If this study is right - it sounds almost like a bandwagon effect
Exactly. The Fine Article fails to raise that point, yet tantalizingly provides a graph of the number of reported complaints which follows a short term fad trajectory. Logically, if there were a bad batch of parts out there, the graph of the cars manufacture date vs complaints would look like that graph. Or if it were a bad design, the graph would resemble the very long term model year production graphs not a short term PR graph.
The only common feature of the problem seems to be that people whom crashed their Toyota during certain months were very likely to blame the car. Basically just a witch hunt. I feel confident driving my wife's Toyota.
If we were extinct two hundred years ago, nearly no evidence would remain.
Very American perspective dude. Plenty of mines in the old country go back thousands of years. Yes thousands not merely centuries.
The bizarre re-distribution of gold would certainly be a sign for geologists. Gold is and always will be industrially useful in addition to being quite the artistic metal, so future prospectors will certainly develop all kinds of crazy theories about the geologic past of Ft Knox, etc.
I would imagine abandoned mines suffer the same fate as caves after millions of years, and I bet they would look pretty interesting on a seismic survey. They all seem to have a branching structure with one high point, and after a certain geologic age, two high points. They all seem to follow paths in otherwise worthless rock, roughly where our geological theories indicate very high chance of some valuable substance.
Weirdly shaped lumps of iron ore aka rusted steel swords found laying the the most geologically unlikely locations around the world would probably launch a thousand super-cockroach PHD thesis.
Fields of equally sized and shaped blocks of granite and limestone (graveyards)
I would imagine sedimentary deposits laid down before and after humanity in Egypt area would be noticeably different.
Everyone needs so sort of motivation. If you can't get your kids to read anything, then thats your fault. Any teacher that claims you can't make a child read should be fired.
My point was the hard part is making the kid 1) want to read and 2) do the text adventure thing. Once you get those two perquisites, then its off to the races you're going to need tranquilizer darts to get that kid to stop reading.
Your point that its the parents job to get those prereqs or else they should feel guilty or whatever is a somewhat separate issue. Much as some folks don't like to dance, some folks don't like to read and thats how its going to be.
If someone figures out a way to get past rudimentary math skills in a game (Inventory space / x bullets per y clips) then you'll have a winner but I can't think of any situation where you're going to challenge kids enough for them to do it in game and no so much that they feel frustrated with the game and look up the answer.
EVE online? Which is basically a spreadsheet with a fancy 3d screen saver? Its way too grindy for my taste, so impatient kids will not tolerate it. But something like it might do OK...
Even kids who read silly novels are learning something that is useful for school.
Good interactive fiction aka text adventure games. You can't make a kid want to read, no different than an adult. But once they're reading you can get them very motivated / interested in what they're reading.
A much more interesting study would have been comparing hand/eye coordination before and after the computer arrived. My guess is aerobic fitness dropped but hand/eye coordination increased dramatically.
We have no proof that we're the first, and frankly if we were extinguished tomorrow the statistical odds are that in 5 million years time there will be no single trace of evidence left that we were ever here. To assume that no species in the billion years or so prior to our arrival reached this level is... well it's absurd.
For a geologist it would be pretty trivial to figure out. Merely analyze the distribution and size of mineral deposits of various ages. Why thats odd, all of the coal that was near the surface 5 million years ago is missing, although the stuff thats buried "too deep" 5 million years ago is still here. Same game for oil/gas, oddly enough all the large deposits that were onshore or close to shore 5M years ago are gone, how odd. Another fun one would be our trash heaps. WTF is all this indium ore near all this relatively pure glass ore? How come we find silicon deposits from 5 million years ago that are occasionally ridiculously pure except for commercially useful P-type and N-type semiconductor impurities? Finally, assuming the highly evolved cockroaches that have taken over have advanced beyond us, they'd also notice that certain technologies that they use have not been exploited, 5M years ago they were obviously pretty good at burning this "oil" stuff but they clearly never figured out how to refine boron into anti-matter reactor shielding, or mined graphite to make monocrystaline carbon fiber space elevators, much like a hundred years ago hyperpurified silicon and large lumps of pure uranium metal were not industrially produced.
Leaving aside any engineering objections to your post, can you honestly say that you really believe that moral equivalence?
Must have missed the other part of my post where I commented the money that pays for fedgov launches was obtained by men with guns and prison cells extorting it from the population and the future of their children. Pay your tax or be shot down like a rabid dog or spend the rest of your life in jail. They are not, by any stretch of the imagination, paid for by freely given donations, its not a contract between well informed equal citizens, just a subject being extorted for protection money. Time taken from your life is the sole source of money. Money taken from you is taking life from you, one dollar or one hour at a time.
So making a big fireworks show is immoral two ways. First the money was collected immorally, so the only way to make it even worse, if thats somehow possible, is to waste it on a fireworks show, so the engineers and politicians have a moral obligation to not waste it. The second way its immoral is money = time = life. For example, slavery is wrong, no matter if whipped by the boss or not, because it's wrong if he does and also wrong if he doesn't because he will unless you "cooperate".
It does open the debate of which is worse, slavery or murder. They're both bad enough that I'm willing to put them under the same umbrella, although technically one is probably worse than the other. Kind of like dying of a 1000 foot fall vs a 2000 foot fall.
Privately funded launches are not immoral, assuming a free and fair market, etc, etc.
Do you truly see no other moral objection to murder than the loss of economic activity?
No because its still wrong on a "do onto others as you'd have them do onto you". But they started it, by framing the argument as blowing millions of tax dollars to do something technologically stupid that will result in an expensive fireworks show. If the article proposed killing all the alligators in FL to make it safe for solid rocket boosters, I'd make an ecological argument instead of a tax dollar argument.
Does this mean it is less morally wrong to kill third world inhabitants, whose lifetime economic activity will be far less than $1M?
Theoretically, if we were not so effective at "keeping the (insert ethnic) man down" the 3rd world-er would be roughly as successful as us, and would have earned his own $1M. So, in some ways it would be worse, in that not only would we destroy a life that should have been worth $1M, but also we oppressed them so they couldn't even get their $1M worth of fun before they croaked. The only thing worse than dying of a heart attack after a lifetime of gobbling tasty yummy ice cream every night, is dying of the same damn heart attack without getting to eat the tasty ice cream.
If I donate $1M to your family or a charity of your choice, may I kill you with no moral repercussions?
I have no idea what it costs. For some insight read the "fight club" book especially w/ regards to the car recall equation, and/or have a seance and ask teddy kennedy's ghost how much it costs to "make it right". Pretending it's not your responsibility because you won't aren't can't pull the trigger is just being chicken, we all live in a world where we have a price enforced by govt safety regulations etc. I believe I've read the actual figure is OSHA/EPA doesn't care about safety if it would theoretically cost more than $25M to save your life. So I guess as a society, assuming you and I are part of it, "we've" decided we're worth about $25M a piece. The only moral repercussions, aside from dropping out of society, are arguing that dollar value higher or lower.
Kept trying to tell me that the CPU was the entire computer.
Duh, like everyone knows that big box with the retractable cup holder in it is called the "hard drive". Even if its got a SSD in it. As if they'd know what a SSD is.
Then there's the old timers whom always called terminals "tubes" and even to this day call LCD displays "tubes".
'In society there are people you don't like, there are people who are incompetent and there are often people above you in authority who you think are incompetent, and learning that ability to deal with that and, actually surviving that environment can be an advantage
You're assuming he's talking about teachers?
Isn't his description remarkably similar to the stereotypical teenager view of their parents? At least occasionally when they're arguing?
So, thats a great experience for the parents that are wrapped around their kids finger and/or want to be their kids best friend or parent, but a waste for all the other kids with "normal" parent / teen relationships.
Another issue is all posts, so far, assume he means incompetence on an absolute scale. However, even if your staff is completely composed of nobel prize winners, theres always going to be that one teacher that is the stupidest. So, in that way, the entire story is meaningless, unless he's advocating a single teacher in a one room schoolhouse.
man-rate = reliable. There are some other specifically man-rating features aside from reliability like abort modes, that probably don't matter for payloads with no emergency recovery system.
But to a first approximation, I claim man-rate = reliable.
Booster cost scales slower with mass than payload costs. After all, communication satellite microwave transmitters are much more expensive than "big fuel tanks".
So, I also claim heavy lift = expensive payload.
So, use the least reliable engine technology that is available to lift your most expensive payloads. What could possibly go wrong?
I'd also claim if a person generates a $1M of economic activity over the course of their life, making a bad engineering decision that "wastes" $500M on a fireworks show, is morally equivalent to killing 500 people, because it wasted their entire life's work. Men with guns had to extort that money out of the population, for nothing. More practically you have thousands of guys literally spending a decade of their life to get "something" into orbit, so turning it into a fireworks show is about the same thing as destroying hundreds of folks life works.
I'll admit you caught me thinking "shuttle". That bad solid booster design cost us one vehicle and one crew. Making the same engineering decision, even if just launching a non-sentient box of rocks, is emotionally distasteful. Last time we tried this we killed seven people, so lets try it again!
I've heard through friends who have done internships at NASA that the working atmosphere there is terrible.
I've heard through (probably completely different) friends that the working atmosphere FOR THE SCIENTIST / ENGINEER / "PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR" personnel is as terrible as you report, but the MBA types love it, because they coincidentally just happen to be the ones in charge and have created a paradise for themselves.
Not a culture of equations and test tubes, but power point and office politics.
Different strokes for different folks, etc. The scientists are on their way out, and they are well aware of it, and unhappy about it, so I'm told. The unwritten goal is to eventually have nothing but management and PR personnel on staff. Not unlike most American companies.
NASA is good at what it does
Like I said, powerpoints and office politics. I am told they're pretty good at those subjects. If you have the mistaken idea that it's like Bell Labs half a century ago, well, illusions don't always work in the real world.
Eh, thats more of a ticket puncher (military reference) or seagull manager (fly in, crap all over everything, fly out).
Look at this quote and try to explain how its not ticket punching or seagull management:
because every four years someone new comes along that thinks they know how to run things. They gut everything that has been happening, and refocus the organization
Obviously NASA was supposed to be a technical organization, but now its just a MBA stepping stone.
and forces use of the solid rocket motors produced by Utah arms manufacturer ATK.
There is no such thing as a truly man rated solid booster. They can put on their manager hat instead of their engineer hat and ram it thru for political reasons, but that doesn't make it true or safe.
So, whats the technical solution?
Politicians are pretty stupid and/or they don't care as long as their Utah connection gets some dough. They don't really care about the technical needs. So I have occasionally daydreamed they should be hired to produce two giant smoke grenades, or something like that. They'd be a "safety system" since the "boosters" would be dead weight and if the actual rocket had a problem, it could eject the dead weight boosters to gain quite a bit of performance.
Or, rather than trying to generate net upward thrust, if they barely broke even with their own weight, maybe they'd be safer.
Its an interesting technical solution to a political problem.
they won't stop until your Facebook/Buzz/Yahoo/whatever profile is a 1:1 mapping of you.... while now it's almost mandatory
Don't forget the other aspect of 1:1 mapping from a mathematical sense. How hard would it be to have multiple pages, if there's no authentication and "everyone knows its mandatory". It's like requiring all of us to carry ID cards at all times, yet allowing all of us to hand craft anything that we feel like calling an ID card.
Maybe, purchase a carefully crafted page for a job interview (HR repo says: "Look! Mr. Someone is a FB friend of the world famous VLM whom has a/. UID with only 5 digits! We gotta hire this guy!!"). This doesn't work so well for rare names. But a sufficiently expensive FB campaign can make any name common. Which might be a valuable service for people with tarnished FB reputations.
HR will check to verify my PHD. Probably. So I probably should not fake a doctoral degree. However, HR can not verify the PHDs of my artificially created FB friends whom sing my praises. Nor my executive and CEO friends. The key is not to go overboard. In my infinite spare time I have been working on a plan to implement all the characters of a certain book inside FB with myself as the main character. Kind of a performance art display. If you must steal my idea, at least credit my post here. It all boils down to the cost of multiple one year domain registration and email hosting.
I have also in my devilishness been contemplating generating a big connectedness graph of a 5-D hypercube, or perhaps several other shapes, and instead of naming the vertices (1,0,1,1,1) or whatever, I'd pull random names, and register and link them in FB-space. I wonder how far I can take this before getting caught. Someone out there is buying connectedness graphs from FB and is bound to notice.
Oh, and collectors. Lest I forget collectors. "Everyone in this department is on FB, so you need to join too". Thankfully not someone in management, so I could simply ignore him. Collectors can get aggressive. Think of how wild otherwise calm cool and collected old women can get when bidding at auctions for antiques. Same deal if you're related to someone or work with them and you've not friended them yet, how dare you.
Collectors are oddly enough closely related to the drama queens or sh!t stirrers or whatever you call them. They at least provide comic relief.
There is also a subset of very passive people on FB whom sign up and then refuse to use it, just accept all incoming friend requests and drive on. Not ready to toss it out, yet no longer willing to participate. The "hoarders" of the social networking scene. Can't use it, but can't throw it away either.
Last but not least I found some folks are on FB simply because they're crusaders in the worst sense, and they want to proselytize either religiously or politically. Doesn't matter if anyone cares or is offended, they're going to go on posting holy book quotes or fox news quotes until they get tired of doing it, which apparently takes years for some of them. Not really my cup of tea, but if it keeps them out of my face in real life, all the better.
With the exception of the folks I actually interact with outside of FB, I think I've now accurately categorized ALL of my ex-FB friends. It was fun, for awhile.
Partially, its a grind game. I recently deleted my account, but one behavior I saw was some of my female acquaintances competing to see whom can collect the highest number of male friends, by any means. I enjoyed some of their pictures at least (hope my wife doesn't read this). The middle school girl game of seeing whom has more friends on the bus, minus (most of) the teasing. A nice looking young woman can easily acquire 4 digits of admirers, if not friends.
Also whenever you hear a trite explanation of why someone is on facebook, always assume the result is the opposite of their goal. Unemployed people claim they are on FB because its a great place to find a job, although they never find one, at least because of FB. I'm at the age where former schoolmates and coworkers are now very lonely stay at home moms, so they claim to be on FB because they're looking for adult interaction, but they post stupid stuff all day, so no one reads them. Single guy friends claim FB is a great way to get some, so they post every freaking benchpress set and every mile on the bicycle, and every time they enter or leave a "trendy bar", yet, they remain single. Everyone in America has heard of "someone" whom got a job or rekindled old friendships or got some because of FB. However, for 99% of the population, FB just simply doesn't work, but as long as there's people who have convinced themselves that it works, its all good, for FB anyway. Its a religion, basically.
And the final reason is simple curiosity. Whatever happened to that stoner dropout dude that I hung out with in 8th grade study hall? Oh, thats interesting. One of my coworkers was going on and on about some girl whom would never date him in high school, turns out she now publicly prefers other women, which explains that, or maybe it's his fault, whatever. Well, that was fun for a little while, goodbye facebook.
The first oddity is why the author believes that the data would sit around for years before being used. Like there's an "exploit bank" where you can deposit your collection of stolen data and gain interest on it until you "cash them in". I'd think far more likely it'll get used fairly rapidly, or never. How you fence or launder millions of records is kind of a mystery to begin with.
The second oddity is we are mostly dealing with the bottom percentiles of personnel, equipment, hardware, software, and design. So the article blissfully dreams "Let's hope that these reasonable measures will include the use of encryption." But you know that fools are just going to add another column to the database called "encryption key" so as to decode the other columns. Or store the key in C:\key.txt. Or go all ROT-13 or whatever the unicode version is of ROT-13. If you're dealing with screwups, adding more conditions just makes their screwups more rube goldberg and hilarious, it doesn't prevent them from screwing up.
Yes. Firstly it requires applications to be modified to really see much benefit, secondly it hurts performance, and thirdly it breaks a myriad of poorly written third-party drivers and other low-level applications.
to the tune of being able to pay about a thousand salaries
Doing, what, exactly? Coming up with new seeds to plant, or knicknacks to buy?
For a comparison, a thousand people running real farm equipment could easily feed about a quarter to a half million people, depending on what they decide to grow (profitable, productive, and low labor are not necessarily all the same)
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GM, Ford and Chrysler are probably very happy about this.
Whom coincidentally spend lots of advertising dollars on the media people whom manufactured the Toyota problem.
Even more interesting is the graph of reported problems. Fits a very short term PR profile not a manufacturing defect profile.
If this study is right - it sounds almost like a bandwagon effect
Exactly. The Fine Article fails to raise that point, yet tantalizingly provides a graph of the number of reported complaints which follows a short term fad trajectory. Logically, if there were a bad batch of parts out there, the graph of the cars manufacture date vs complaints would look like that graph. Or if it were a bad design, the graph would resemble the very long term model year production graphs not a short term PR graph.
The only common feature of the problem seems to be that people whom crashed their Toyota during certain months were very likely to blame the car. Basically just a witch hunt. I feel confident driving my wife's Toyota.
Why don't they make gas stations check their pumps once a day for skimmers? Perhaps when they set the price in the morning. Seems relatively simple.
Being "in" on the scam is even simpler. Especially if you don't need management approval, merely minimum wage McJob worker approval.
I bet the sea birds eating the shrimp have high levels of Prozac too... humm.. chocolate seagulls....
You, uh, see those things on the ground by the seagulls? Those aren't tootsie rolls. Just a public service notification here.
I can't believe there aren't already good methods for disposal of medications widely in use.
High temperature incineration? Piranha solution (ask a chemist) ?
Consumption would probably work pretty well, since a quarter of the population has no medical insurance.
If we were extinct two hundred years ago, nearly no evidence would remain.
Very American perspective dude. Plenty of mines in the old country go back thousands of years. Yes thousands not merely centuries.
The bizarre re-distribution of gold would certainly be a sign for geologists. Gold is and always will be industrially useful in addition to being quite the artistic metal, so future prospectors will certainly develop all kinds of crazy theories about the geologic past of Ft Knox, etc.
I would imagine abandoned mines suffer the same fate as caves after millions of years, and I bet they would look pretty interesting on a seismic survey. They all seem to have a branching structure with one high point, and after a certain geologic age, two high points. They all seem to follow paths in otherwise worthless rock, roughly where our geological theories indicate very high chance of some valuable substance.
Weirdly shaped lumps of iron ore aka rusted steel swords found laying the the most geologically unlikely locations around the world would probably launch a thousand super-cockroach PHD thesis.
Fields of equally sized and shaped blocks of granite and limestone (graveyards)
I would imagine sedimentary deposits laid down before and after humanity in Egypt area would be noticeably different.
Everyone needs so sort of motivation. If you can't get your kids to read anything, then thats your fault. Any teacher that claims you can't make a child read should be fired.
My point was the hard part is making the kid 1) want to read and 2) do the text adventure thing. Once you get those two perquisites, then its off to the races you're going to need tranquilizer darts to get that kid to stop reading.
Your point that its the parents job to get those prereqs or else they should feel guilty or whatever is a somewhat separate issue. Much as some folks don't like to dance, some folks don't like to read and thats how its going to be.
Woo! A mouse with zero tactile feedback! Just what I always wanted in an input tool that I need to be precise.
Precise and mouse never seemed to go together to me. Now, precise and trackball, you've got something there.
I thought you wrote "Jesus" at first glance. Nice.
Yeah, my girlfriend's name is, uh .. "world cup" yeah I never want to see any of that waste of time again.
If someone figures out a way to get past rudimentary math skills in a game (Inventory space / x bullets per y clips) then you'll have a winner but I can't think of any situation where you're going to challenge kids enough for them to do it in game and no so much that they feel frustrated with the game and look up the answer.
EVE online? Which is basically a spreadsheet with a fancy 3d screen saver? Its way too grindy for my taste, so impatient kids will not tolerate it. But something like it might do OK...
Even kids who read silly novels are learning something that is useful for school.
Good interactive fiction aka text adventure games. You can't make a kid want to read, no different than an adult. But once they're reading you can get them very motivated / interested in what they're reading.
A much more interesting study would have been comparing hand/eye coordination before and after the computer arrived. My guess is aerobic fitness dropped but hand/eye coordination increased dramatically.
We have no proof that we're the first, and frankly if we were extinguished tomorrow the statistical odds are that in 5 million years time there will be no single trace of evidence left that we were ever here. To assume that no species in the billion years or so prior to our arrival reached this level is... well it's absurd.
For a geologist it would be pretty trivial to figure out. Merely analyze the distribution and size of mineral deposits of various ages. Why thats odd, all of the coal that was near the surface 5 million years ago is missing, although the stuff thats buried "too deep" 5 million years ago is still here. Same game for oil/gas, oddly enough all the large deposits that were onshore or close to shore 5M years ago are gone, how odd. Another fun one would be our trash heaps. WTF is all this indium ore near all this relatively pure glass ore? How come we find silicon deposits from 5 million years ago that are occasionally ridiculously pure except for commercially useful P-type and N-type semiconductor impurities? Finally, assuming the highly evolved cockroaches that have taken over have advanced beyond us, they'd also notice that certain technologies that they use have not been exploited, 5M years ago they were obviously pretty good at burning this "oil" stuff but they clearly never figured out how to refine boron into anti-matter reactor shielding, or mined graphite to make monocrystaline carbon fiber space elevators, much like a hundred years ago hyperpurified silicon and large lumps of pure uranium metal were not industrially produced.
Leaving aside any engineering objections to your post, can you honestly say that you really believe that moral equivalence?
Must have missed the other part of my post where I commented the money that pays for fedgov launches was obtained by men with guns and prison cells extorting it from the population and the future of their children. Pay your tax or be shot down like a rabid dog or spend the rest of your life in jail. They are not, by any stretch of the imagination, paid for by freely given donations, its not a contract between well informed equal citizens, just a subject being extorted for protection money. Time taken from your life is the sole source of money. Money taken from you is taking life from you, one dollar or one hour at a time.
So making a big fireworks show is immoral two ways. First the money was collected immorally, so the only way to make it even worse, if thats somehow possible, is to waste it on a fireworks show, so the engineers and politicians have a moral obligation to not waste it. The second way its immoral is money = time = life. For example, slavery is wrong, no matter if whipped by the boss or not, because it's wrong if he does and also wrong if he doesn't because he will unless you "cooperate".
It does open the debate of which is worse, slavery or murder. They're both bad enough that I'm willing to put them under the same umbrella, although technically one is probably worse than the other. Kind of like dying of a 1000 foot fall vs a 2000 foot fall.
Privately funded launches are not immoral, assuming a free and fair market, etc, etc.
Do you truly see no other moral objection to murder than the loss of economic activity?
No because its still wrong on a "do onto others as you'd have them do onto you". But they started it, by framing the argument as blowing millions of tax dollars to do something technologically stupid that will result in an expensive fireworks show. If the article proposed killing all the alligators in FL to make it safe for solid rocket boosters, I'd make an ecological argument instead of a tax dollar argument.
Does this mean it is less morally wrong to kill third world inhabitants, whose lifetime economic activity will be far less than $1M?
Theoretically, if we were not so effective at "keeping the (insert ethnic) man down" the 3rd world-er would be roughly as successful as us, and would have earned his own $1M. So, in some ways it would be worse, in that not only would we destroy a life that should have been worth $1M, but also we oppressed them so they couldn't even get their $1M worth of fun before they croaked. The only thing worse than dying of a heart attack after a lifetime of gobbling tasty yummy ice cream every night, is dying of the same damn heart attack without getting to eat the tasty ice cream.
If I donate $1M to your family or a charity of your choice, may I kill you with no moral repercussions?
I have no idea what it costs. For some insight read the "fight club" book especially w/ regards to the car recall equation, and/or have a seance and ask teddy kennedy's ghost how much it costs to "make it right". Pretending it's not your responsibility because you won't aren't can't pull the trigger is just being chicken, we all live in a world where we have a price enforced by govt safety regulations etc. I believe I've read the actual figure is OSHA/EPA doesn't care about safety if it would theoretically cost more than $25M to save your life. So I guess as a society, assuming you and I are part of it, "we've" decided we're worth about $25M a piece. The only moral repercussions, aside from dropping out of society, are arguing that dollar value higher or lower.
Kept trying to tell me that the CPU was the entire computer.
Duh, like everyone knows that big box with the retractable cup holder in it is called the "hard drive". Even if its got a SSD in it. As if they'd know what a SSD is.
Then there's the old timers whom always called terminals "tubes" and even to this day call LCD displays "tubes".
'In society there are people you don't like, there are people who are incompetent and there are often people above you in authority who you think are incompetent, and learning that ability to deal with that and, actually surviving that environment can be an advantage
You're assuming he's talking about teachers?
Isn't his description remarkably similar to the stereotypical teenager view of their parents? At least occasionally when they're arguing?
So, thats a great experience for the parents that are wrapped around their kids finger and/or want to be their kids best friend or parent, but a waste for all the other kids with "normal" parent / teen relationships.
Another issue is all posts, so far, assume he means incompetence on an absolute scale. However, even if your staff is completely composed of nobel prize winners, theres always going to be that one teacher that is the stupidest. So, in that way, the entire story is meaningless, unless he's advocating a single teacher in a one room schoolhouse.
man-rate = reliable. There are some other specifically man-rating features aside from reliability like abort modes, that probably don't matter for payloads with no emergency recovery system.
But to a first approximation, I claim man-rate = reliable.
Booster cost scales slower with mass than payload costs. After all, communication satellite microwave transmitters are much more expensive than "big fuel tanks".
So, I also claim heavy lift = expensive payload.
So, use the least reliable engine technology that is available to lift your most expensive payloads. What could possibly go wrong?
I'd also claim if a person generates a $1M of economic activity over the course of their life, making a bad engineering decision that "wastes" $500M on a fireworks show, is morally equivalent to killing 500 people, because it wasted their entire life's work. Men with guns had to extort that money out of the population, for nothing. More practically you have thousands of guys literally spending a decade of their life to get "something" into orbit, so turning it into a fireworks show is about the same thing as destroying hundreds of folks life works.
I'll admit you caught me thinking "shuttle". That bad solid booster design cost us one vehicle and one crew. Making the same engineering decision, even if just launching a non-sentient box of rocks, is emotionally distasteful. Last time we tried this we killed seven people, so lets try it again!
I've heard through friends who have done internships at NASA that the working atmosphere there is terrible.
I've heard through (probably completely different) friends that the working atmosphere FOR THE SCIENTIST / ENGINEER / "PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR" personnel is as terrible as you report, but the MBA types love it, because they coincidentally just happen to be the ones in charge and have created a paradise for themselves.
Not a culture of equations and test tubes, but power point and office politics.
Different strokes for different folks, etc. The scientists are on their way out, and they are well aware of it, and unhappy about it, so I'm told. The unwritten goal is to eventually have nothing but management and PR personnel on staff. Not unlike most American companies.
NASA is good at what it does
Like I said, powerpoints and office politics. I am told they're pretty good at those subjects. If you have the mistaken idea that it's like Bell Labs half a century ago, well, illusions don't always work in the real world.
Eh, thats more of a ticket puncher (military reference) or seagull manager (fly in, crap all over everything, fly out).
Look at this quote and try to explain how its not ticket punching or seagull management:
because every four years someone new comes along that thinks they know how to run things. They gut everything that has been happening, and refocus the organization
Obviously NASA was supposed to be a technical organization, but now its just a MBA stepping stone.
and forces use of the solid rocket motors produced by Utah arms manufacturer ATK.
There is no such thing as a truly man rated solid booster. They can put on their manager hat instead of their engineer hat and ram it thru for political reasons, but that doesn't make it true or safe.
So, whats the technical solution?
Politicians are pretty stupid and/or they don't care as long as their Utah connection gets some dough. They don't really care about the technical needs. So I have occasionally daydreamed they should be hired to produce two giant smoke grenades, or something like that. They'd be a "safety system" since the "boosters" would be dead weight and if the actual rocket had a problem, it could eject the dead weight boosters to gain quite a bit of performance.
Or, rather than trying to generate net upward thrust, if they barely broke even with their own weight, maybe they'd be safer.
Its an interesting technical solution to a political problem.
they won't stop until your Facebook/Buzz/Yahoo/whatever profile is a 1:1 mapping of you .... while now it's almost mandatory
Don't forget the other aspect of 1:1 mapping from a mathematical sense. How hard would it be to have multiple pages, if there's no authentication and "everyone knows its mandatory". It's like requiring all of us to carry ID cards at all times, yet allowing all of us to hand craft anything that we feel like calling an ID card.
Maybe, purchase a carefully crafted page for a job interview (HR repo says: "Look! Mr. Someone is a FB friend of the world famous VLM whom has a /. UID with only 5 digits! We gotta hire this guy!!"). This doesn't work so well for rare names. But a sufficiently expensive FB campaign can make any name common. Which might be a valuable service for people with tarnished FB reputations.
HR will check to verify my PHD. Probably. So I probably should not fake a doctoral degree. However, HR can not verify the PHDs of my artificially created FB friends whom sing my praises. Nor my executive and CEO friends. The key is not to go overboard. In my infinite spare time I have been working on a plan to implement all the characters of a certain book inside FB with myself as the main character. Kind of a performance art display. If you must steal my idea, at least credit my post here. It all boils down to the cost of multiple one year domain registration and email hosting.
I have also in my devilishness been contemplating generating a big connectedness graph of a 5-D hypercube, or perhaps several other shapes, and instead of naming the vertices (1,0,1,1,1) or whatever, I'd pull random names, and register and link them in FB-space. I wonder how far I can take this before getting caught. Someone out there is buying connectedness graphs from FB and is bound to notice.
Oh, and collectors. Lest I forget collectors. "Everyone in this department is on FB, so you need to join too". Thankfully not someone in management, so I could simply ignore him. Collectors can get aggressive. Think of how wild otherwise calm cool and collected old women can get when bidding at auctions for antiques. Same deal if you're related to someone or work with them and you've not friended them yet, how dare you.
Collectors are oddly enough closely related to the drama queens or sh!t stirrers or whatever you call them. They at least provide comic relief.
There is also a subset of very passive people on FB whom sign up and then refuse to use it, just accept all incoming friend requests and drive on. Not ready to toss it out, yet no longer willing to participate. The "hoarders" of the social networking scene. Can't use it, but can't throw it away either.
Last but not least I found some folks are on FB simply because they're crusaders in the worst sense, and they want to proselytize either religiously or politically. Doesn't matter if anyone cares or is offended, they're going to go on posting holy book quotes or fox news quotes until they get tired of doing it, which apparently takes years for some of them. Not really my cup of tea, but if it keeps them out of my face in real life, all the better.
With the exception of the folks I actually interact with outside of FB, I think I've now accurately categorized ALL of my ex-FB friends. It was fun, for awhile.
but the rest of the world?
Partially, its a grind game. I recently deleted my account, but one behavior I saw was some of my female acquaintances competing to see whom can collect the highest number of male friends, by any means. I enjoyed some of their pictures at least (hope my wife doesn't read this). The middle school girl game of seeing whom has more friends on the bus, minus (most of) the teasing. A nice looking young woman can easily acquire 4 digits of admirers, if not friends.
Also whenever you hear a trite explanation of why someone is on facebook, always assume the result is the opposite of their goal. Unemployed people claim they are on FB because its a great place to find a job, although they never find one, at least because of FB. I'm at the age where former schoolmates and coworkers are now very lonely stay at home moms, so they claim to be on FB because they're looking for adult interaction, but they post stupid stuff all day, so no one reads them. Single guy friends claim FB is a great way to get some, so they post every freaking benchpress set and every mile on the bicycle, and every time they enter or leave a "trendy bar", yet, they remain single. Everyone in America has heard of "someone" whom got a job or rekindled old friendships or got some because of FB. However, for 99% of the population, FB just simply doesn't work, but as long as there's people who have convinced themselves that it works, its all good, for FB anyway. Its a religion, basically.
And the final reason is simple curiosity. Whatever happened to that stoner dropout dude that I hung out with in 8th grade study hall? Oh, thats interesting. One of my coworkers was going on and on about some girl whom would never date him in high school, turns out she now publicly prefers other women, which explains that, or maybe it's his fault, whatever. Well, that was fun for a little while, goodbye facebook.
The first oddity is why the author believes that the data would sit around for years before being used. Like there's an "exploit bank" where you can deposit your collection of stolen data and gain interest on it until you "cash them in". I'd think far more likely it'll get used fairly rapidly, or never. How you fence or launder millions of records is kind of a mystery to begin with.
The second oddity is we are mostly dealing with the bottom percentiles of personnel, equipment, hardware, software, and design. So the article blissfully dreams "Let's hope that these reasonable measures will include the use of encryption." But you know that fools are just going to add another column to the database called "encryption key" so as to decode the other columns. Or store the key in C:\key.txt. Or go all ROT-13 or whatever the unicode version is of ROT-13. If you're dealing with screwups, adding more conditions just makes their screwups more rube goldberg and hilarious, it doesn't prevent them from screwing up.
Yes. Firstly it requires applications to be modified to really see much benefit, secondly it hurts performance, and thirdly it breaks a myriad of poorly written third-party drivers and other low-level applications.
So? Its never stopped them before.
to the tune of being able to pay about a thousand salaries
Doing, what, exactly? Coming up with new seeds to plant, or knicknacks to buy?
For a comparison, a thousand people running real farm equipment could easily feed about a quarter to a half million people, depending on what they decide to grow (profitable, productive, and low labor are not necessarily all the same)