Not true. There is an Arkansas Governor in Jail for WhiteWater involvement. The Rose Law firm files that were never found may have implicated one or the other of the Clintons. The charges are "not proven" which does not mean "not guilty" or acquitted. To be acquitted you must be tried. The Whitewater case against the Clintons themselves never came to trial but it COULD in the future if those records happen to be found or witnesses get tired of being intimidated! I'm not sure when the statues toll on Fraud and Perjury but I don't think it is too late. Now about Freeh, AG Janet Reno could have removed Freeh at any time, I think he was a horrible FBI Director. I'm conservative but those hired to do such an important law enforcement job should be competent and should follow the LAW not the "money" or politics. IMO, An incompetent FBI Director actually played well into the Clinton Admin strategy! He ran around chasing down leads the Clintons knew would never yield results, thus there was not any creative thinking of where else they might look for evidence. Also recall that Bill was convicted of perjury, was disbarred in AR and lost his law license (big whoppie, he basically got off with a slap).
Clinton has been voted by many historians (who are generally liberal) as one of the WORST presidents in modern US History. Don't try to rewrite history. The facts are plentiful that Clinton was a real bozo who just happened to get elected. Hillary is the brains of that outfit and used Bill to get to where she wanted. The only reason she has not divorced him is his ability to raise money for her within the liberal community.
We worried that the trailer loads of UDMH and other rocket fuels they moved past our door would one day go BOOM! We hoped we were gone that day, the trailers would be sticks and we'd get better working conditions. In the almost 3 yrs I was there it never happend:( We scrounged desks, made the office of an old used high bay building our Conference room, and learned how to design software WITHOUT Case tools (None of them worked on the Macs). Now that I look back on it, the conditions were bad, but we had a good team and excellent management. Now I have great conditions, a so-so team and terrible management!
There are a couple of "br" IP addy's too. I guess they don't bother to check if an address is within the US or not. You could send all your music via one of these non US domains if you wanted. Just set up the box in the non-US domain as a DMZ server and NAT to the real address of the data somewhere else. However that is hard to do for your average Joe User who swaps songs. Unless they can look at the DNS and NAT setup they can't see the address translation back to a US machine. Of course I could be wrong..and this also requires co-operation by someone in another country. I wonder if thier Gov't would get upset at the help they gave a US citizen to "break" US laws?
This was in the early 90's. I'm just today finishing up my second stint with NASA (this time in West Va) and one of our guys down at MSFC swears the trailers are still there and people still work in them! NASA will be hard pressed to go to the moon w/o some major infrastructure improvements. BTW, the VAB roof repairs are underway, but it's a BIG job, something like 18 months and $3M to put on a new roof.
How about an old house trailer in Huntsville, Alabama that had no heat or A/C, and was 300 yards from a Rocket Engine Test Stand? We had to leave everytime they tested an engine for "safety reasons" (100dB+ noise too). It was so cold in the winter we wore gloves and so hot in the summer we had to shut down the Macs before they overheated. We brought in heaters but only 1 or 2 folks could have them on a time w/o tripping the breakers. And how about varmits like GroundHogs and Skunks who lived under/around the trailers? We thought about getting some pink flamingos, rusty cars and a hound or two to make the joint classier! But we got the design work for the Space Station done anyway, we were Dedicated Space Groupies!
I think SWIFT has a UV telesope along with a Gamma-Ray Telescope, but I'm not certain. I can ask someone I know who works on it. If I'm wrong then UV astronomy is DOA until we get Moonbase Alpha going;)
The next space telescope, James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled for 2011, and I know for a fact it is already in development. With the adaptive optics and VLB telescopes a good bit of what HST does can now be done on the ground. It is GREAT publicity for NASA with all the great images but it's science usefulness is going downhill.
I'm not a liberal, but adding $1B to NASA's budget for the next few years and even after that tossing in the ISS and STS funds you won't even get close to a Lunar Base. Those $$$ will get a new heavy lift rocket (that proposal is due out any day) and a new man-rated capsule to go with it, and maybe ONE mission. I think this is a lot of smoke but not much substance. Why? If Bush is re-elected (which is very likely) he only gets 4 more years, and that is only a fraction of the time needed to get this program to completion. There is no telling whether future Presidents and future Congresses will fund it, and at what level so there is very little certainty that this idea will ever become reality. Now if this was a DoD Mission that could be buried in the "black" budget for the next 15 yrs, I'd say it had a very good chance of occuring but even then it would need a hell of a lot more funds.
Mutual funds only hold 4% of SCOs stock. It looks like the Royce and Assoc. is the largest instituional investor at 10.41% according to Yahoo. I can't tell which of the other listed institutional investors may be Canopy companies.
Flight arrival times are a RANDOM Distribution but they can be predicted to some level of exactness such as by the Posisson distribution given a large number of data points. Which leads me to believe we are talking about "random" in two different senses here, you are say random is 100% total unpredicatablity even with perfect information, I am saying random in that you can hit around the value and guess at it from the data, but never predict it with 100% certainty. In that sense you would say I have a "chaotic" system but I call it (by education) "random". Perhaps what we have here is a random used in a different context means slightly different things. I found this interesting quote:
"A chaotic signal is generated by a mathematical expression that contains some sort of randomness. The periodicity of the values given by the expression depends upon probability distributions and rules which also are dependent on past or present values. The behavior of these functions show symmetry or tendency causing attraction to the value with the highest periodicity. A chaotic behavior is considered as a quantified level of unpredictability [4, Schroeder, 1991] which needs to be normalized and mapped to values meaningful and within the bounds for synthesis of Physical Models." Reading this it sounds like chaotic is really a lesser degree of "randomness". So, I would say that the stock market DOES have a quantified level of unpredictableness based on the past and present values (information) and that it can be normalized (risk). So it looks like mathematically you are right, but you got a real uphill battle to convince Finance professors and stock brokers it isn't random!:)
Most prison guards are unionized and union members are "strongly encouraged" to vote Democratic!! Everyone tends to vote for a candidate the promises you something you desire, regardless of party. That is just human nature.
Not true. You are NOT allowed to lobby for any poltical party as a Government Employee of ANY level, peon or manager. Notice I said EMPLOYEE not political appointee. Even some appointees are considered employees in this context. If you do lobby other Gov't employees on Gov't property on Gov't time you may well be fired (after a long drawn out process). As for seniority, that's an excellent point that you want YOUR Senator in positions of influence on this committees. That could all be fixed if they would instill term limits for office or term limits for being on a committee.
I have an undergrad in CS so I have the math. I clearly understand randomness. I also know Chaotic systems can be predicted to some extent by a series of equations often using calculus. Weather forecasting is an example. THey can do this because the laws of Physics apply to a given situation. There are not any laws of Human Behavior (OK, maybe Greed is one) that you can use to predict how a group of investors will react to a given set of data. That is what makes it Random. Random perspectives on where the price should be to buy/sell based on each persons incorporation of data about the market is why it's random. There have been highly mathematical studies done using very powerful statistics (thats math too) that support this viewpoint that it is Random. BTW, MBA's where I went had to take 6 hours of Grad level Statistics, we are NOT Math dummies.
Check your math. 99.9% accuracy means less than ONE person on that Jet could get a false positive, or 439.56 of the 440 would be correctly ID'd as who they really are. They also don't state if the.1% is mean percent false positive or worst case (likely worst case). To get that.1% down to less they can tighten up the amount of match required to get a "hit", but the algorith will take longer and that might inconvenince the tourists. Of the.1% that are false postives, I wonder if they read the print a secomd time just to be sure, if so that reduces the chances even more.
No it's not about control, its about SECURITY. Why do parents take kids to be fingerprinted, so they are SECURE in the knowledge the kids can be ID'd if needed. Fingerprints are a way to identify those who should or should not be allowed to do things or to visit places. Faces,names, passports can be altered or faked rather easily fingerprints are much harder.
I have no problems if a country wants to fingerprint me if I come in, it's their country they have a right to protect it. As for the 28 countries, I suspect these countries share fingerprint data with the US already but if you are NOT ever going to check these places you cen bet the terrorists are going to start seeking citizenship there so they can come over here w/o being detected by the fingerprint system.
Maybe in the cities you do. I have friends over there who run across packs of them when out hunting wild goat with thier dogs. The Red ones get really big and are just nasty.
Nope, in the long run it is random, you learn this on Day 1 of any Finance or Investment class. There are up and down market CYCLES but they are not the same in magnitude, duration or intensity. If all you want to do is predict up or down on a given day that's 50/50 odds, I'm talking about predicting up or down and how much in say 1 yr, 5 yrs or 10 yrs. Prices react to information flow which is random. Look up Random Walk Theory and Efficient Markets Hypothesis. However, there are some promising attempts to refute this theory involving very advanced non-parametric statistics which are way beyond my MBA classes in Stats. Price Trends however can be predicted using and Regression Analysis, and can give you expected values but it's not the same as having a dead nuts on formula for predicting the actual price on a given day.
The stock,market as a whole has been proven to be random, there IS no pattern or predicatabilty. Some things move certain stocks, but not for a predictable amount or for a predicatable period of time. Picking good stocks is as much a matter of luck as it is skill. You see the funds and managers that were on top on the bottom a few years later even though they are still doing all the right things. Thats what drives a lot of "logical thinking" types crazy about the stock market..it is NOT logical. SCO stock should be almost worthless if things were sane, but it's close to $20. Never underestimate the stupidity of investors, because if enough of them are stupid enough to buy the price WILL rise even if the company is a really a dog. Then when the price starts going up the ones who were thought they were smart and stayed out are now overcome by greed and they jump in too. That is what is keeping SCO's price way above reasonable levels.
How do we know that Apple hasn't funded some of the development of this drive via a strategic alliance in order to get first rights to the device at a great price (cost + a small %). That sort of thing wouldn't be announced and would only show up in Apple financials as "investments" with no details. That might be a smarter idea than buying them out, because if you buy them out you get their liabilities (bills, debts) as well as the assets (the drive technology). The margins on disk drives are not real high so paying back the acqusition costs out of profits might take some time. Of course they could sell the driver technology for something but that would be silly as it would remove a strategic advantage for Apple. Also Apple has never shown that it wants to be vertically integrated like the old IBM was where they owned and made everything for thier computers. I think Apple is just going to have to pay what is asked or the developer could always market it to someone else (a iPod Clone made in China perhaps)
Yes,there WAS a bad sci-fi movie about this. It was called the Andromeda Strain. Based on a book by Micheal Crighton IIRC. Same guy who wrote Jurassic Park. The "probe" brought back a virus that somehow almost escapes into the wild from the containment lab. At the time it was pretty far fetched. but now who knows. It seems Science is not taking nearly as long to catch up to sci-fi as we might think it would.
So, ya'll are saying that Mathematical Induction does NOT work in the field of Topology? Interesting, as I recall my undergrad Calculus professor saying it worked in all branches of math. Perhaps he was unfamiliar with that area of math.
Obviously, false memories can be implanted as well as certain ones erased. Rumsfeld was on the Board of ABB, the BOD of the companies doesn't know crap about the projects going on, they are there to look good and to create "networks" and "alliances" for the business. Just look at the BODs of the Fortune 100 companies, see the interlocking directors? What the crap would the head of McD's know about the business details of say a computer company he was on the Board of? I think you have the time period wrong as well, the 70's were when Iran was the enemy and Iraq was "on our side". Saddam gassed the Kurds shortly before the first Gulf War, the entire world did nothing, so much for the UN helping prevent Genocide. Perhaps the US should have taken him out then.
To take that concept one more step read Kiln People by David Brin. You can make an infinite number of clones of yourself that each last a few hours to a few days, and if you wish you can download the memories the clone experiences during his/her "life". So if the clone does something illegal, the "owner" has no recollection of it if the clone dies before the memories are downloaded. Excellent book that deals with exactly this question, while disquised as a detective novel.
Good point as well as being funny. Integrated heaters for the whole tank would require a major if not total redesign of the external tank. What they are doing is heating a small area where foam has been lost several times before (bi-pod ramp). But there is a long way from the engineers wanting to try this until it actually flies. I also wonder about the schedule impact of refitting current tanks and/or making new tanks with this change. The RTF is taking longer and costing more than planned. NASA did NOT get supplemental budget for this so that money has GOT to come out of the other parts of NASA's budget, so while STS gets fixed other things may go wanting such as Space and/or Planetary Science Missons. Even with all the changes you still have a 30yr old vehicle. What's the next thing to break?
Igor Sikorsky (inventor of the helicopter) personally flew on the first flight of all his new designs. And on many of those he took family members. Now that's confidence! NASA should require the same "skin in the game".
Each Launch is an independant event. The odds of failure are the same (1 in 100 roughly) for each launch. The 1 in 100 number was reached via relaibilty calculations based on fault tree analysis of critical component failures. This is System Engineering 101, NASA did this right, but the "system" that supports the engineering broke down. There is not a lot wrong with NASA engineering but IMNSHO there is a LOT wrong with NASA management (this from a NASA contractor). In fact NASA last week released a proposal to "industry" to come in a help them establish a more correct culture inclduing management processes. Hmm..Maybe my MBA has a use after all!!
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Not true. There is an Arkansas Governor in Jail for WhiteWater involvement. The Rose Law firm files that were never found may have implicated one or the other of the Clintons. The charges are "not proven" which does not mean "not guilty" or acquitted. To be acquitted you must be tried. The Whitewater case against the Clintons themselves never came to trial but it COULD in the future if those records happen to be found or witnesses get tired of being intimidated! I'm not sure when the statues toll on Fraud and Perjury but I don't think it is too late. Now about Freeh, AG Janet Reno could have removed Freeh at any time, I think he was a horrible FBI Director. I'm conservative but those hired to do such an important law enforcement job should be competent and should follow the LAW not the "money" or politics. IMO, An incompetent FBI Director actually played well into the Clinton Admin strategy! He ran around chasing down leads the Clintons knew would never yield results, thus there was not any creative thinking of where else they might look for evidence. Also recall that Bill was convicted of perjury, was disbarred in AR and lost his law license (big whoppie, he basically got off with a slap). Clinton has been voted by many historians (who are generally liberal) as one of the WORST presidents in modern US History. Don't try to rewrite history. The facts are plentiful that Clinton was a real bozo who just happened to get elected. Hillary is the brains of that outfit and used Bill to get to where she wanted. The only reason she has not divorced him is his ability to raise money for her within the liberal community.
We worried that the trailer loads of UDMH and other rocket fuels they moved past our door would one day go BOOM! We hoped we were gone that day, the trailers would be sticks and we'd get better working conditions. In the almost 3 yrs I was there it never happend :( We scrounged desks, made the office of an old used high bay building our Conference room, and learned how to design software WITHOUT Case tools (None of them worked on the Macs). Now that I look back on it, the conditions were bad, but we had a good team and excellent management. Now I have great conditions, a so-so team and terrible management!
There are a couple of "br" IP addy's too. I guess they don't bother to check if an address is within the US or not. You could send all your music via one of these non US domains if you wanted. Just set up the box in the non-US domain as a DMZ server and NAT to the real address of the data somewhere else. However that is hard to do for your average Joe User who swaps songs. Unless they can look at the DNS and NAT setup they can't see the address translation back to a US machine. Of course I could be wrong..and this also requires co-operation by someone in another country. I wonder if thier Gov't would get upset at the help they gave a US citizen to "break" US laws?
This was in the early 90's. I'm just today finishing up my second stint with NASA (this time in West Va) and one of our guys down at MSFC swears the trailers are still there and people still work in them! NASA will be hard pressed to go to the moon w/o some major infrastructure improvements. BTW, the VAB roof repairs are underway, but it's a BIG job, something like 18 months and $3M to put on a new roof.
How about an old house trailer in Huntsville, Alabama that had no heat or A/C, and was 300 yards from a Rocket Engine Test Stand? We had to leave everytime they tested an engine for "safety reasons" (100dB+ noise too). It was so cold in the winter we wore gloves and so hot in the summer we had to shut down the Macs before they overheated. We brought in heaters but only 1 or 2 folks could have them on a time w/o tripping the breakers. And how about varmits like GroundHogs and Skunks who lived under/around the trailers? We thought about getting some pink flamingos, rusty cars and a hound or two to make the joint classier! But we got the design work for the Space Station done anyway, we were Dedicated Space Groupies!
I think SWIFT has a UV telesope along with a Gamma-Ray Telescope, but I'm not certain. I can ask someone I know who works on it. If I'm wrong then UV astronomy is DOA until we get Moonbase Alpha going ;)
The next space telescope, James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled for 2011, and I know for a fact it is already in development. With the adaptive optics and VLB telescopes a good bit of what HST does can now be done on the ground. It is GREAT publicity for NASA with all the great images but it's science usefulness is going downhill. I'm not a liberal, but adding $1B to NASA's budget for the next few years and even after that tossing in the ISS and STS funds you won't even get close to a Lunar Base. Those $$$ will get a new heavy lift rocket (that proposal is due out any day) and a new man-rated capsule to go with it, and maybe ONE mission. I think this is a lot of smoke but not much substance. Why? If Bush is re-elected (which is very likely) he only gets 4 more years, and that is only a fraction of the time needed to get this program to completion. There is no telling whether future Presidents and future Congresses will fund it, and at what level so there is very little certainty that this idea will ever become reality. Now if this was a DoD Mission that could be buried in the "black" budget for the next 15 yrs, I'd say it had a very good chance of occuring but even then it would need a hell of a lot more funds.
Mutual funds only hold 4% of SCOs stock. It looks like the Royce and Assoc. is the largest instituional investor at 10.41% according to Yahoo. I can't tell which of the other listed institutional investors may be Canopy companies.
Flight arrival times are a RANDOM Distribution but they can be predicted to some level of exactness such as by the Posisson distribution given a large number of data points. Which leads me to believe we are talking about "random" in two different senses here, you are say random is 100% total unpredicatablity even with perfect information, I am saying random in that you can hit around the value and guess at it from the data, but never predict it with 100% certainty. In that sense you would say I have a "chaotic" system but I call it (by education) "random". Perhaps what we have here is a random used in a different context means slightly different things. I found this interesting quote: "A chaotic signal is generated by a mathematical expression that contains some sort of randomness. The periodicity of the values given by the expression depends upon probability distributions and rules which also are dependent on past or present values. The behavior of these functions show symmetry or tendency causing attraction to the value with the highest periodicity. A chaotic behavior is considered as a quantified level of unpredictability [4, Schroeder, 1991] which needs to be normalized and mapped to values meaningful and within the bounds for synthesis of Physical Models." Reading this it sounds like chaotic is really a lesser degree of "randomness". So, I would say that the stock market DOES have a quantified level of unpredictableness based on the past and present values (information) and that it can be normalized (risk). So it looks like mathematically you are right, but you got a real uphill battle to convince Finance professors and stock brokers it isn't random! :)
Most prison guards are unionized and union members are "strongly encouraged" to vote Democratic!! Everyone tends to vote for a candidate the promises you something you desire, regardless of party. That is just human nature.
Not true. You are NOT allowed to lobby for any poltical party as a Government Employee of ANY level, peon or manager. Notice I said EMPLOYEE not political appointee. Even some appointees are considered employees in this context. If you do lobby other Gov't employees on Gov't property on Gov't time you may well be fired (after a long drawn out process). As for seniority, that's an excellent point that you want YOUR Senator in positions of influence on this committees. That could all be fixed if they would instill term limits for office or term limits for being on a committee.
I have an undergrad in CS so I have the math. I clearly understand randomness. I also know Chaotic systems can be predicted to some extent by a series of equations often using calculus. Weather forecasting is an example. THey can do this because the laws of Physics apply to a given situation. There are not any laws of Human Behavior (OK, maybe Greed is one) that you can use to predict how a group of investors will react to a given set of data. That is what makes it Random. Random perspectives on where the price should be to buy/sell based on each persons incorporation of data about the market is why it's random. There have been highly mathematical studies done using very powerful statistics (thats math too) that support this viewpoint that it is Random. BTW, MBA's where I went had to take 6 hours of Grad level Statistics, we are NOT Math dummies.
Check your math. 99.9% accuracy means less than ONE person on that Jet could get a false positive, or 439.56 of the 440 would be correctly ID'd as who they really are. They also don't state if the .1% is mean percent false positive or worst case (likely worst case). To get that .1% down to less they can tighten up the amount of match required to get a "hit", but the algorith will take longer and that might inconvenince the tourists. Of the .1% that are false postives, I wonder if they read the print a secomd time just to be sure, if so that reduces the chances even more.
No it's not about control, its about SECURITY. Why do parents take kids to be fingerprinted, so they are SECURE in the knowledge the kids can be ID'd if needed. Fingerprints are a way to identify those who should or should not be allowed to do things or to visit places. Faces,names, passports can be altered or faked rather easily fingerprints are much harder. I have no problems if a country wants to fingerprint me if I come in, it's their country they have a right to protect it. As for the 28 countries, I suspect these countries share fingerprint data with the US already but if you are NOT ever going to check these places you cen bet the terrorists are going to start seeking citizenship there so they can come over here w/o being detected by the fingerprint system.
Maybe in the cities you do. I have friends over there who run across packs of them when out hunting wild goat with thier dogs. The Red ones get really big and are just nasty.
Nope, in the long run it is random, you learn this on Day 1 of any Finance or Investment class. There are up and down market CYCLES but they are not the same in magnitude, duration or intensity. If all you want to do is predict up or down on a given day that's 50/50 odds, I'm talking about predicting up or down and how much in say 1 yr, 5 yrs or 10 yrs. Prices react to information flow which is random. Look up Random Walk Theory and Efficient Markets Hypothesis. However, there are some promising attempts to refute this theory involving very advanced non-parametric statistics which are way beyond my MBA classes in Stats. Price Trends however can be predicted using and Regression Analysis, and can give you expected values but it's not the same as having a dead nuts on formula for predicting the actual price on a given day.
The stock ,market as a whole has been proven to be random, there IS no pattern or predicatabilty. Some things move certain stocks, but not for a predictable amount or for a predicatable period of time. Picking good stocks is as much a matter of luck as it is skill. You see the funds and managers that were on top on the bottom a few years later even though they are still doing all the right things. Thats what drives a lot of "logical thinking" types crazy about the stock market..it is NOT logical. SCO stock should be almost worthless if things were sane, but it's close to $20. Never underestimate the stupidity of investors, because if enough of them are stupid enough to buy the price WILL rise even if the company is a really a dog. Then when the price starts going up the ones who were thought they were smart and stayed out are now overcome by greed and they jump in too. That is what is keeping SCO's price way above reasonable levels.
How do we know that Apple hasn't funded some of the development of this drive via a strategic alliance in order to get first rights to the device at a great price (cost + a small %). That sort of thing wouldn't be announced and would only show up in Apple financials as "investments" with no details. That might be a smarter idea than buying them out, because if you buy them out you get their liabilities (bills, debts) as well as the assets (the drive technology). The margins on disk drives are not real high so paying back the acqusition costs out of profits might take some time. Of course they could sell the driver technology for something but that would be silly as it would remove a strategic advantage for Apple. Also Apple has never shown that it wants to be vertically integrated like the old IBM was where they owned and made everything for thier computers. I think Apple is just going to have to pay what is asked or the developer could always market it to someone else (a iPod Clone made in China perhaps)
Yes,there WAS a bad sci-fi movie about this. It was called the Andromeda Strain. Based on a book by Micheal Crighton IIRC. Same guy who wrote Jurassic Park. The "probe" brought back a virus that somehow almost escapes into the wild from the containment lab. At the time it was pretty far fetched. but now who knows. It seems Science is not taking nearly as long to catch up to sci-fi as we might think it would.
So, ya'll are saying that Mathematical Induction does NOT work in the field of Topology? Interesting, as I recall my undergrad Calculus professor saying it worked in all branches of math. Perhaps he was unfamiliar with that area of math.
Obviously, false memories can be implanted as well as certain ones erased. Rumsfeld was on the Board of ABB, the BOD of the companies doesn't know crap about the projects going on, they are there to look good and to create "networks" and "alliances" for the business. Just look at the BODs of the Fortune 100 companies, see the interlocking directors? What the crap would the head of McD's know about the business details of say a computer company he was on the Board of? I think you have the time period wrong as well, the 70's were when Iran was the enemy and Iraq was "on our side". Saddam gassed the Kurds shortly before the first Gulf War, the entire world did nothing, so much for the UN helping prevent Genocide. Perhaps the US should have taken him out then.
To take that concept one more step read Kiln People by David Brin. You can make an infinite number of clones of yourself that each last a few hours to a few days, and if you wish you can download the memories the clone experiences during his/her "life". So if the clone does something illegal, the "owner" has no recollection of it if the clone dies before the memories are downloaded. Excellent book that deals with exactly this question, while disquised as a detective novel.
Good point as well as being funny. Integrated heaters for the whole tank would require a major if not total redesign of the external tank. What they are doing is heating a small area where foam has been lost several times before (bi-pod ramp). But there is a long way from the engineers wanting to try this until it actually flies. I also wonder about the schedule impact of refitting current tanks and/or making new tanks with this change. The RTF is taking longer and costing more than planned. NASA did NOT get supplemental budget for this so that money has GOT to come out of the other parts of NASA's budget, so while STS gets fixed other things may go wanting such as Space and/or Planetary Science Missons. Even with all the changes you still have a 30yr old vehicle. What's the next thing to break?
Igor Sikorsky (inventor of the helicopter) personally flew on the first flight of all his new designs. And on many of those he took family members. Now that's confidence! NASA should require the same "skin in the game".
Each Launch is an independant event. The odds of failure are the same (1 in 100 roughly) for each launch. The 1 in 100 number was reached via relaibilty calculations based on fault tree analysis of critical component failures. This is System Engineering 101, NASA did this right, but the "system" that supports the engineering broke down. There is not a lot wrong with NASA engineering but IMNSHO there is a LOT wrong with NASA management (this from a NASA contractor). In fact NASA last week released a proposal to "industry" to come in a help them establish a more correct culture inclduing management processes. Hmm..Maybe my MBA has a use after all!!