If you take a moment to actually poke around on the site, you'll see that there's a lot of localization, but not in the stuff created within CNet itself. While it's an interesting approach by the publishers of builders.com to attempt wholesale outsourcing of articles, it's also an obvious grasp at straws from a site that's on the verge of closing down.
While I've met any number of Indians in the US and India with a fine command of the English language, I'm not sure how well a two month attempt to create a writing mill from scratch will play, even run from San Jose, much less India. If the quality of written matter goes down (for a number of reasons, of which ESL writers are only one), customers aren't going to browse the site, and advertisers are going to bail.
I'm one of the small number of folks running Debian on an old Powermac, so I'm glad for the log scale on the architectures plot to help pull "my" group out of the noise. It bothers me that a very large fraction come up as architecture "unknown". I don't see a "--mind-your-own-damn-business" flag in the manpage, so what's with that?
My Original Example, In Depth
on
Melting Europa
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· Score: 1
Ok, if we're going to split hairs: William Shockley, the 1956 winner in physics for co-inventing the transistor. Years later at Stanford, he became interested in the origins of human intelligence. Although he had no formal training in genetics or psychology, he began to formulate a theory of what he called dysgenics. Using data from the U.S. Army's crude pre-induction IQ tests, he concluded that African Americans were inherently less intelligent than Caucasians.
If Thomas Gold or Dyson want to speculate that because the outer planets are lousy with methane, etc, then an inner rocky planet like Earth is sweating out hydrocarbons by the metric kiloton every day, they can be my guest. However, until they stop making lay errors like mistaking oil seepage from nearby steam injections for abiotic petroleum reservoir refills, I don't find it a theory that a roughneck can bank on. Your mileage may vary.
Re:Oh That's Right, Oil Percolates From Mantle!
on
Melting Europa
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· Score: 1
Yep. Kooks like Freeman Dyson and Thomas Gold, too.
Yep, kinda like the occasional Nobel Lauriate who, based on his encyclopedic knowledge of Physics, concludes that negros are natural born morons.
Oh That's Right, Oil Percolates From Mantle!
on
Melting Europa
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Yes, and it's a theory that gravity sucks. For those of you just tuning in, there are two theories of petroleum and LP generation: Biogenic and Abiogenic.
Biogenic assumes that living things die, are deeply buried in the crust, rot, and in so doing create various hydrocarbons. Abiogenic assumes that primordial material from the creation of the planet are cooked and rise into the crust. This theory posits that biological microfossils found in petroleum are leeched from the crust by the flow, rather than being one of the byproducts of biogenic rot.
Kooks like J. F. Kenney grasp at old research by a few Soviet geologist to claim that abiogenic reserves are being constantly replenished more quickly than even our current rate of extraction(1).
The vast majority of geologists would say that while research confirms that abiogenic formation of gaseous alkanes can take place in the Earth's crust, a comparison with the isotopic signatures of economically important gas reservoirs around the world suggests that abiogenic production is not a globally significant source of hydrocarbons (2).
After reading through the Spaceguard proposal and the Space.com article, I gotta wonder if the left hand knows what the right hand is doing.
There's mention of the big buck$ LSST telescope, and a proposal to pop for six dedicated scopes, but nothing about the US$8mil or so that has already been allocated to the PanSTARRS project in Hawaii. UH is developing a telescope array and automated asteroid detection system to scan almost the entire sky every few days. Once deployed on either Mauna Kea or Haleakala, a five year campaign is planned to catalog at least 90% of the estimated number of 0.3km or bigger NEOs out there.
If an orbit is found that seems to intersect with us, then it becomes someone else's problem.
It doesn't cost 400 quid to put together an LCD picture frame. PopSci is taking a different route from Linux Toys, which starts with a $50 laptop from eBay. This has also been reviewed on Slashdot. While I like PopSci's mini ATX method, the Linux Toys laptop method is usually cheaper, if you shop eBay carefully, and refer to Linux On Laptops to make sure it'll work.
Some of you may recall that the Viking landers used radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTG's), the "warm brick" another poster referred to. The landers remained active for up to six years, Viking 1 having been disabled by a boo-boo from mission control. They didn't have to worry much about dust accumulation, and Viking 2 landed at 48deg North, 'way north of the tropical band the MER planners were limited to by solar panels.
So why nukes for Viking, and none for MER A & B?
1) Viking had money. Sure, NASA was getting into a budget hurt locker by the time the missions made it to Mars in '76, but the money was there when it was needed during the planning and construction. The landers got the kitchen sink, and the biggest Titan II launchers then avaiable to get 'em going. By contrast, the MER team had to make sure their package was not much heavier and absolutely no bigger than Pathfinder. The planetary missions are bastard stepchildren to a NASA which is mandated to keep the Space Shuttle and ISS going on an inadequate budget, even if it all went to the manned space program.
2) Three Mile Island, Chernobyl. Hadn't happened yet, so the no nukes crowd was still the wacko fringe during Viking. Compare to the fuss made over Cassini before launch and while making a gravity-assist Earth flyby. "200,000 deaths!" "Dump it in the Sun!" In general, people have mellowed out a bit, but the PR angle makes a good excuse when one doesn't have the money to gold-plate a mission, anyway.
The Falklands were an "intervention"? So, when the Germans occupied the Channel Islands, was their reconquest an "intervention" as well? I'm guessing you define "liberation" when it's a piece of the UK you care about, an "intervention" when it's a piece you don't (and the locals weren't cooperative with your desire to wash your hands of their home).
Perhaps the reason why many Americans care about military records is the perception that a military is a neccessary part of maintaining national sovereignty. Do the folks in the UK think that's all just poppy cock, or just you?
I agree, that open source doesn't market because it's there to solve a specific problem, rather than to create another Bill. Free software is software to solve a specific problem too, starting with an NDA standing between a programmer and a printer driver bug fix. I realise the driving force behind Open software tends to be more practical (I can make this product work better) than political Free software (I can make this product). However, without freedom of action, Open software might find itself squished between the politics of Commercial software.
Open source needs marketing to increase market share as much as Commercial software does. Without it, a programmer is more likely to run into a situation where she can't make the software better because she's not allowed to. Is force to drive the marketing different? Sure, but it's still there.
You may teach an optimization class, but your argument sounds like the same doctrinaire crap the economics profs preach as if it were handed down from the Almighty. All human endevors are by their nature inefficient in some way, such that it's always possible to squeeze more productivity out of them.
However, last time I checked, "to maximize efficiency" was not an article of the US constitution. Therefore, if the greater number of voting citizens wish to enjoy some breathing room at the expense of maximized productivity and profits, they have several options. One such is to bring pressure that legislators pass and executive branches enforce laws and regulations acting - how ever imperfectly - as a counter balance to the latest phase in hollowing out the US economic infrastructure.
I forsee a day when you, sir or madam, find that too few of the potential consumers of a post-secondary education are able to afford your product. At that time, I look forward to your report on the benefits of market rigor.
Oh, come on. Thrifty shopping does not harm the economy. If I save $5 by finding a better deal at Walmart or anywhere else, I now have $5 left over which I'll either spend on something else or invest. Your argument is one of the many forms of the broken window fallacy.
I think you may have missed the point of the "broken window fallacy" examples. What I'm stating is a case of "hidden cost", which the Wikipedia article you reference defines as "Because the costs are hidden, there is an illusion that the benefits cost nothing." Within Walmart's business practices are the hidden costs: a strong deflationary cycle that removes more value from the overall system than it gains for Walmart's stockholders and employees. I stand by my assertion that in essence the $5 you save now are going to have a future cost of - say - $10.
And yet, by offering goods at 5-10% lower than the cost of their competitors, the 95% of the people in the "several communities" with "depressed spending power" who don't work retail have an extra 5-10% of their disposable income available to be spent on other stuff.
Walmart's business is 2.5% of US GDP, 40% of all retail trade. Walmart drives the trend for lower retail paysales and more part time employment, as well as the trend for consumer product manufacturers to move ops overseas. When people save 5-10% at Walmart, they are reducing the circulation of money in the US, which depresses the economy as a whole. Soon, the money saved to buy something else never gets earned in the first place, leading to further drops in prices and wages.
Consider that most people are capable of figuring out what's in their own best interests. If a Wal-Mart wasn't a Good Thing for most people, most people wouldn't shop there, and the company would be bankrupt.
Exactly, their own best interest at the moment of purchase . For most goods, people shop on price without any consideration for the larger consequences. Only when we buy consumer durable (a frig, washer, car) does quality vs. price come into play, and consumers almost never consider the effect on anyone else. That's what macro economics is built on, the almost completely self-absorbed economic decisions of individuals.
"Assembly" used to send chills down my spine, too, until my job required that I get over it and just do it. I think a big stumbling block is that the first instruction set most potential asm coders see is for the 8086 and it's large set of god-awful address indexing instructions. At least, that's the way it was at CSU, Northridge back in the day.
However, when my then employer needed a high performance CPU for their missiles, they designed what in later days would have been called a RISC chip. The instruction set was all of maybe 20, so few that many of us found ourselves coding patches directly in hex. There were just a few general purpose registers and four pages of memory to worry about.
It was elegant, straight forward, and only took a few sessions writing a patch to get the hang of. Once over the hurdle of writing a few lines on an embedded system like that, taking the next step and coding to an API of an open source system ain't too much bigger of a deal.
If, in fact, Stallman is bathing more, thank goodness. When imagining his session with the President, I almost choked as I suddenly recalled Richard's visit to MHPCC on Maui (it's in the book).
He gave the staff his standard stump speech on how he came to his current views, starting from incident with the printer driver NDA. Even if you've heard it before, and think you've read the GPL, it still helps focus understanding of his position.
Before the speech, a few of us took him out to lunch. Leaving aside the fact that he's not the greatest conversationalist, and doesn't suffer fools lightly, what really struck us was that he was considerably more disheaveled than even our own Ph.Ds, and - I swear to God - he nibbled on loose strands of hair to the point he was nearly flossing.
It's true, the President of India, as with any parlimentary democracy, serves a largely ceremonial position. However, he is very cultured and influential, and I can only hope that Dr. Stallman managed to comport himself appropriately.
If you'll take a look at a metric ruler you're sure to have close at hand, you'll see that 1mm (or 8/10 mm) is more than adequate for a good air gap. Trains, planes, automobiles, and virtually all other machinery uses MUCH closer tolerences than that, life-supporting or not.
A 1mm gap/variance leaves bearings, seals, valves, and gears unusable in most situations.
Aside from the wee issues with getting a working fusion reactor working, and building a cislunar transpotation infrastructure, we're overlooking the ascetic issues.
Granted, the moon has no ecology, and it would take a Long Time to churn up a significant fraction of the surface (area = N. & S. America). However, imagine the uproar after a few contiguous square km/mi of the surface has been strip mined, photographed, and displayed on the terrestrial news media. Yah can't cover that shit up with trees.
Looksmart has an article detailing Thorn/EMI technology division sell offs in the late 90's from the stock analyst's perspective. The thinking was that EMI was at heart a music company, and that the resources expended on the technology divisions (CAT scanners, among other things) were sucking up cash that could be used to expand the music side of the house. The analyst didn't think Thorn/EMI was getting anything out of being a diversified company, and should cut back to the "core competency"... recorded music.
Diversified companies were the fashion of the 50's and 60's, throwing together businesses with no noticeable linkages. Trimming those megacorps back down to a "we make 'x'" model was the fashion of the 90's.
Incidentally, the CAT scanner company still exists as Sensaura.
You're spot on, the story didn't mention Clear Channel, and the incident of the radio anchor phoning it in is pretty innoculous. Howevercomma IMO the writer and/or editor missed a worthwhile opportunity to expand on the topic a bit, even given the limited column space for the story.
Although nobody was making up stories here, it is reasonable to me that this potends a slippery slope. The whole point? Save money. Nobody notices the early stages of sending production - of whatever sort - to a cheaper or more central location. Naturally, other broadcasters will want to save money too. At some point, who's left to do the actual local news gathering? AP? Don't assume market forces will handle it, because ownership of local affiliates has been getting very concentrated (Thanks, Mr. Powell, et al). In addition, with the centralized studios, how is - or is - one going to present faces that represent the varous communities?
I can just see it, news for Hawaii, featuring a crew with maybe one Asian face, and none of which can pronounce 'Aiea'.
Yep, or to fund a giveaway to other big businesses outside of aerospace.
If one of the MERs found something truly mindbending, I'm all for shooting a big wad to send some people out for a better look. But, even if Yoda wandered up to a lander with a feather duster, I can't see GWB being the one to fund the effort.
In many respects, delaying Hubble's successor is a good thing. For starters, it means that it will be able to incorporate even more technological advances and thereby be a more reliable and an even better scientific tool for the thousands of scientists that use its data.
I'm afraid I'll have to disagree. Delaying a mission to await technological improvement is like waiting for the next generation of PC before a purchase. In the meantime, odds are great that changes in Congressional and/or Executive priorities would kill the project completely. Someone's always looking for $50 million to cut here to justify a $100 billion giveaway there.
Grunsfeld may have pawned off the decision to let Hubble drift on Bush, but he probably considered it a Godsend. As much as they hated to let a perfectly good instrument go, NASA has known they needed to ditch the follow on Shuttle mission in favor of the next space telescope. It's been the user community that had been pushing to keep Hubble going, and now NASA can tell 'em to take it up with the boss.
NASA doesn't have that much money to play with anymore, and the hundreds of millions needed for another repair mission (even before the backup orbiter issue) was going to seriously screw up the timing of even getting the follow on telescope into the sky, not to mention the other robotic missions they're trying to keep alive.
When the mass media in general bats around a crappy Mars mission success ratio, while ernestly proclaiming "Mars is hard to get to!", I've gotta laugh. What they are doing is counting anything that we've every had the vaguest intention of sending to Mars, and counting it as a failure if said object had not in fact flown-by/orbited/landed on Mars.
In fact, especially back in the '60's, getting into space was hard. Look at any of the mission timelines, like the Scorecard, and you'll see that a good number of the "failures" were really failures to get off the ground at all, especially the USSR. It didn't matter whether the goal was Earth orbit, the Moon, Venus, or Mars, a good number of those early rockets couldn't hold together long enough to get into space. Even then, the payloads often stopped working after they got into space, or if they worked, we didn't even push 'em in the general direction of the goal.
So, let's use the Scorecard and see what really happened:
Launch failure: 8
NEO failure: 3
Payload F.U.B.A.R enroute: 5
Payload F.U.B.A.R Mars orbit: 6
Payload F.U.B.A.R. Mars landing: 5
Successful flyby: 3
Successful orbit: 9
Successful landing: 4
So, the stats come down to definitions. If we ditch the lauch and NEO failures as a cost of doing business in space, most of which were back when you could still buy a Studebaker, the actual success rate for the Mars mission doesn't look quite so bad. In fact, if you cut the Russians out of the picture, it looks pretty damn good, which leaves the program managers for the Mars Climate Orbiter looking like even bigger retards than before.
ADD/ADHD may not be a disease in the classical sense, but it's a condition that puts you at a marked disadvantage in post agricultural society. Wanna see the difference between a kid with honest-to-God ADHD with treatment and a kid without? Go to a local elementary classroom.
The teachers and parent volunteers can see it. The kid with can concentrate, can connect with the other kids, and the whole class doesn't become dealing with that one kid.
In a class with an untreated kid isn't a learning environment for anybody, it's daycare. You wanna throw around bromides about over drugging kids for being kids? Great, you go. Know what? People abuse the medical system all the time. But for kids who REALLY have the symtoms of ADD or ADHD, pharmacology works.
BTW, if Rational Recovery has worked for you, that's excellent. When I look over their website, I see zealotry written all over it. So, anyone who investigates making use of it should mentally prepare themselves for a hard sell.
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While I've met any number of Indians in the US and India with a fine command of the English language, I'm not sure how well a two month attempt to create a writing mill from scratch will play, even run from San Jose, much less India. If the quality of written matter goes down (for a number of reasons, of which ESL writers are only one), customers aren't going to browse the site, and advertisers are going to bail.
I'm one of the small number of folks running Debian on an old Powermac, so I'm glad for the log scale on the architectures plot to help pull "my" group out of the noise. It bothers me that a very large fraction come up as architecture "unknown". I don't see a "--mind-your-own-damn-business" flag in the manpage, so what's with that?
If Thomas Gold or Dyson want to speculate that because the outer planets are lousy with methane, etc, then an inner rocky planet like Earth is sweating out hydrocarbons by the metric kiloton every day, they can be my guest. However, until they stop making lay errors like mistaking oil seepage from nearby steam injections for abiotic petroleum reservoir refills, I don't find it a theory that a roughneck can bank on. Your mileage may vary.
Yep. Kooks like Freeman Dyson and Thomas Gold, too.
Yep, kinda like the occasional Nobel Lauriate who, based on his encyclopedic knowledge of Physics, concludes that negros are natural born morons.
Biogenic assumes that living things die, are deeply buried in the crust, rot, and in so doing create various hydrocarbons. Abiogenic assumes that primordial material from the creation of the planet are cooked and rise into the crust. This theory posits that biological microfossils found in petroleum are leeched from the crust by the flow, rather than being one of the byproducts of biogenic rot.
Kooks like J. F. Kenney grasp at old research by a few Soviet geologist to claim that abiogenic reserves are being constantly replenished more quickly than even our current rate of extraction(1).
The vast majority of geologists would say that while research confirms that abiogenic formation of gaseous alkanes can take place in the Earth's crust, a comparison with the isotopic signatures of economically important gas reservoirs around the world suggests that abiogenic production is not a globally significant source of hydrocarbons (2).
There's mention of the big buck$ LSST telescope, and a proposal to pop for six dedicated scopes, but nothing about the US$8mil or so that has already been allocated to the PanSTARRS project in Hawaii. UH is developing a telescope array and automated asteroid detection system to scan almost the entire sky every few days. Once deployed on either Mauna Kea or Haleakala, a five year campaign is planned to catalog at least 90% of the estimated number of 0.3km or bigger NEOs out there.
If an orbit is found that seems to intersect with us, then it becomes someone else's problem.
It doesn't cost 400 quid to put together an LCD picture frame. PopSci is taking a different route from Linux Toys, which starts with a $50 laptop from eBay. This has also been reviewed on Slashdot. While I like PopSci's mini ATX method, the Linux Toys laptop method is usually cheaper, if you shop eBay carefully, and refer to Linux On Laptops to make sure it'll work.
So why nukes for Viking, and none for MER A & B?
1) Viking had money. Sure, NASA was getting into a budget hurt locker by the time the missions made it to Mars in '76, but the money was there when it was needed during the planning and construction. The landers got the kitchen sink, and the biggest Titan II launchers then avaiable to get 'em going. By contrast, the MER team had to make sure their package was not much heavier and absolutely no bigger than Pathfinder. The planetary missions are bastard stepchildren to a NASA which is mandated to keep the Space Shuttle and ISS going on an inadequate budget, even if it all went to the manned space program.
2) Three Mile Island, Chernobyl. Hadn't happened yet, so the no nukes crowd was still the wacko fringe during Viking. Compare to the fuss made over Cassini before launch and while making a gravity-assist Earth flyby. "200,000 deaths!" "Dump it in the Sun!" In general, people have mellowed out a bit, but the PR angle makes a good excuse when one doesn't have the money to gold-plate a mission, anyway.
Perhaps the reason why many Americans care about military records is the perception that a military is a neccessary part of maintaining national sovereignty. Do the folks in the UK think that's all just poppy cock, or just you?
Open source needs marketing to increase market share as much as Commercial software does. Without it, a programmer is more likely to run into a situation where she can't make the software better because she's not allowed to. Is force to drive the marketing different? Sure, but it's still there.
However, last time I checked, "to maximize efficiency" was not an article of the US constitution. Therefore, if the greater number of voting citizens wish to enjoy some breathing room at the expense of maximized productivity and profits, they have several options. One such is to bring pressure that legislators pass and executive branches enforce laws and regulations acting - how ever imperfectly - as a counter balance to the latest phase in hollowing out the US economic infrastructure.
I forsee a day when you, sir or madam, find that too few of the potential consumers of a post-secondary education are able to afford your product. At that time, I look forward to your report on the benefits of market rigor.
I think you may have missed the point of the "broken window fallacy" examples. What I'm stating is a case of "hidden cost", which the Wikipedia article you reference defines as "Because the costs are hidden, there is an illusion that the benefits cost nothing." Within Walmart's business practices are the hidden costs: a strong deflationary cycle that removes more value from the overall system than it gains for Walmart's stockholders and employees. I stand by my assertion that in essence the $5 you save now are going to have a future cost of - say - $10.
Walmart's business is 2.5% of US GDP, 40% of all retail trade. Walmart drives the trend for lower retail paysales and more part time employment, as well as the trend for consumer product manufacturers to move ops overseas. When people save 5-10% at Walmart, they are reducing the circulation of money in the US, which depresses the economy as a whole. Soon, the money saved to buy something else never gets earned in the first place, leading to further drops in prices and wages.
Consider that most people are capable of figuring out what's in their own best interests. If a Wal-Mart wasn't a Good Thing for most people, most people wouldn't shop there, and the company would be bankrupt.
Exactly, their own best interest at the moment of purchase . For most goods, people shop on price without any consideration for the larger consequences. Only when we buy consumer durable (a frig, washer, car) does quality vs. price come into play, and consumers almost never consider the effect on anyone else. That's what macro economics is built on, the almost completely self-absorbed economic decisions of individuals.
However, when my then employer needed a high performance CPU for their missiles, they designed what in later days would have been called a RISC chip. The instruction set was all of maybe 20, so few that many of us found ourselves coding patches directly in hex. There were just a few general purpose registers and four pages of memory to worry about.
It was elegant, straight forward, and only took a few sessions writing a patch to get the hang of. Once over the hurdle of writing a few lines on an embedded system like that, taking the next step and coding to an API of an open source system ain't too much bigger of a deal.
He gave the staff his standard stump speech on how he came to his current views, starting from incident with the printer driver NDA. Even if you've heard it before, and think you've read the GPL, it still helps focus understanding of his position.
Before the speech, a few of us took him out to lunch. Leaving aside the fact that he's not the greatest conversationalist, and doesn't suffer fools lightly, what really struck us was that he was considerably more disheaveled than even our own Ph.Ds, and - I swear to God - he nibbled on loose strands of hair to the point he was nearly flossing.
It's true, the President of India, as with any parlimentary democracy, serves a largely ceremonial position. However, he is very cultured and influential, and I can only hope that Dr. Stallman managed to comport himself appropriately.
A 1mm gap/variance leaves bearings, seals, valves, and gears unusable in most situations.
Granted, the moon has no ecology, and it would take a Long Time to churn up a significant fraction of the surface (area = N. & S. America). However, imagine the uproar after a few contiguous square km/mi of the surface has been strip mined, photographed, and displayed on the terrestrial news media. Yah can't cover that shit up with trees.
"EMI and the CT Scanner (A) & (B)", case numbers 9-383-194 and 9-383-195, 26 pages, US$13 to purchase on line.
For you cheap bastards, like me, see MITOpenCourseWare (Made In India), and scroll down to lecture #8.
Diversified companies were the fashion of the 50's and 60's, throwing together businesses with no noticeable linkages. Trimming those megacorps back down to a "we make 'x'" model was the fashion of the 90's.
Incidentally, the CAT scanner company still exists as Sensaura.
Although nobody was making up stories here, it is reasonable to me that this potends a slippery slope. The whole point? Save money. Nobody notices the early stages of sending production - of whatever sort - to a cheaper or more central location. Naturally, other broadcasters will want to save money too. At some point, who's left to do the actual local news gathering? AP? Don't assume market forces will handle it, because ownership of local affiliates has been getting very concentrated (Thanks, Mr. Powell, et al). In addition, with the centralized studios, how is - or is - one going to present faces that represent the varous communities?
I can just see it, news for Hawaii, featuring a crew with maybe one Asian face, and none of which can pronounce 'Aiea'.
If one of the MERs found something truly mindbending, I'm all for shooting a big wad to send some people out for a better look. But, even if Yoda wandered up to a lander with a feather duster, I can't see GWB being the one to fund the effort.
I'm afraid I'll have to disagree. Delaying a mission to await technological improvement is like waiting for the next generation of PC before a purchase. In the meantime, odds are great that changes in Congressional and/or Executive priorities would kill the project completely. Someone's always looking for $50 million to cut here to justify a $100 billion giveaway there.
NASA doesn't have that much money to play with anymore, and the hundreds of millions needed for another repair mission (even before the backup orbiter issue) was going to seriously screw up the timing of even getting the follow on telescope into the sky, not to mention the other robotic missions they're trying to keep alive.
In fact, especially back in the '60's, getting into space was hard. Look at any of the mission timelines, like the Scorecard, and you'll see that a good number of the "failures" were really failures to get off the ground at all, especially the USSR. It didn't matter whether the goal was Earth orbit, the Moon, Venus, or Mars, a good number of those early rockets couldn't hold together long enough to get into space. Even then, the payloads often stopped working after they got into space, or if they worked, we didn't even push 'em in the general direction of the goal.
So, let's use the Scorecard and see what really happened:
Launch failure: 8
NEO failure: 3
Payload F.U.B.A.R enroute: 5
Payload F.U.B.A.R Mars orbit: 6
Payload F.U.B.A.R. Mars landing: 5
Successful flyby: 3
Successful orbit: 9
Successful landing: 4
So, the stats come down to definitions. If we ditch the lauch and NEO failures as a cost of doing business in space, most of which were back when you could still buy a Studebaker, the actual success rate for the Mars mission doesn't look quite so bad. In fact, if you cut the Russians out of the picture, it looks pretty damn good, which leaves the program managers for the Mars Climate Orbiter looking like even bigger retards than before.
The teachers and parent volunteers can see it. The kid with can concentrate, can connect with the other kids, and the whole class doesn't become dealing with that one kid.
In a class with an untreated kid isn't a learning environment for anybody, it's daycare. You wanna throw around bromides about over drugging kids for being kids? Great, you go. Know what? People abuse the medical system all the time. But for kids who REALLY have the symtoms of ADD or ADHD, pharmacology works.
BTW, if Rational Recovery has worked for you, that's excellent. When I look over their website, I see zealotry written all over it. So, anyone who investigates making use of it should mentally prepare themselves for a hard sell.