NASA has *always* started up more programs than it could ever finish, so there'd be a good chance of what would eventually be needed already coming down the pipe. Add to the NASA developments all those designs put together by aero-corps most of which didn't get used. It ends up looking like a set up when something tests out well and then gets canceled. Being successful and being able to fit future requirements are not the same thing, and until a good test, they can't tell what the operating parmeters are for the vehicle. Also in this category are most of the best designs, those done around the edges of the aerospace industries. An example of these is the entire line of a multi-project program's worth of vehicles designed by Robert Truax http://www.astronautix.com/astros/truax.htm and http://neverworld.net/truax/
But the biggest culprit is of course programs developed to fulfill the goals of one administration, which get cut by the next or subsequent administrations. If NASA developed programs based on 'stair-step' continual expansion (making each step a requirement for the next) rather than political grandstanding, progress might be slower in gross effect but with far less net cost and effort.
As to 'why cancel the Ares and then start investigating a new heavy-lifter', first, Ares is not a new anything -- it's a hack built from shuttle components, meaning most of the technology is quite old (not to say that's bad, but it could be better). Second, the same could be said every few years for the last half century. Third, NASA and all the companies it feeds through its technology transfer program require constant renewal of R&D program direction in order to invent a whole new pile of golly-gee-whiz tech, and this is what NASA does best.
Take a look at the line of canceled and never-started projects derived from, and intended to expand, the Apollo lunar program. This is the best example of cancels soon after if not before development began. Follow the links below from the index page at http://www.astronautix.com/
Pre- and post-lunar Apollo (and other vehicle) variants: Apollo Odds and Mods Project Horizon Project Lunex Lunar Gemini
Saturn developement beyond initial lunar landings: Saturn V
And a complete program already well into development, with success fairly assured. Had this not been canceled, Armstrong might still have been first one the moon, but definitely would have been the first to fly (not just ride) an orbital space plane. An extremely well documented example of cancelmania: X-20/23/24 Dynasoar
One project NASA may presently be regretting not following up on was an improved suspension and steering design for the Mars rovers. I'm not fully up on the details, but it would almost certainly have allowed Spirit to dig itself out of the sand. Apparently the story of its development and rejection was covered by some science-based talk show around 10 years ago. Some of the reasons they didn't pick up on it at the time made sense; the design they used was so far along that changing it would have cost much more, and being developed by an individual rather than the design team, training to bring them up to speed just to evaluate it would have taken too long. However, since the alternative design was produced by a college sophomore and was clearly better than that which was produced by an entire team, the fact that they resented being shown up by a kid is a distinct possibility. That's supported by the fact that his performance report was glowing, yet when he went to check out his supervisor told him "Don't bother to ask for a letter of reommendation". Turned out he didn't need one for his next summer job, at the National Ignition Facility. We're waiting to see whether they're using his design on Curiosity.
I saw/heard an external bone conduction device with no spill over into the air, at the Lake County, Indiana fair around 1962 give or take a couple years. It was shaped like a small, rectangular pencil sharpener cut in half so that a half-cone was cut out of one side. That hollow was placed on the bridge of the nose. The fidelity was superb for the time. The drawback was, no stereo, hence no or very poor localization. I've watched for the commercial version ever since, but have never seen one.
tBA writes: "A lot of pundits, scientists, and people who should know better are decrying the demise of NASA, saying that the President's budget cutting the Constellation program and the Ares rockets will sound the death knell of manned space exploration. This simply is not true."
You are quite correct. It is simply not true that "A lot of pundits, scientists, and people who should know better are decrying the demise of NASA, saying that the President's budget cutting the Constellation program and the Ares rockets will sound the death knell of manned space exploration." Very few people of any stripe, and virtually none who 'know better' are saying that. A large number are reporting the budget cuts. A small number are claiming any sort of implications headed towards eliminating manned space projects, and most of those are reprinting the same article. Most are correctly reporting that the intention behind the budget cuts was to promote 'private sector' orbital projects.
If you need to set up a straw man for you to sucker punch in order to get your point across, then either your confidence in the importance of the material, and/or your confidence in your journalistic skills are lacking. Look up 'fallacy of extension' and 'argument from adverse consequences' at http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html Given that you rarely decry demises and death knells ('prestigous jargon' on that list) in your columns, it seems the problem here is more of skills issue.
> It looks like that campaign was supposed to end > last year, on Dec 31st. Why should we waste > time answering your questions
It looks like someone asked a question about software. Why should we waste our time listening to the grunting noises you make when trying to force your head up your ass past the elbows?
Apple's trend away from tinkering predates the company. During the design and building phase of the ][, Woz was building in things which Jobs didn't want. Three specifically that they argued over were color (vs. black and white output), the lid (and by extension, poking around inside) and memory expansion past the max installed 16 K (this is the actual source of the often repeated and rarely correct "Who would ever need more than X-kb of memory?" -- It was Jobs and it was 16K). The second and third are both in the 'tinkering' group of features. In all cases Woz won, and we got a machine that ultimately was pushed to do things which by design it supposedly 'couldn't'.
When Jobs decided to make his own machine, all three of the above limitations were built in. The first Mac was B&W, had no lid, and came with the only memory configuration that it could run. At the time I was senior/technical editor of The Road Apple, a 'zine for Apple ][,// and ]|[ users, created with the specific intention of trying to prevent Apple from dropping the ][ line. (As far as I have ever been able to determine, it was the first computer publication produced simultaneously in the US (Portland OR; Al Martin, Publisher) and USSR (Moscow, Russia); my co-editor was a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences; Academician Vladimir Fedorov). When Woz left, Jobs prevailed and we lost. Jobs' design choices for the first Mac and his acquiring complete control when Woz left, were the second and third major changes away from tinkering. Both were a direct result of Job's taking back those things he wanted done on the ][ that allowed tinkering (or were just plain neat hacks) but which Woz chose to do his own way. Simply put, this direction was based on the fact that Jobs lost those arguments. resented it, and when he got the chance, he finally got his own way.
References for the historical stuff can all be located if one digs. Support for Jobs' tendency towards management techniques such as tantrums and verbiage bordering on abuse has also been documented up through the point where John Scully took over for 10 years so Jobs could grow up and gain some people skills. Collections of The Road Apple were available on some of the Apple ][ ftp sites. One that has been converted to webby stuff is at http://apple2.org.za/gswv/a2zine/GS.WorldView/Resources/ROAD.APPLE/
Passing a law that makes using a phone while driving is not likely to decrease the incidence of using a phone while driving,
What it is likely to cause to happen is people will tend to lie more to say they weren't using the phone while driving. So unless they have some method of spying on drivers to see what they're really doing, rather than relying on self-reports, the HLDI has no grounds to state "such laws have reduced hand-held phone use" or to draw any conclusions based on phone use from the study in TFA.
That's precisely what all you zombies (ie. everyone other than myself) are programmed to say.
People laugh at Descartes today, but he wasn't entirely wrong to point out the fundamentally internal nature of conscious experience. There is of course the other problem: Consciousness is not Supervenient on the Physical. But then, any thing that doesn't exist would, by definition, not be supervenient on the physical, unless of course to exist physically isn't the only way an entity can exist. Given that Science is the Philosophy and Study of the physical, it is no surprise to see that Science has to dismiss Consciousness as an illusion.
You're referring to Cartesian dualism, the separation of body/brain and "mind". That's from his public writings and is widely accepted as his genuine opinion on the subject. It wasn't. In his diary he wrote that he created the idea of dualism to present so that the church would see him as promoting the idea that there was a place in his theory for the soul. He specifically wanted to avoid the fate of such as Bruno and Galileo. I don't recall the specific reference for this, but it was shown to me by Karl Pribram. He credits it as the source he drew from when he developed his saying "Brain is a noun. Mind is a verb. Mind is what brain does."
From posting summary: "If true, this won't please the federal panel that recommended against just such privatization."
ASAP is not a 'federal panel' in that it is a panel of members of a federal agency. The members are primarily consultants for and members of commercial concerns in aerospace. When tasked with something like an accident investigation or other safety related issue, they do a fine, objective job. When they undertake to advise NASA on what do to when it comes to contracting and such, they invariably favor themselves and their clients, which so far have not been the start ups that the Obama administration is considering using for future human spaceflight.
The panel members are listed, along with their relationships to the areospace community, in attachment 5 of the 2009 ASAP/NASA report at http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/oer/asap/documents/2009_ASAP_Annual_Report.pdf For those listed as consultants and giving the name of some consultancy concern, go to the web site of that agency and see who they consult to. The answers aren't very surprising given the recommendations that suggest NASA stick with the BigAero companies.
There's no difference in this application than most of the others ever produced. They're all simply frequency shifted time series. Any pseudo-regular simple or complex wave can be sifted to any frequency. Radio-astronomy has been the biggest source so far, though brain recordings have been done. At this point about the only novel application would be taking recorded sound and shifting it up to visual light.
The application I've found that uses amplitude modulation (notes from data points rather than time series wave forms) is Moonbell http://wms.selene.jaxa.jp/selene_sok/about_en.html Musical notes are created from lunar altitude measurements done by Selene.
I like Penrose' ideas that there is an element of non-computability involved in Consciousness, not because there's any evidence for it (there isn't much "evidence" for Consciousness at all, apart from your first person experience of it), but because to me it's the difference between being Conscious and being one of David Chalmers' zombies. I like to think I'm mostly the former.
That's precisely what all you zombies (ie. everyone other than myself) are programmed to say. Although some of you do produce novel responses occasionally. The Penrose zombie presented his theory to the Karl Pribram zombie (my primary teaching machine) who asked "So what does this mean to psychology?" The Penrose zombie replied "How would I know? You're the psychologist." A strange thing to say because (a) the Penrose zombie didn't flinch from psychology in the 'zombies' issue (v 3 #1) of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, and (2) the Pribram zombie was programmed as a neurologist, not a psychologist.
After receiving that JoCS issue I had my fill of speculative philosophy of science in place of real science and wrote to ask them where I might obtain samples of zombies suitable for laboratory testing. Since I, as the sole non-zombie, would know the correct answer to be 'everywhere; any of us', their programming correctly perceived my response as irony. Not having been programmed to respond to it (the zombie in TFA hadn't developed that idea yet), they didn't respond at all. As a result I canceled my subscription. They continued to produce that journal as if I were still taking it, again as a lack of complete programming.
The idea that complete computation can produce all the answers is not new. It is based on comprehensive algorithms rather than incomplete calculations resulting in "I don't know". It is because of this that such computations are called 'NP Complete'. It means that in order to complete the calculations, they have to be done as NP (Not Penrose).
One datum to connect the report from TFA (and sadly but in fact detracting from it) and that elsewhere that the Obama budget contains no funding for Constellation:
If India launches people into space in 2016 it'll be the 4th nation but the 5th organization to do so. After China's manned orbital flights but before India's planned missions, two pilots earned their astronaut wings flying SpaceShipOne. TFA says they plan to stay a week, but the title does just say 'space'. After the Rutan Clan, every nation the sends up a space mission will be 'after a private company'.
True, there's an attempt to leave Constellation off the budget (but wait until after ASAP/BigAero has their say). But there's still ongoing support for private programs developing lunar oriented hardware as well as lift vehicles being developed that could make the attempt.
In the case of "the offense of persistently instigating lawsuits, typically groundless ones", just making the accusation is often enough to make the attorney quit a case. They can be tried for it in court as well as being censured or disbarred, whereas the client can only be tried (often not understanding what it is and/or thinking their case's validity precludes such a charge). It may have been used successfully at least once in a context in which it is often discussed: "In Religious Technology Center v. Gerbode, 1994 WL 228607 (C.D. Cal. 1994), a Rule 11 sanction of $8,887.50 was imposed against Helena K. Kobrin, an attorney for the Church for bringing legally baseless, frivolous claims", however corroboration for this is lacking.
Wait until one costs the company something through a computer failure and failure to follow the policy.
Fix the problem and present the machine back to them with a bill for the repair. Make sure to boost the price to cover any ancillaries such as your training, their training, their retraining, lost time to the company due to their down time, and any similar costs you can dream up. Keep copies.
Request a general meeting with the bossships. Present the data from the above repair, anonymized to protect the guilty. Compare the cost presented with the cost of following policy. Make sure to point out that they too stand to lose financially (ie not make even more money) if they or others cost the company money. Suggest that in order to protect the company they adopt the policy that such unnecessary costs be charged to the individual in the future.
For theft, adjust scenario as necessary as well as costs. For concominant data theft, do the same, as well as figure in cost to the company.
Or put together a 'what if' report based on a previous loss and present that at such a meeting, rather than wait until it actually happens. Feel free to pretend it did at the start of your presentation (with knowledge of at least one boss). Done this way you could make it look like the company was sunk and scare the bejeezus out of them.
"...unlike Earth, they do not have magnetic poles that match up with their geographical poles."
Unlike Earth, neither does Earth. The Earth's south magnetic pole is presently about 25.6 degrees from the south pole. Granted, that's not 60 degrees, but apparently neither are theirs since according to TFA the magnetic poles on Uranus and Neptune "can be up to 60 degrees off the north-south axis", it they were, there's be no reason to say "can be".
There's no note regarding secondary poles on the giant planets like on the sun, but according the Oersted and Magsat satellite data and article in Nature in 2002 (416/8661, pp 620-623) there's an alternate pole developing in the South Atlantic west of South Africa. There's also a geomagnetic anomaly near Lake Baikal in Siberia that causes deflection in the magnetic field measured as far away as Japan, but there's no evidence (or none as yet) that it's a developing "alternate". But one's enough, when it comes to picking apart TFA. Not only is Earth unlike the Earth they compare against while constructing their theory, it's quite capable of being equal to the giants in its unlikeness in the complete absence of diamond seas with or without diamondbergs.
"...the DMCA says that the remedies are the counter-notice procedure *and* an award for attorney's fees."
That statement is descriptive, a listing of the options available. The verb "are" indicates that there is more than one remedy.
If the statement was intended to be prescriptive, requiring both actions, it would be stated as a single remedy, phrased "the remedy IS..." and then listed both with the conjunction 'and'. If the statement were prescriptive and stated to allow only one or the other, the verb 'are' and conjunction 'or' would have been used. If prescriptive and allowing either or both, it'd say 'are' and 'and/or'. Thus as stated, it is not prescriptive, rather is only an accounting of possibilities without any inference of inclusion or exclusion.
Two fatalities? In 8 years? And we are talking about rather intensive procedures for which informed consent is obtained either directly or by proxy?
If we're going to stick to a medical scene, how many fatalities due to surgical 'mistakes' occurred? Drug related accidents too. Either makes the 'two' look like Disney material.
During the same period NTSB general aviation (ie not commercial airlines) reports show 181 incidents, 147 accidents, 109 fatalities in the US.
What I'd like to see is some in depth journalism investigation (a subset of investigative journalism) to determine how many accident fatalities due to inaccurate reporting of weather/road/building/etc conditions, suicides due to news reports detrimental to the victim, suicides among employees, and covert/extended suicide by employees via such as alcoholism occurred due to the NYT. And when the count is in, maybe a comparison about how hard it is to run a newspaper vs. running a linear accelerator based medical radiation system. And before you go counting how many people each takes, consider how much of the operation of the latter is automated and how many people it would take to do it without the automation.
S(peculative)F is solidified imagination. Imagination must remain fluid, but it should also be provided material from which to start and with which to work. In the absence of this particular form, another would no doubt come to fore, such as the original Hypercard was intended. Perhaps after the fact such a codification of material for speculating might be seen as necessary, but that's only after the fact. At the time it (SF or its substitute for the purpose stated) is simply an inevitable and spontaneous emergent property/process of imagination exercising itself with the at least hopeful intention of being shared. It occurs to me that even critics of religion could accept its utility in these terms.
Interviewer: "Is that your crash helmet?" Jose' Jimenez: " . . . oh I hope not."
Using: standard atmosphere http://www.desktopaero.com/stdatm.html Mach/altitude tables http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/atmosphere/q0112.shtml g acceleration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_velocity and historical stuff on Col Joe. At 35 seconds he'll have fallen from 120kft to 80kft, going 1126 ft/s. That's Mach 1 at sea level. At 80kft it's Mach 1.15, giving some room for drag error. 10 seconds later he'd cross from stratosphere to tropopause where Mach 1 is lowest, but since it's only a matter of ~6 ft/s, this just gives him room to fall farther if need be but not required. At 80kft the dynamic pressure will be around 55 lb/ft^2, so if fully loaded he weighs more than 165 lbs he'll still accelerate some, but not after the 45 second mark. If he's outfitted like Kittenger was, he'll weigh up towards 300 lbs, and would still accelerate for some time.
At 30 seconds he'll be falling at 965 ft/s, or Mach 0.98, well within the narrow transonic region of highest pressure, "max Q". This is where aircraft prior to the Bell X-1 came apart due to the buffeting of turbulence combined with the growing bow shock pressure wave.
He can do it theoretically. The altitude is just about perfect for the attempt. I'm more concerned about whether he'll be able to keep from getting the piss kicked out of him at the Mach line. Sure, it'll be slight compared to what General Chuck punched through, but he's a damn sight slighter than the X-1. On the other hand Kittenger hit Mach 0.96 around 60kft and I see no report of this effect so maybe it's not a problem.
It may still be a problem to punch through though. There's a spike in the speed/drag curve that's greater or lesser depending on the drag characteristics (coefficient of drag of cD). If his outfit will be shaped to approximate a low cD body so much the better. Since he'll require some form of protection I doubt anyone would fault him for choosing a shape to fit his flight profile.
If he kept up his falling profile he's still slow to terminal velocity for the lower altitude, around 200 MPH, slower still if he's either braking or blacked out and spinning. Lower altitude here is taken to be where he could pop the chute and stay conscious even if he lost his mask, around 20 kft. At that altitude and speed a full open would be quite a jerk, but no more than airborne troops practice, and which I'm sure he's handled previously. If he's designing his chute to be able to be opened higher/faster should he need or want to, he'll include a drogue chute with a delay before the main, to slow him gradually to safe opening speed (especially helpful if spinning).
Conceptually it's even older. It is the magnetic signals associated with the well known EEG 'brain waves', first recorded in 1928.
It is exactly and only the perpendicular to the EEG signals, and as such are analyzed in much the same way, and represent the same neural processes.
What good it is, is it can detect and localize 'dipole' generators in the folds of the cortex. Since the negative and positive ends of those are the same distance from the scalp, they balance out on EEG and can't be seen. The magnetic field to such a dipole is most prominent in this configuration.
The drawback is that detecting the ~10 femtotesla signals require massive shielding to prevent pretty much any near by electrical activity to interfere. With signals that weak, it's a good thing the magnetic field isn't reduced by the skull and scalp like EEG (by 3 orders of magntitude).
The detectors are superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDS). They require massive technical infrastructure and maintenance, ie. great expense.
Except for the localization noted, if MEG can do it, EEG can do it easier, cheaper (three orders of magnitude), faster (in terms of turnover), and operated by personnel with less training. There are portable EEGs capable of being operated in the field, but even a full size unit is about the size of a desktop computer and can be run off a laptop.
I'd be very interested to hear what TFA has to say about why MEG is necessary. Their 248 SQUID machine is high density, but so are the 256 electrode EEG that have been on the market for years. I'd also like to know exactly what the signals of interest are, so I can figure out how to pull it out of EEG with far less sophisticated equipment, such as exists in pretty much every VA neurology department.
Among points I picked up on myself, they point out that since there are no existing standards for them to follow for building human rated craft, they claim that none of them have experience doing so is non sequitor. They politely don't point out that the sole existing man rated spacecraft has had two fatal failures, though they'd also have to admit it's experimental, not commercial, even though built by human rated aircraft corporations.
Even more politely, when ASAP makes the statement that the commercial start ups hoping to carry people are making unsubstantiated claims, they do reply that since they haven't built the hardware yet to test it, and only have stated intentions, it's hardly a valid criticism but don't resort to the sorely needed "DUH!".
ASAP has done a creditable job when it came to criticizing their own work. That is, the BigAero members cooperated fully when investigating problems. But as far as dealing a blow to commercial startups, TFA is so full of FUD that NASA can only take it and leave it or risk being seen being led around by the corporate welfare milk teat.
FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation, and more recently Commerce's Office of Space Commercialization, have been plowing full speed ahead to clear the way for the new guys just as much as the big ones. When multibillion dollar corporations get scared enough to "warn" NASA, things are probably going to get interesting. I thought they were interesting enough the year Rutan won the X-prize, because half the licenses for commercial launches issued that year by FAA/AST had his name on them.
It's not clear from TFA or the abstract whether the volumes measured were absolute or in proportion to overall brain volume. A bigger brain will have bigger parts usually, but it may need them all bigger to run the thing. A smaller brain with a larger part might have more of that function than it requires, lending to greater ability. Anyone got access to the PDF to see how they define volume?
Size itself can be a contributor to greater or lesser processing according to what and where. We found that the larger the cross section of the foremost part of the corpus callosum (larger taken as a fraction of overall volume) had greater attentional abilities, particularly disattention. We also found that the smaller the portion of Broca's area that became engaged, the greater the ability to read something cold and make themselves sound natural rather than stilted as though they were reading aloud. They both make sense in different ways -- the former is a collection connections between hemispheres, essentially a cable trunk, so greater volume = more neurons or bigger/more efficient/effective neurons, or something similar. In the latter, the smaller area is likely a function of greater interconnection allowing for more processing, more complex processing, faster processing due to less distance, or something like these.
In any case, all the parts examined in TFA are controlled in large part by the dopamine system, meaning they're involved in reward. That's reward in the Skinnerian sense -- reinforcement -- not in the sense of causing a good feeling. They're all involved in learning. The tasks measured were scored according to how well/fast someone learned the task or strategies/tactics that worked. So it all makes good plain old sense, as does much of the more nuts and bolts stuff in neuroscience.
A point of clarification vs. the Cosmic Log write up: they failed to find an interaction with the hippocampus, as opposed to finding none. Absence of evidence, etc. That doesn't mean it's not there, just that they failed to detect it if it was.
There is so much in the summary, the articles and the web pages associated with this that fall somewhere between hype and bald faced lies that I'm not going to waste my time picking it apart. Someone saw a sympathetic audience and played it. You've been played like Clapton's Strat and you made exactly the music they wanted you to. Too bad nobody saw fit to investigate any of this. Anyone that actually gave shit about anything more than the chance to spout off might have at least tried to contact any of the several broadcast museums like Paley Center, Museum of TV and Radio or Museum of Broadcast Communications.
Come on kids, try reconciling the fact that they've got these things locked in a vault with the accusation of "failing to preserve" and try to imagine the mental gymnastics required not to trip over that if you weren't already jumping head first into what you thought was yet another copyright law bashing. I'm astounded at how few bullshit meters got pegged by this.
Since when is someone liable for what someone else does with a copy sold or loaned to someone else?
Since the copyright laws were passed. They allow for selling of a portion of rights to parties. What those parties do with the copies, or by their inability to control the material they're entrusted with, what they allow to happen to those copies, can devalue the portions of the rights not entrusted to them. They can be held liable for loss by the owner. Likewise, if the owner allows the portion under their control to be compromised, devaluing the portion they previously sold rights to, they can be held liable for loss due to the devaluation they allowed to happen.
The show may have had permission to use someone's music. The show no longer exists so neither does the permission.
Running IT as a business is like driving an airplane:
It seems like a logical extension of known abilities. In the situation, if you try a few driving techniques, they'll probably work out fairly well. But the first time you try something that seems simple but works very differently, say try to turn left by turning the 'steering' wheel to the left, you're going to be sorry.
Making parallels between IT and business is what business people do when confronted with having to run IT based on their business experience rather than learning how to do it right. They are rationalizing using the tools they already have, and protecting their ego by trying to make the rest of the model fit them. When they try to turn left and end up pranging*, they can blame the IT department for not falling into line with the business model. They can use that excuse when interviewing for their next position and get the sympathy of all the other business people who commiserate with colleagues forced to work with the IT people.
Do your business-based IT manager a favor. Soothe his ego by telling him he drives like Mario Andretti. Then brief him on the basic differences between driving the track at Indy, and moving in 3 dimensions using pitch, yaw and roll, and how if he tries to take the first turn the way he used to, he's going to get a valuable lesson in roll, as well as in pranging. Then take him out for a few touch-and-goes and let him hold the stick for a bit on the level. Then sign him up for beginner's ground school, which would be learning to be a help desk droid. If you're stuck with him, you might just try to get him to learn to be part of the department rather than part of the problem.
And if he refuses? Fuck it, strap him in and let him solo. It won't take long. There's lots of these guys that the big kids upstairs want sent your way, for various reasons, and 'making IT work' may be the mantra but it's not always the reason.
Pranging, from prang v. (Brit.): To land an airplane nose first, usually at high speed, often under power, almost certainly by someone with no previous experience landing an airplane in that fashion. The lucky tend to learn to land in other ways after this, the smart learn to before this, the rest never get a second chance.
Google is positioning itself so that their only two options will be to tuck their tail between their legs and do China's bidding or pull out and lose all the invested capital. China will not back down they will never let themselves appear weak.
Google can afford to lose the investment. Until someone does make the sacrifice, everyone else is going to cave to China. When someone stands up to them, others will follow.
But not selling in China is no big deal. They're make and sell what we won't sell them, even if they have to build it from pirated plans. What will make the difference is when someone refuses to buy from China. China will respond by shuttering, which will only propagate the intended cut-off: If you won't buy from us, we won't sell to you. Who's to suffer? Walmart shoppers?
The marketplace, taken as a whole, has much more power than any government. If it decides to act as a whole, either they'll win, or everyone will lose with China losing far more.
If Google doesn't do this, it'll be a long time before anyone does, if ever. So fuck China. If Google does this I'm prepared to back them by buying stock.
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NASA has *always* started up more programs than it could ever finish, so there'd be a good chance of what would eventually be needed already coming down the pipe. Add to the NASA developments all those designs put together by aero-corps most of which didn't get used. It ends up looking like a set up when something tests out well and then gets canceled. Being successful and being able to fit future requirements are not the same thing, and until a good test, they can't tell what the operating parmeters are for the vehicle. Also in this category are most of the best designs, those done around the edges of the aerospace industries. An example of these is the entire line of a multi-project program's worth of vehicles designed by Robert Truax http://www.astronautix.com/astros/truax.htm and http://neverworld.net/truax/
But the biggest culprit is of course programs developed to fulfill the goals of one administration, which get cut by the next or subsequent administrations. If NASA developed programs based on 'stair-step' continual expansion (making each step a requirement for the next) rather than political grandstanding, progress might be slower in gross effect but with far less net cost and effort.
As to 'why cancel the Ares and then start investigating a new heavy-lifter', first, Ares is not a new anything -- it's a hack built from shuttle components, meaning most of the technology is quite old (not to say that's bad, but it could be better). Second, the same could be said every few years for the last half century. Third, NASA and all the companies it feeds through its technology transfer program require constant renewal of R&D program direction in order to invent a whole new pile of golly-gee-whiz tech, and this is what NASA does best.
Take a look at the line of canceled and never-started projects derived from, and intended to expand, the Apollo lunar program. This is the best example of cancels soon after if not before development began. Follow the links below from the index page at http://www.astronautix.com/
Pre- and post-lunar Apollo (and other vehicle) variants:
Apollo Odds and Mods
Project Horizon
Project Lunex
Lunar Gemini
Saturn developement beyond initial lunar landings:
Saturn V
Lunar exploration and expansion :
Manned Lunar Bases
Manned Circumlunar
Manned Lunar Landers
Manned Lunar Flyers
Manned Lunar Rovers
Manned Lunar Orbiters
And a complete program already well into development, with success fairly assured. Had this not been canceled, Armstrong might still have been first one the moon, but definitely would have been the first to fly (not just ride) an orbital space plane. An extremely well documented example of cancelmania:
X-20/23/24 Dynasoar
One project NASA may presently be regretting not following up on was an improved suspension and steering design for the Mars rovers. I'm not fully up on the details, but it would almost certainly have allowed Spirit to dig itself out of the sand. Apparently the story of its development and rejection was covered by some science-based talk show around 10 years ago. Some of the reasons they didn't pick up on it at the time made sense; the design they used was so far along that changing it would have cost much more, and being developed by an individual rather than the design team, training to bring them up to speed just to evaluate it would have taken too long. However, since the alternative design was produced by a college sophomore and was clearly better than that which was produced by an entire team, the fact that they resented being shown up by a kid is a distinct possibility. That's supported by the fact that his performance report was glowing, yet when he went to check out his supervisor told him "Don't bother to ask for a letter of reommendation". Turned out he didn't need one for his next summer job, at the National Ignition Facility. We're waiting to see whether they're using his design on Curiosity.
I saw/heard an external bone conduction device with no spill over into the air, at the Lake County, Indiana fair around 1962 give or take a couple years. It was shaped like a small, rectangular pencil sharpener cut in half so that a half-cone was cut out of one side. That hollow was placed on the bridge of the nose. The fidelity was superb for the time. The drawback was, no stereo, hence no or very poor localization. I've watched for the commercial version ever since, but have never seen one.
tBA writes: "A lot of pundits, scientists, and people who should know better are decrying the demise of NASA, saying that the President's budget cutting the Constellation program and the Ares rockets will sound the death knell of manned space exploration. This simply is not true."
You are quite correct. It is simply not true that "A lot of pundits, scientists, and people who should know better are decrying the demise of NASA, saying that the President's budget cutting the Constellation program and the Ares rockets will sound the death knell of manned space exploration." Very few people of any stripe, and virtually none who 'know better' are saying that. A large number are reporting the budget cuts. A small number are claiming any sort of implications headed towards eliminating manned space projects, and most of those are reprinting the same article. Most are correctly reporting that the intention behind the budget cuts was to promote 'private sector' orbital projects.
If you need to set up a straw man for you to sucker punch in order to get your point across, then either your confidence in the importance of the material, and/or your confidence in your journalistic skills are lacking. Look up 'fallacy of extension' and 'argument from adverse consequences' at http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html Given that you rarely decry demises and death knells ('prestigous jargon' on that list) in your columns, it seems the problem here is more of skills issue.
> It looks like that campaign was supposed to end
> last year, on Dec 31st. Why should we waste
> time answering your questions
It looks like someone asked a question about software. Why should we waste our time listening to the grunting noises you make when trying to force your head up your ass past the elbows?
Apple's trend away from tinkering predates the company. During the design and building phase of the ][, Woz was building in things which Jobs didn't want. Three specifically that they argued over were color (vs. black and white output), the lid (and by extension, poking around inside) and memory expansion past the max installed 16 K (this is the actual source of the often repeated and rarely correct "Who would ever need more than X-kb of memory?" -- It was Jobs and it was 16K). The second and third are both in the 'tinkering' group of features. In all cases Woz won, and we got a machine that ultimately was pushed to do things which by design it supposedly 'couldn't'.
When Jobs decided to make his own machine, all three of the above limitations were built in. The first Mac was B&W, had no lid, and came with the only memory configuration that it could run. At the time I was senior/technical editor of The Road Apple, a 'zine for Apple ][, // and ]|[ users, created with the specific intention of trying to prevent Apple from dropping the ][ line. (As far as I have ever been able to determine, it was the first computer publication produced simultaneously in the US (Portland OR; Al Martin, Publisher)
and USSR (Moscow, Russia); my co-editor was a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences; Academician Vladimir Fedorov). When Woz left, Jobs prevailed and we lost. Jobs' design choices for the first Mac and his acquiring complete control when Woz left, were the second and third major changes away from tinkering. Both were a direct result of Job's taking back those things he wanted done on the ][ that allowed tinkering (or were just plain neat hacks) but which Woz chose to do his own way. Simply put, this direction was based on the fact that Jobs lost those arguments. resented it, and when he got the chance, he finally got his own way.
References for the historical stuff can all be located if one digs. Support for Jobs' tendency towards management techniques such as tantrums and verbiage bordering on abuse has also been documented up through the point where John Scully took over for 10 years so Jobs could grow up and gain some people skills. Collections of The Road Apple were available on some of the Apple ][ ftp sites. One that has been converted to webby stuff is at http://apple2.org.za/gswv/a2zine/GS.WorldView/Resources/ROAD.APPLE/
Passing a law that makes using a phone while driving is not likely to decrease the incidence of using a phone while driving,
What it is likely to cause to happen is people will tend to lie more to say they weren't using the phone while driving. So unless they have some method of spying on drivers to see what they're really doing, rather than relying on self-reports, the HLDI has no grounds to state "such laws have reduced hand-held phone use" or to draw any conclusions based on phone use from the study in TFA.
People laugh at Descartes today, but he wasn't entirely wrong to point out the fundamentally internal nature of conscious experience. There is of course the other problem: Consciousness is not Supervenient on the Physical. But then, any thing that doesn't exist would, by definition, not be supervenient on the physical, unless of course to exist physically isn't the only way an entity can exist. Given that Science is the Philosophy and Study of the physical, it is no surprise to see that Science has to dismiss Consciousness as an illusion.
You're referring to Cartesian dualism, the separation of body/brain and "mind". That's from his public writings and is widely accepted as his genuine opinion on the subject. It wasn't. In his diary he wrote that he created the idea of dualism to present so that the church would see him as promoting the idea that there was a place in his theory for the soul. He specifically wanted to avoid the fate of such as Bruno and Galileo. I don't recall the specific reference for this, but it was shown to me by Karl Pribram. He credits it as the source he drew from when he developed his saying "Brain is a noun. Mind is a verb. Mind is what brain does."
From posting summary: "If true, this won't please the federal panel that recommended against just such privatization."
ASAP is not a 'federal panel' in that it is a panel of members of a federal agency. The members are primarily consultants for and members of commercial concerns in aerospace. When tasked with something like an accident investigation or other safety related issue, they do a fine, objective job. When they undertake to advise NASA on what do to when it comes to contracting and such, they invariably favor themselves and their clients, which so far have not been the start ups that the Obama administration is considering using for future human spaceflight.
The panel members are listed, along with their relationships to the areospace community, in attachment 5 of the 2009 ASAP/NASA report at http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/oer/asap/documents/2009_ASAP_Annual_Report.pdf For those listed as consultants and giving the name of some consultancy concern, go to the web site of that agency and see who they consult to. The answers aren't very surprising given the recommendations that suggest NASA stick with the BigAero companies.
There's no difference in this application than most of the others ever produced. They're all simply frequency shifted time series. Any pseudo-regular simple or complex wave can be sifted to any frequency. Radio-astronomy has been the biggest source so far, though brain recordings have been done. At this point about the only novel application would be taking recorded sound and shifting it up to visual light.
The application I've found that uses amplitude modulation (notes from data points rather than time series wave forms) is Moonbell http://wms.selene.jaxa.jp/selene_sok/about_en.html Musical notes are created from lunar altitude measurements done by Selene.
I like Penrose' ideas that there is an element of non-computability involved in Consciousness, not because there's any evidence for it (there isn't much "evidence" for Consciousness at all, apart from your first person experience of it), but because to me it's the difference between being Conscious and being one of David Chalmers' zombies. I like to think I'm mostly the former.
That's precisely what all you zombies (ie. everyone other than myself) are programmed to say. Although some of you do produce novel responses occasionally. The Penrose zombie presented his theory to the Karl Pribram zombie (my primary teaching machine) who asked "So what does this mean to psychology?" The Penrose zombie replied "How would I know? You're the psychologist." A strange thing to say because (a) the Penrose zombie didn't flinch from psychology in the 'zombies' issue (v 3 #1) of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, and (2) the Pribram zombie was programmed as a neurologist, not a psychologist.
After receiving that JoCS issue I had my fill of speculative philosophy of science in place of real science and wrote to ask them where I might obtain samples of zombies suitable for laboratory testing. Since I, as the sole non-zombie, would know the correct answer to be 'everywhere; any of us', their programming correctly perceived my response as irony. Not having been programmed to respond to it (the zombie in TFA hadn't developed that idea yet), they didn't respond at all. As a result I canceled my subscription. They continued to produce that journal as if I were still taking it, again as a lack of complete programming.
The idea that complete computation can produce all the answers is not new. It is based on comprehensive algorithms rather than incomplete calculations resulting in "I don't know". It is because of this that such computations are called 'NP Complete'. It means that in order to complete the calculations, they have to be done as NP (Not Penrose).
One datum to connect the report from TFA (and sadly but in fact detracting from it) and that elsewhere that the Obama budget contains no funding for Constellation:
If India launches people into space in 2016 it'll be the 4th nation but the 5th organization to do so. After China's manned orbital flights but before India's planned missions, two pilots earned their astronaut wings flying SpaceShipOne. TFA says they plan to stay a week, but the title does just say 'space'. After the Rutan Clan, every nation the sends up a space mission will be 'after a private company'.
True, there's an attempt to leave Constellation off the budget (but wait until after ASAP/BigAero has their say). But there's still ongoing support for private programs developing lunar oriented hardware as well as lift vehicles being developed that could make the attempt.
Barratry is alive and well, in both federal and many state judicial systems:
http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/lawyer_awaits_verdict_in_barratry_trial_over_subpoena_sent_to_opposing_part/
http://www.lukegilman.com/blawg/2009/11/07/houston-lawyer-charged-with-barratry-for-having-homeless-man-hand-out-business-cards/
http://www.citmedialaw.org/threats/state-oklahoma-miller-v-king
In the case of "the offense of persistently instigating lawsuits, typically groundless ones",
just making the accusation is often enough to make the attorney quit a case. They can be tried for it in court as well as being censured or disbarred, whereas the client can only be tried (often not understanding what it is and/or thinking their case's validity precludes such a charge). It may have been used successfully at least once in a context in which it is often discussed: "In Religious Technology Center v. Gerbode, 1994 WL 228607 (C.D. Cal. 1994), a Rule 11 sanction of $8,887.50 was imposed against Helena K. Kobrin, an attorney for the Church for bringing legally baseless, frivolous claims", however corroboration for this is lacking.
"How do I get through to the bosses..."
Talk boss language to them.
Wait until one costs the company something through a computer failure and failure to follow the policy.
Fix the problem and present the machine back to them with a bill for the repair. Make sure to boost the price to cover any ancillaries such as your training, their training, their retraining, lost time to the company due to their down time, and any similar costs you can dream up. Keep copies.
Request a general meeting with the bossships. Present the data from the above repair, anonymized to protect the guilty. Compare the cost presented with the cost of following policy. Make sure to point out that they too stand to lose financially (ie not make even more money) if they or others cost the company money. Suggest that in order to protect the company they adopt the policy that such unnecessary costs be charged to the individual in the future.
For theft, adjust scenario as necessary as well as costs. For concominant data theft, do the same, as well as figure in cost to the company.
Or put together a 'what if' report based on a previous loss and present that at such a meeting, rather than wait until it actually happens. Feel free to pretend it did at the start of your presentation (with knowledge of at least one boss). Done this way you could make it look like the company was sunk and scare the bejeezus out of them.
"...unlike Earth, they do not have magnetic poles that match up with their geographical poles."
Unlike Earth, neither does Earth. The Earth's south magnetic pole is presently about 25.6 degrees from the south pole. Granted, that's not 60 degrees, but apparently neither are theirs since according to TFA the magnetic poles on Uranus and Neptune "can be up to 60 degrees off the north-south axis", it they were, there's be no reason to say "can be".
There's no note regarding secondary poles on the giant planets like on the sun, but according the Oersted and Magsat satellite data and article in Nature in 2002 (416/8661, pp 620-623) there's an alternate pole developing in the South Atlantic west of South Africa. There's also a geomagnetic anomaly near Lake Baikal in Siberia that causes deflection in the magnetic field measured as far away as Japan, but there's no evidence (or none as yet) that it's a developing "alternate". But one's enough, when it comes to picking apart TFA. Not only is Earth unlike the Earth they compare against while constructing their theory, it's quite capable of being equal to the giants in its unlikeness in the complete absence of diamond seas with or without diamondbergs.
"...the DMCA says that the remedies are the counter-notice procedure *and* an award for attorney's fees."
That statement is descriptive, a listing of the options available. The verb "are" indicates that there is more than one remedy.
If the statement was intended to be prescriptive, requiring both actions, it would be stated as a single remedy, phrased "the remedy IS..." and then listed both with the conjunction 'and'. If the statement were prescriptive and stated to allow only one or the other, the verb 'are' and conjunction 'or' would have been used. If prescriptive and allowing either or both, it'd say 'are' and 'and/or'. Thus as stated, it is not prescriptive, rather is only an accounting of possibilities without any inference of inclusion or exclusion.
Two fatalities? In 8 years? And we are talking about rather intensive procedures for which informed consent is obtained either directly or by proxy?
If we're going to stick to a medical scene, how many fatalities due to surgical 'mistakes' occurred? Drug related accidents too. Either makes the 'two' look like Disney material.
During the same period NTSB general aviation (ie not commercial airlines) reports show 181 incidents, 147 accidents, 109 fatalities in the US.
For commercial accidents and fatalities, go world wide and enjoy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_commercial_aircraft Feel free to discount the Sept 11 2001 entry as a statistical outlier. Take a calculator.
What I'd like to see is some in depth journalism investigation (a subset of investigative journalism) to determine how many accident fatalities due to inaccurate reporting of weather/road/building/etc conditions, suicides due to news reports detrimental to the victim, suicides among employees, and covert/extended suicide by employees via such as alcoholism occurred due to the NYT. And when the count is in, maybe a comparison about how hard it is to run a newspaper vs. running a linear accelerator based medical radiation system. And before you go counting how many people each takes, consider how much of the operation of the latter is automated and how many people it would take to do it without the automation.
S(peculative)F is solidified imagination. Imagination must remain fluid, but it should also be provided material from which to start and with which to work. In the absence of this particular form, another would no doubt come to fore, such as the original Hypercard was intended. Perhaps after the fact such a codification of material for speculating might be seen as necessary, but that's only after the fact. At the time it (SF or its substitute for the purpose stated) is simply an inevitable and spontaneous emergent property/process of imagination exercising itself with the at least hopeful intention of being shared. It occurs to me that even critics of religion could accept its utility in these terms.
Interviewer: "Is that your crash helmet?"
Jose' Jimenez: " . . . oh I hope not."
Using:
standard atmosphere http://www.desktopaero.com/stdatm.html
Mach/altitude tables http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/atmosphere/q0112.shtml
g acceleration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_velocity
and historical stuff on Col Joe.
At 35 seconds he'll have fallen from 120kft to 80kft, going 1126 ft/s. That's Mach 1 at sea level. At 80kft it's Mach 1.15, giving some room for drag error. 10 seconds later he'd cross from stratosphere to tropopause where Mach 1 is lowest, but since it's only a matter of ~6 ft/s, this just gives him room to fall farther if need be but not required. At 80kft the dynamic pressure will be around 55 lb/ft^2, so if fully loaded he weighs more than 165 lbs he'll still accelerate some, but not after the 45 second mark. If he's outfitted like Kittenger was, he'll weigh up towards 300 lbs, and would still accelerate for some time.
At 30 seconds he'll be falling at 965 ft/s, or Mach 0.98, well within the narrow transonic region of highest pressure, "max Q". This is where aircraft prior to the Bell X-1 came apart due to the buffeting of turbulence combined with the growing bow shock pressure wave.
He can do it theoretically. The altitude is just about perfect for the attempt. I'm more concerned about whether he'll be able to keep from getting the piss kicked out of him at the Mach line. Sure, it'll be slight compared to what General Chuck punched through, but he's a damn sight slighter than the X-1. On the other hand Kittenger hit Mach 0.96 around 60kft and I see no report of this effect so maybe it's not a problem.
It may still be a problem to punch through though. There's a spike in the speed/drag curve that's greater or lesser depending on the drag characteristics (coefficient of drag of cD). If his outfit will be shaped to approximate a low cD body so much the better. Since he'll require some form of protection I doubt anyone would fault him for choosing a shape to fit his flight profile.
If he kept up his falling profile he's still slow to terminal velocity for the lower altitude, around 200 MPH, slower still if he's either braking or blacked out and spinning. Lower altitude here is taken to be where he could pop the chute and stay conscious even if he lost his mask, around 20 kft. At that altitude and speed a full open would be quite a jerk, but no more than airborne troops practice, and which I'm sure he's handled previously. If he's designing his chute to be able to be opened higher/faster should he need or want to, he'll include a drogue chute with a delay before the main, to slow him gradually to safe opening speed (especially helpful if spinning).
MEG is not new, it's over 40 years old.
Conceptually it's even older. It is the magnetic signals associated with the well known EEG 'brain waves', first recorded in 1928.
It is exactly and only the perpendicular to the EEG signals, and as such are analyzed in much the same way, and represent the same neural processes.
What good it is, is it can detect and localize 'dipole' generators in the folds of the cortex. Since the negative and positive ends of those are the same distance from the scalp, they balance out on EEG and can't be seen. The magnetic field to such a dipole is most prominent in this configuration.
The drawback is that detecting the ~10 femtotesla signals require massive shielding to prevent pretty much any near by electrical activity to interfere. With signals that weak, it's a good thing the magnetic field isn't reduced by the skull and scalp like EEG (by 3 orders of magntitude).
The detectors are superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDS). They require massive technical infrastructure and maintenance, ie. great expense.
Except for the localization noted, if MEG can do it, EEG can do it easier, cheaper (three orders of magnitude), faster (in terms of turnover), and operated by personnel with less training. There are portable EEGs capable of being operated in the field, but even a full size unit is about the size of a desktop computer and can be run off a laptop.
I'd be very interested to hear what TFA has to say about why MEG is necessary. Their 248 SQUID machine is high density, but so are the 256 electrode EEG that have been on the market for years. I'd also like to know exactly what the signals of interest are, so I can figure out how to pull it out of EEG with far less sophisticated equipment, such as exists in pretty much every VA neurology department.
Full article: http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=30060
Among points I picked up on myself, they point out that since there are no existing standards for them to follow for building human rated craft, they claim that none of them have experience doing so is non sequitor. They politely don't point out that the sole existing man rated spacecraft has had two fatal failures, though they'd also have to admit it's experimental, not commercial, even though built by human rated aircraft corporations.
Even more politely, when ASAP makes the statement that the commercial start ups hoping to carry people are making unsubstantiated claims, they do reply that since they haven't built the hardware yet to test it, and only have stated intentions, it's hardly a valid criticism but don't resort to the sorely needed "DUH!".
ASAP has done a creditable job when it came to criticizing their own work. That is, the BigAero members cooperated fully when investigating problems. But as far as dealing a blow to commercial startups, TFA is so full of FUD that NASA can only take it and leave it or risk being seen being led around by the corporate welfare milk teat.
FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation, and more recently Commerce's Office of Space Commercialization, have been plowing full speed ahead to clear the way for the new guys just as much as the big ones. When multibillion dollar corporations get scared enough to "warn" NASA, things are probably going to get interesting. I thought they were interesting enough the year Rutan won the X-prize, because half the licenses for commercial launches issued that year by FAA/AST had his name on them.
It's not clear from TFA or the abstract whether the volumes measured were absolute or in proportion to overall brain volume. A bigger brain will have bigger parts usually, but it may need them all bigger to run the thing. A smaller brain with a larger part might have more of that function than it requires, lending to greater ability. Anyone got access to the PDF to see how they define volume?
Size itself can be a contributor to greater or lesser processing according to what and where. We found that the larger the cross section of the foremost part of the corpus callosum (larger taken as a fraction of overall volume) had greater attentional abilities, particularly disattention. We also found that the smaller the portion of Broca's area that became engaged, the greater the ability to read something cold and make themselves sound natural rather than stilted as though they were reading aloud. They both make sense in different ways -- the former is a collection connections between hemispheres, essentially a cable trunk, so greater volume = more neurons or bigger/more efficient/effective neurons, or something similar. In the latter, the smaller area is likely a function of greater interconnection allowing for more processing, more complex processing, faster processing due to less distance, or something like these.
In any case, all the parts examined in TFA are controlled in large part by the dopamine system, meaning they're involved in reward. That's reward in the Skinnerian sense -- reinforcement -- not in the sense of causing a good feeling. They're all involved in learning. The tasks measured were scored according to how well/fast someone learned the task or strategies/tactics that worked. So it all makes good plain old sense, as does much of the more nuts and bolts stuff in neuroscience.
A point of clarification vs. the Cosmic Log write up: they failed to find an interaction with the hippocampus, as opposed to finding none. Absence of evidence, etc. That doesn't mean it's not there, just that they failed to detect it if it was.
There is so much in the summary, the articles and the web pages associated with this that fall somewhere between hype and bald faced lies that I'm not going to waste my time picking it apart. Someone saw a sympathetic audience and played it. You've been played like Clapton's Strat and you made exactly the music they wanted you to. Too bad nobody saw fit to investigate any of this. Anyone that actually gave shit about anything more than the chance to spout off might have at least tried to contact any of the several broadcast museums like Paley Center, Museum of TV and Radio or Museum of Broadcast Communications.
Come on kids, try reconciling the fact that they've got these things locked in a vault with the accusation of "failing to preserve" and try to imagine the mental gymnastics required not to trip over that if you weren't already jumping head first into what you thought was yet another copyright law bashing. I'm astounded at how few bullshit meters got pegged by this.
Since when is someone liable for what someone else does with a copy sold or loaned to someone else?
Since the copyright laws were passed. They allow for selling of a portion of rights to parties. What those parties do with the copies, or by their inability to control the material they're entrusted with, what they allow to happen to those copies, can devalue the portions of the rights not entrusted to them. They can be held liable for loss by the owner. Likewise, if the owner allows the portion under their control to be compromised, devaluing the portion they previously sold rights to, they can be held liable for loss due to the devaluation they allowed to happen.
The show may have had permission to use someone's music. The show no longer exists so neither does the permission.
Running IT as a business is like driving an airplane:
It seems like a logical extension of known abilities.
In the situation, if you try a few driving techniques, they'll probably work out fairly well.
But the first time you try something that seems simple but works very differently, say try to turn left by turning the 'steering' wheel to the left, you're going to be sorry.
Making parallels between IT and business is what business people do when confronted with having to run IT based on their business experience rather than learning how to do it right. They are rationalizing using the tools they already have, and protecting their ego by trying to make the rest of the model fit them. When they try to turn left and end up pranging*, they can blame the IT department for not falling into line with the business model. They can use that excuse when interviewing for their next position and get the sympathy of all the other business people who commiserate with colleagues forced to work with the IT people.
Do your business-based IT manager a favor. Soothe his ego by telling him he drives like Mario Andretti. Then brief him on the basic differences between driving the track at Indy, and moving in 3 dimensions using pitch, yaw and roll, and how if he tries to take the first turn the way he used to, he's going to get a valuable lesson in roll, as well as in pranging. Then take him out for a few touch-and-goes and let him hold the stick for a bit on the level. Then sign him up for beginner's ground school, which would be learning to be a help desk droid. If you're stuck with him, you might just try to get him to learn to be part of the department rather than part of the problem.
And if he refuses? Fuck it, strap him in and let him solo. It won't take long. There's lots of these guys that the big kids upstairs want sent your way, for various reasons, and 'making IT work' may be the mantra but it's not always the reason.
Pranging, from prang v. (Brit.): To land an airplane nose first, usually at high speed, often under power, almost certainly by someone with no previous experience landing an airplane in that fashion. The lucky tend to learn to land in other ways after this, the smart learn to before this, the rest never get a second chance.
Google is positioning itself so that their only two options will be to tuck their tail between their legs and do China's bidding or pull out and lose all the invested capital. China will not back down they will never let themselves appear weak.
Google can afford to lose the investment. Until someone does make the sacrifice, everyone else is going to cave to China. When someone stands up to them, others will follow.
But not selling in China is no big deal. They're make and sell what we won't sell them, even if they have to build it from pirated plans. What will make the difference is when someone refuses to buy from China. China will respond by shuttering, which will only propagate the intended cut-off: If you won't buy from us, we won't sell to you. Who's to suffer? Walmart shoppers?
The marketplace, taken as a whole, has much more power than any government. If it decides to act as a whole, either they'll win, or everyone will lose with China losing far more.
If Google doesn't do this, it'll be a long time before anyone does, if ever. So fuck China. If Google does this I'm prepared to back them by buying stock.