.
You are taking far too much for granted, and ignoring the very hard labors of your ancestors that got you to where you are today. I do have pity upon you for forgetting the lessons of history, and therefore are doomed to repeat them.
One nice thing about the "lighting the fires atop the walls" would do is not only notify that an attack is happening, but also the direction it is coming from.
The Internet Brain talks a little about this a little bit, including some potential references to look at.
But it does matter to those who may be your prospective employers and those to whom you may want to get a little bit of money from if you want to have something other than the stupid return on investment that you are quoting.
Does it matter if a business can afford to hire one or two more people because they can keep a little bit more of their money? I think that "poor person" you are championing here is going to appreciate that job when the tax code is a little bit more sane.
On top of all of this, you are missing the whole point of the parent post..... that the double taxation of dividends has all but eliminated this form of investment return from public corporations. Even for companies who offer dividends, they usually have options available to have stock certificates in lieu of dividends (purchased at market rates) for investors who don't want them and are willing to take a hit on capital gains at a later date.
BTW, I wouldn't count out too many people in downtown Cleveland to not care about this issue either... as far more people than you would realize have fairly sizable 401(k) accounts and other retirement investments that depend on the health of the world financial markets, including stock dividends from public companies. This even includes several "homeless" people that I've met that don't want to cash out their retirement accounts for one reason or another (perhaps even very valid reasons at that). You won't stay a young and stupid recent college graduate for too long.
You know, I think this hits the nail on the head squarely (or in the foot, as it may be with Circuit City).
When I think of Wal-mart, I think of (as my sister put it to me once) "a future landfill waiting to happen". You go to that store because it has dirt cheap prices on everything, even if they break tomorrow. Overhead is so low and they move so many semi-trucks of merchandise that it doesn't matter if their employees are as stupid as a cube of margarine. You know exactly what you are going to get when you go into that store.
Somehow, I don't think Circuit City can compete with Wal-mart....even if it is just the Wal-mart electronics departments.
Somehow this idea that you have to distinguish yourself and make you heard above the noise of the marketplace is lost on the board members and top executives of Circuit City. In some cases, I've seen a successful re-launch of a retail store concept, but that is something quite rare indeed. I agree that Circuit City doesn't have much of a hope for lasting to next Christmas, or perhaps just barely.
This is also something ripe for a shareholder suit against the board of directors. If there was a specific action that the board members performed that did not meet with the corporate charter (usually to maximize profit and minimize risk is stated explicitly in the corporate charter), there may be grounds to go after the personal wealth of the board members. "Honest" investing mistakes are fine, but in this case the shareholders could legitimately claim that by firing the experienced help, they shot themselves in the foot and caused the profits of the company to drop like a rock.
Usually, most experienced help has proven themselves worthy simply by longevity alone that they can keep their noses clean and are mostly good workers. Especially if they don't have "special" protections that keep them from getting fired, such as special contracts from labor unions that allow under-performing employees to remain on the job.
This is also something that has "class-action lawsuit" written all over it as well (the class being shareholders of record as of a certain date). As an investor going into one of these lawsuits, it is a bit tricky as you might just make more money by simply selling the stock and not bothering with the lawsuit, but if you think you can make more money from the lawsuit or simply want to get revenge from some stupid board members, it can be a shareholder tool to force the board to shape up.
Where a dropping share price starts to hurt is when the top tier of executives have a large number of stock options that are available to them, but the stock price is below the option price. Usually most executives like the situation to be the other way around (like being able to buy Microsoft or Apple stock for $10/share). For this reason, stock options are usually given as a performance bonus for top executives so their interests are also similar or the same as the shareholders. I don't know what options are available for Circuit City execs, but I would presume that they are worthless or nearly so at the moment.
I suppose that some of those predicting the end of the Roman Empire were correct.... but it took several hundred years to happen. In that case, I suppose it gave legitimacy to those doom and gloom experts too.
We don't even have an energy problem. Indeed, all of the problems you are complaining about here is due to an over abundance of energy, not a lack of it. The fact that a doom sayer of the finality of the world like yourself can name off at least 4 different sources of energy that can be tapped and transformed into useful forms needed in modern industrial societies speaks volumes about how much effort is going into identifying useful energy forms.
The one huge problem, if there is one, about energy production is not how to extract the most out of the energy sources, but how to keep idiots from extracting too much from those energy sources at once. You may ask "Huh?" here, but pay close attention.... an explosion is just the rapid release of large quantities of energy at once at a point source.... aka a "bomb". And those kill people == very bad technology (to some people's thinking). This is the primary reason why nuclear energy (both fusion and fission) is the big evil bad guy, in spite of the fact that a nuclear future really is the best way to protect the environment in the long run. Not only for waste disposal, but even for mineral extraction costs (including intangible costs like environmental damage) nuclear fission is several orders of magnitude more efficient than petroleum and coal production techniques. For crying out loud, the typical coal electric generating plant produces far more toxic nuclear waste per kWh than a typical nuclear fission power plant. That is completely discounting silly things like CO2 that are now getting everybody's panties in a bunch. Fusion sources, if developed, are just the icing on the cake and make the argument undeniable.
This still doesn't solve the problem of how you can concentrate energy into a useful and portable source that can be tapped by ordinary people, for things like transportation and commerce. And mass transportation isn't always the solution, as there are legitimate reasons why many people don't want to be in a herd and travel the same route and to the same places that 90% of the rest of humanity is at.
FYI, did you know that when you throw a gallon of gasoline into your automobile, that at the refinery more energy was consumed in the processing of the gasoline than is available for you when you burn that fuel? Most of that processing energy comes in the form of electricity, which the oil refineries get from the same sources that power your light bulbs... but the point is that most fuel sources are just energy concentration mediums. And it is important to separate energy production from energy storage. Until you can develop an energy storage medium that is more efficient than petroleum, we will continue to require petroleum or something very similar for a very long time to come. Lithium ion technology looks very promising at the moment, as are some other interesting energy storage devices. Ethanol is, IMHO, a horribly wasteful energy storage form but at least it is a semi-viable replacement for common uses of petroleum if you absolutely must stop the black fluid mineral extraction processes. And most alcohols don't
While Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites are certainly the focus of this particular article and thread, they are hardly the only commercial spacecraft corporation that is making some significant progress and will be making headlines in 2008 (assuming that everything is still working the way it should).
SpaceX, or Space Exploration Technologies, the company started by Paypal founder Elon Musk, is scheduled to perform their final test flight for the Falcon 1 in January, 2008. If all goes well, they may even get a flight of their larger Falcon 9 spacecraft before the end of the year. This is particularly significant for manned spaceflight, as their Dragon spacecraft is reliant upon the successful launches of these vehicles. Unlike the Virgin Galactic spacecraft, the Dragon spacecraft is going to have the capabilities of sending as many as six passengers to the ISS.... or anywhere else in Low-earth orbit. In many ways, I think this is going to be far more significant than what Branson is doing with Virgin Galactic.
In addition, the Lunar Landing Challenge will likely be "won" this time next year with the nearly dozen rocket teams competing for the purse. My heart broke when Armadillo Aerospace crashed and burned this year and failed to win the price objectives, but they certainly learned from their experience and will roll those designs into the next generation of their spacecraft. This particular challenge is certainly breeding many future commercial spaceflight companies that are flying real hardware, and not just some imaginative designs on paper that will never see the light of day.
I also don't know what Blue Origin is doing, but that is certainly a company to keep a close ear to the ground and at least try to watch for developments over this next year. Unlike several of the spacecraft manufacturers, they are avoiding the appearance of vaporware by simply not really announcing anything other than the fact that they own one heck of a lot of real estate in Texas and that they have had several successful test flights of their rocketry hardware.... and a long term goal of also doing commercial passenger space travel. They also have some investors with some deep pockets that can help get them there without having to "go public".
I'm just scratching the surface here as well, but there are some amazing groups of individuals who have been devoting resources to commercial spaceflight, and 2008 really could be "the year of the spacecraft", at least in terms of headlines generated by the mainstream press. Virgin Galactic certainly isn't going to be the only one in the headlines here, although they may be the first to send paying passengers into space on something other than a Soyuz capsule.
The only way this would have a significant impact is on a political basis. That would be, some idiot of a bureaucrat who gums up the whole thing by holding hearings and stopping anybody in any situation from using a rocket of any design to get into space.
In fact, that is precisely the problem that the USA has been facing in manned spaceflight.... that there has been one "true" design of a spacecraft. When a major design flaw is found with that spacecraft design, it shuts down the whole "industry" and makes a huge mess of things.
If you make the comparison to commercial aviation, this would be like trying to conduct passenger air travel with everybody using the same type of airplane or even the very same (very large) airplane. Yeah, if there is a problem or an accident involving that design, perhaps a serious inquiry should occur and perhaps even shut down all of the airplanes of that particular design. Luckily, there are enough different kinds of airplanes flying with commercial aviation that passenger air travel would continue even if the FAA completely removed one type of airplane with a particularly fatal design flaw...or even removed all of the aircraft of a particular manufacturer (like Boeing, for instance). Would that put that particular manufacturer into bankruptcy if their aircraft were grounded for a significant amount of time? Yeah. No doubt. But it still wouldn't kill commercial aviation, and in the long run it would actually be healthier for the industry as others would try to fill the economic niche left by the removal of that company, specifically trying to overcome the problems discovered.
While nobody, and I mean nobody, really wants to see somebody die in space, and I'll admit that I really am concerned about commercial spaceflight safety, even having a full spacecraft of passengers dying would not necessarily be "the end of the world". People die in amusement parks, and fairly often on roller coasters. A curious thing happens when people die in an amusement park, however: The number of customers actually goes up! I'm not kidding here. And the lines to get on the ride where people died actually get longer (once, of course, the ride is fixed and the park officials claim to have fixed the problem).
If, when an accident occurs for the commercial spaceflight industry during actual operations of the spacecraft, there will be some very intelligent (they are rocket scientists, you know) people who will be able to calmly and completely explain where the safety protocols broke down, what was the real problem, and be able to honestly say that the problem has been corrected. This has been a pattern since the beginning of commercial aviation or even commercial shipping of any kind, and I simply don't see this one transportation method being openly dismissed to the degree you are suggesting if somebody dies. Do people still ride passenger cruise ships through the North Atlantic since the Titanic sank?
BTW, have you seen the size of a full data dump of the English Wikipedia?
It would fill much more than a typical thumb drive, and that is just the text alone. Add in the images, and you have many GB worth of data. I would be very surprised if you could fit all of that information onto a palm-sized device that could "fit in your pocket" (the iPhone connected to the 'net not withstanding).
Articles about living people do tend to have some substantial problems, and as a rule I stay away from them as much as I can...and treat the information on those kind of pages with a grain of salt (perhaps a whole shaker).
Still, I can understand why you feel upset when you find information that you know for a fact is inaccurate...particularly when it is about yourself.
IMHO Wikipedia has its strength in articles about technology and science, where there are resources available to do unbiased research and "facts" can be independently verified. Articles about pop culture and living people (like yourself) tend to be much weaker as there often aren't real sources for the information except for occasional news stories that in themselves have biases and shortcomings. In reading some of the historical editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica, I wouldn't say that unbiased articles about living people is any worse today than it was 100 years ago, and may in fact be slightly better in that people are aware of the biases instead of simply relying upon "authority" to get it correct.
In defense of Encyclopaedia Britannica, they did hire some of the very best scholars over the years that included Nobel Prize laureates and well respected authors and educators to help compile their content. Some of the authors involved are nearly a "who's who" of the best of the writing world, science, and theology.
Still, I would have to say that there still are bias even to this particular reference work, and it has its own limitation, including inaccuracies. To suggest that one is better than the other is just squabbling over details.
So, do you allow references to any encyclopedia in any of your classes as a source?
As a parent and educator, I encourage my children and students to use Wikipedia as a starting off point to begin research. It is a wonderful place to find a brief overview of a topic, related concepts, and original sources of information. You don't use Wikipedia to be the source but rather use it to help find the sources that are relevant. Look up what the authors of the Wikipedia article used to justify the information in the article. For featured articles, this is actually a requirement.
Yes, there will be some weak articles in Wikipedia.... just as there would be in any general reference book like Encyclopedia Britannica as well. Even when I was a kid (well before Wikipedia), it was common in a high school level or younger to have kids simply copy whole paragraphs from an encyclopedia and call it "research" for papers written as an assignment. I (unfortunately) even saw it on a college level. Using Wikipedia makes this no different.
For some topics, you as a student may not even have a clue where to being on studying about the subject. A Google search is often a poor tool as it throws up all kinds of garbage and people using keywords inappropriately to advertise some website... often porn websites to boot. A good website like Wikipedia can certainly help in identifying what is something of quality you ought to consider as you begin a scholarly study of the topic.
One other thing that Wikipedia does: It allows your students to "give back" and offer to others some of the fruits of their labor, if they choose to add to the article or even just add a few extra references suggestions to look at which apply to a given topic. Wikipedia shouldn't be looked at with fear and dread by educators, but instead should be discussed as why tertiary sources aren't necessarily something you should use instead of primary sources. Wikipedia is a tertiary source and doesn't claim to be anything else.
How do you know that manned spaceflight has no money?
As far as spaceflight being dangerous, so is flight of any kind in general. So I take it that you never fly commercial airliners and believe they should be shut down as well due to safety issues? And it wasn't risky in the 1920's just when commercial aviation was starting out?
Most of the reason why spaceflight is perceived to be so expensive has to do with the Kennedy Administration's attitude about going to the Moon: Waste everything but time. So of course with such an approach you would have something that worked, but would be incredibly expensive.
Keep in mind the classical engineering motto:
You can have your idea built with the following criteria:
Please choose at most two of the above.
NASA choose to ignore cheaper in the quest for Apollo. Design compromises on the Space Shuttle ignored nearly all of these potential goals as they tried to do all three at the same time, together with a culture designing the space shuttle that was used to the Apollo goal of unlimited budgets.
We simply don't know if the design using a "cheaper" and "more reliable" approach that takes longer to build can be done at all without a huge pressure of national pride forcing them to be built yesterday. Elon Musk and Burton Rutan are certainly trying to find out.
First of all, I was referring to not unmanned LEO travel, but manned spaceflight that has been done now by three nations, and the ESA is strongly looking at being nation/group #4 to have their own way into space. This isn't exactly something new, and was done by John Glenn in 1960. It isn't exactly cutting edge science here and knowledge of how to send people up and down is pretty well established. How to do that cheaply is another issue, but actually getting it accomplished isn't.
As far as a "zero tolerance" of fatalities, I certainly don't see that from NASA. I still think it was stupid to have the Columbia go back to the Earth, other than the fact that NASA didn't want a bunch of corpses floating in a gradually decaying orbit over the course of several years after those astronauts died of starvation and oxygen deprevation. Even so, NASA has had several fatalities due to manned spaceflight operations, not all of which have been counted in the "official" statistics of astronauts who died during the actual launch or landing of the spacecraft. The Russians have had even higher levels of fatalities, even though the Soyuz seems to be more reliable now than the Space Shuttle...especially on a per flight basis. Commercial aviation was much worse than spaceflight when it first started, with an incredibly high rate of death for pilots. That is one of the reasons why the Federal Aviation Ad
There is a "military space program". It is called the United States Air Force. They have full jurisdiction over military assets that go into space, and have a rather large fleet of satellites and when NASA sends up "classified" cargos on the Space Shuttle, it is done with 100% Air Force crews. There are some NASA astronauts from other branches of the miltary, but that is irrelevant here.
As for an established manned military presence in space, I have no doubt that the Department of Defense will come up with whatever spacecraft can work to fill its needs. If that is the Scaled Composite's Space Ship Five, I have no doubt that there will be a military contract for something like that to fill their needs.
This isn't a "privatization of NASA", but letting NASA be what it should be: An advanced aviation and space research and development organization that stays on the cutting edge of new technologies and pushes the frontiers of both knowledge and physical territory. A NASA astronaut shouldn't be the thousandth person on Mars, he should be the first. At NASA's current rate of progress I have my doubts about even coming in on the first thousand.
Certainly coming up with a new spacecraft that only makes it from the ground to low-earth orbit is hardly cutting edge engineering here, and for nearly the same cost as flying the space shuttle at the same time. I have deep reservations about cost estimates for the Ares spacecraft, especially given the previous track record NASA has for similar programs.
You miss the point I was trying to make here. I'm suggesting that the price that people were willing to pay for commercial point to point services at high speed can be derived from the price they were willing to pay for a Concorde. Not that I was defending the costs of the next generation of super-sonic aircraft or the technical challenges that would go into building them.
If you have at least a rough idea what people will pay for these services, at least you can begin to come up with a business plan if you want to even design something like a sub-orbital spacecraft.
In addition, sub-orbital can do distances much larger than just trans-atlantic travel, which in comparison is a trivial distance. This makes for a much larger time savings that can be justified for paying yet higher prices.
This still says nothing about if a particular spacecraft design can be financially successful, but I am suggesting that there is a non-zero dollar figure you can use right now to make a business case for making a competitor to Virgin Galactic that would do a trans-atlantic flight hop... provided you could bring the cost of the aircraft/spaceship down to something under the budget based on these numbers.
It is entirely a different issue if such a spacecraft could be built for that cost.
Define "most people"?
When was the last time you flew in a commercial airliner during bad weather?
I remember one particularly nasty flight that went through what I swear was a hurricane that was essentially a 3 hour ride in a roller coaster. And that was a regularly scheduled commercial flight with over 300 passengers on board. I'm sure the pilots of that plane weren't exactly having an easy time on the flight either, but the point is that even existing transportation systems experience some interesting acceleration forces. This particular flight lasted nearly 10 hours (going from the USA to Brazil) but for at least 3 hours it was a real wild ride. And I experienced G forces that were very much equivalent of what I would have in a roller coaster... including some very unpredictable direction changes going up, down, and side to side, that simply wouldn't be found in a rocket. In some ways, going into space is quite a bit more predictable than air travel.
I know that most air travel happens at high altitudes that try to get "above the weather", but my point is that I don't think most of those passengers of nearly every age that I was traveling with (newborns to senior citizens...certainly not all of them at peak physical fitness) ever considered that it would be their last flight when the plane landed on the ground. And this isn't an isolated experience.
I just don't buy this argument against people going into space even for point to point travel on the Earth.
I'll be the first to admit that some aspects of "privatization of government" simply don't make sense. Private security guards instead of police, and a private "security patrol" instead of military units...essentially the classical "mercenaries" is just insane. These by their very nature really require some sort of governmental "authority" in order to not only enforce decisions made by government employees in this sort of position, but to also keep people in these positions from abusing their authority.
Still, when it comes to NASA and building the next version of a transportation system, this is something that governments, particularly the U.S. Federal Government, has a miserable track record on delivering. And something which "private industry" has a very long and well established record of providing at a very reasonable price along with excellent performance. NASA isn't in the commercial passenger airline industry, why should they be doing the same thing for spaceflight?
More to the point, travel to and from the Earth to Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) is hardly cutting edge in terms of discovering how it can be done, if it can be done, or what the environment is like to even be there as an astronaut. This isn't science, this is engineering and mass-produced manufacturing technology. The Ares I spacecraft can't even really be called "cutting edge", other than some of the components are going to be a couple of generations more up-to-date than what NASA had in the 1960s...especially with things like replacing the Apollo Guidance Computer and using new composite materials for the structure of the spacecraft. But those were developed outside of NASA and nothing that NASA is doing now is really being innovative other than putting these existing technologies together. And even that isn't really new either, if you consider some of the private spacecraft manufacturers in the USA alone.
If on the next time you go on a flight across the world somewhere, would you be willing to fly in an airplane that was operated by the European Union (not just one country in Europe) and built by the lowest bid contractor that bribed EU officials to get the contract? That is what you get from NASA (substituting the EU with USA federal government). It might work, but it might crash 1%-5% of the time too... again like the Space Shuttle does. Not a good track record to compare against.
If it meant that I could travel from Chicago to Beijing in under 3 hours? Or London to Syndey in less than 5 hours?
You had better believe that there would be demand for genuine ballistic arcs around the world. Indeed there is demand for sub-orbital flights right now.... if the equipment technology (read safety concerns) and the costs dropped to something a little cheaper than the current $1 Billion USD per flight that NASA does for Shuttle flights.
Also, next day cargo is already being done by current air freight businesses. It is in fact a huge industry in its own right. "Previous day" shipment (crossing the international time line to travel to yesterday) suddenly becomes a reality when you include potential ballistic arcs for shipping cargo.
A hard data point on what people are willing to pay for high speed travel can be found with the Concorde super-sonic flights between New York and London. People were routinely paying $10,000 per seat, and strong sales whenever it was available. Certainly there were some sound business reasons why you might want to send a salesman or corporate executive on one of these high-speed flights instead of a sub-sonic commercial flight.
The reason the Concorde isn't flying any more had more to do with safety concerns and the age of the airplanes that were in service, rather than a lack of demand for something which could go that fast. The market certainly is there... if you can build the machine to make it happen.
Not only would I, myself, be willing to "volunteer" to take one of these flights, there certainly is a price well above normal commercial air travel that I'd be willing to pay for the privilege myself. I could also calculate and demonstrate from a raw energy and physics perspective how you could eventually save money and make a ballistic flight through the vacuum of space cheaper than plowing through the troposphere in an airplane, especially for longer flights. In other words, even for point to point travel from different locations on the Earth and nowhere else, you can make a hard case for space travel being something eventually routine.
And once you are already in space (essentially LEO), getting to the Moon is in comparison trivial. Or the rest of the Solar System. In fact, I've seen some good numbers that show it is easier to get to Phobos than to the Moon, but that is irrelevant to this discussion.
In regards to the Russian government, I had some high hopes that Yeltsin would have made some significant improvements in the system.
The most amazing thing for Yeltsin was when he went on a visit to Texas, and entered a grocery store, making note of a woman buying a large amount of food from a store that was obviously overflowing with goods. He thought she must have been some sort of high-level government employee because of all the nice stuff she was getting, and because the store was relatively empty at the time (no lines waiting to get in at all or even to the checkstand). It turns out that the woman was buying the food with Food Stamps, and was a single mother earning roughly minimum wage.
When Yeltsin realized that somebody on welfare in the USA was eating better than he was as the President of Russia, he realized that it would be nearly impossible to win a war against the USA, if the USA put up anything resembling a real fight. He also realized that some very significant reforms had to happen both politically and economically to Russian society if his country was to survive at all in the coming centuries.
I'll note that some much needed reforms have happened to Russia, and the overall standard of living in Russia is slightly better than before... even though there is a greater disparity between the rich and the poor now in Russia as well. Life is also much tougher as the current economic system in Russia is much more unpredictable than under the earlier Communist system, and I can understand why there are some Russians who hate the situation they are currently forced to live under right now.
As for China.... that is one really weird economy and political situation going on right now. In many ways you can compare the economic and political situation to a small town where the economy is dominated by one super-large employer. I'm talking something like a smaller mid-west town where a major manufacturing plant employs almost all private-sector jobs. There are hundreds of towns like this across America, and it is interesting to see how governments give in to that "company" whenever a political situation that affects that company shows up.
The reason I say that is because the Chinese "People's Army" is by far and away the largest employer in China. I'm not just talking the soldiers in uniform, but in nearly every other economic aspect of Chinese society. The Chinese Army owns and operates mines, smelting plants, manufacturing facilities, television stations, transportation systems, commercial shipping operations.... indeed nearly anything and everything that can be made or crafted in modern society. If you purchased something from Wal-mart that had "Made in China" on it, I would give it about a 50/50 odds or better that it was made by the Chinese Army either directly or indirectly. I'm not kidding here either. Oh, there are completely private companies in China too that aren't owned by the government, but the Army shows up in some way or another for nearly everything in China. It is also how the Chinese government can afford to support their standing army of 10's of millions of soliders, as the tax base in China isn't large enough to support the current level of military activity in China. A surprising amount of money gets transferred by the U.S. Army to the Chinese Army as well...through this economic activity. As a result, the Army in China tends to run the government and not the other way around. And THAT issue has some interesting political and economic consequences which go a long way to explain why China behaves as they do in the world trade markets.
An interesting historical note to use that actually supports your thesis here is what happened to the economies of Japan and Germany after World War II:
Think about it carefully here. Both countries not only lost major markets, but were nearly completely destroyed due to warfare, and they were defeated peoples as well, both economically, militarily, and emotionally in nearly every aspect. Japan was even nuked, for crying out loud, and Tokyo had been bombed so completely that a nuke really wouldn't have made that much of a difference.
Yet here we are in the 21st Century, and both of these countries are economic powerhouses (with Japan and Germany both in the top 10 largest and most powerful armies in the world today....look it up if you don't believe me!)
So how did Japan go from a country receiving economic aid from Ethiopia to what it is today after this mess? It sure wasn't technology, but rather a very skilled population of highly literate and well educated people that were able to pick up the pieces of their country not ruined from warfare and able to rebuild. In many ways and in the longer term way of thinking, WWII was one of the best things that Japan ever did. Losing the war helped them out in many more ways than had they succeeded in establishing a Japanese empire from Calcutta to Denver (somewhere between Denver and Omaha was supposed to be the border between Japan and Germany.... who knows?)
In some ways, Japan had it easier than Germany, as Japan was able to keep some of its previous government, and the Japanese economy did survive at least in some form or another after the peace treaty ending the war. Germany had to fact the task of completely restarting their economy from scratch through an interersting idea: Every German citizen was given 1000 marks that they could use in any way they wanted... and that initial bit of cash is what the German economy was based on ever since (until they moved to the Euro). And again, the German population was highly educated, trained in technical skills, and very literate.
The question that needs to be raised to any nation is if they can survive and thrive on this sort of disaster, or if instead what will happen is what did happen to the Roman empire after the invasions by the Goths and Vandals. Many people even during the early middle ages wondered deeply about what happened to Rome, and nearly all of European history up to the 21st Century can be read as a series of attempts to re-create that long-lost empire of old... including Hitler's Germany I might add.
China faces an interesting problem because while the Chinese people are very literate, they have traditionally lacked many of the technological skills necessary for industrialized societies. Due to becoming the manufacturing center for North America, China is, for better or for worse, getting those basic skills necessary to compete. Many of the environmental and economic problems of today are in part due to how China has become an industrialize nation, and the billion Chinese citizens throwing gasoline into their vehicles.
While I admit that the Chinese have copied many things, they also have some incredibly bright and well educated individuals that certainly can compete with the best of "western" society. At best, this whole thing about the messing up of the photo is more a lack of experience than a criticism that they can't create these ideas and products in the first place.
My concern isn't about China trying to get to the Moon, but rather the American government's apparent apathy about returning to the Moon or trying to even set any strong goals of any kind with space technology. Seven years from now (more or less), when the Space Shuttle retires, there doesn't really appear to be any likelihood of there even being a manned astronaut corps of any kind at all with experience in space. I have deep doubts about the Ares spacecraft program, and my gut tells me that NASA is going to screw this program up, like the last dozen spacecraft proposals that