Well all I can say to this is any religion where people seriously ponder, expect or at worst promote an imminent and apocalyptic end to all life on earth is pretty much psychotic.
It just never ceases to amaze me what people will accept when its shovelled by a religion, especially one that has achieved a dominant and majority position in society.
I have a pretty high confidence if Judaism and Christianity hadn't existed until now, and something resembling a cult were to try to propagate Christianity, and the books of Revelations, from a standing start today they would be persecuted mercilessly, like for example David Koresh was in Waco, or like the early Christians were by the Roman empire.
Apocalyptic religions are simply nuts, and when their believers gain control of a government with apocalyptic weapons its beyond nuts, its immensely dangerous.
If you get people with an apocalyptic belief system in charge of government you can be sure they wont care about things like global warming because they are of a mindset that life on earth wont be around long enough for it to matter anyway.
"However just because it is a common thing does not make it a good thing."
Well its a "good thing" for ex politicians and ex generals. Its a "good thing" for the companies that hire them. If you outlawed it the number of people willing to enter government service would plummet. The actual pay checks for government service aren't the greatest by private industry standards. Aside from a few idealists, and a larger number of people who are already rich, most people enter public service with the intent of helping out their friends while in office and cashing in on their knowledge and connections as soon as they retire from public service. Its a well known fact that the second term for two term Presidents is often rocky. A key reason is many of the President's best people leave at the end of the first term so they can cash in on their power and connections while their friends are still in power in the second term. Tommy Thompson is just a classic example of this.
"At any rate, you are probably right that these things won't ever become mandatory-- in the United States."
You probably said that about National ID cards... and you were wrong. They were for all practical purposes instituted in the intelligence "reform" bill in December 2004. This bill was 3000 pages long, most who voted for it hadn't read it and it passed 89-2 in the Senate and 336-75 in the house. In many respects it was more dangerous to civil liberties than the Patriot act and it was passed with 99+% of the American public completely oblivious to its implications.
All in all I think it would be GREAT if the Republicans passed a bill mandating chipping everyone. It would drive home to more people how much of a police state they are really living in today. Eventually you might create enough critical mass to mobilize Americans to take their government back. Its not likely but you never now what might be the trigger to wake people out of their slumber.
"most Christians actually want to stave off the end times"
Did you do a poll or something to figure this out? What was the results 56% against Satan taking over the earth, 44% for and 10% have never heard of Satan?
This source, which I am sure is as above reproach as your data says 85% of bible scholars believe in the rapture. The rapture is a BOOMING business in fundamentalist Christian circle these days, especially thanks to the Internet.
To use your phrasing, and with the assurance my poll has as much validity as yours... "most" born agains who subscribe to the rapture are bursting with anticipation of the end times so they can be called to heaven and on the way up can have the last laugh as all the non believers and worshipers of false gods burn in hell.
"That doesn't necessarily mean that all Christians will oppose things like implantable RFID tags"
I wager "most" can with suitable conditioning(i.e. nightmare scenarios of danger and insecurity) be made to see this as essential to their security, essential to "protect the children", essential to being able to identify bad elements in society. Pre 2001 I would have though it impossible that Americans would stand for national ID cards and those were authorized as an obscure provision in the recent nation intelligence "reform" act and are now nearly inevitable, and will no doubt be chipped in one way or another.
If this company wants a slam dunk way to get support for this all they need to do is point out all sex offenders will have these tags, their tag information will be made available on the Internet, and they will market do it yourself readers so you to can instantly identify if there are sex offenders within 100 feet of your home. You could hook it up to an alarm so if sex offender gets near your home alarms will sound and the police will be notified.
Another slam dunk way to sell it, with tiny ethical problems, you could maybe put mandatory religious preference and ethnic identifiers in the chip so you could setup alarms to go off if Muslims, Atheists, or whatever ethnic or religious group you despise gets to close to you, your children or your home.
"We have done very little under the Bush Administration to truly put a lid on nuclear proliferation, and many have even exacerbated it by stepping up development of bunker-buster nukes."
The Bush administration has almost certainly dramatically accelerated proliferation. They've adopted an obvious bifurcated policy in dealing with nations depending on whether they have nukes, or at least they say they have them, or they don't.
North Korea says they have nukes so the Bush administration negotiates with them, and treats them with a hands off policy focused on diplomatic efforts and not much saber rattling.
Iraq has no nukes, though the neocons say they are trying to get them and they get whacked.
Iran has no nukes, though the neocons say they are trying to get them, and the implication is they may well be in line to get whacked one way or another, air strikes on their reactor before it goes online, fomenting revolution thanks to the CIA, or outright invasion if they can gin up a case and get out of the quagmire in Iraq.
Libya has something of a contrived nuclear program, give it up and are showered with benefits. Leads you to think you should start a sham program, just to give it up to see what you can get for it in concessions from the U.S. and U.K.
There is an obvious pattern here a 5 year old can see. If you are on the wrong side of the U.S. the best policy you can pursue is to acquire nukes or at least say you acquired them and fake a good case to support it. If you do you're safe from American aggression. If you don't have nukes and you get on the wrong side of the U.S. chances are you get whacked. Therefor every enemy the U.S. has, has been incentivized to get nukes.
No really that is the word I meant to use whether you like it or not. I'll abuse the English language in my posts as I see fit, always do cuz I ain't gonna waste the time obsessing over the grammar, the ideas are the only interesting part.
Rather than obsess about that abuse why don't you try to post something relevant to the topic at hand instead of being a pedant. Pedants are not popular because they don't add anything of value to a discussion, they distract from the discussion and leap on to pointless tangents.
"... all the while knowing that the civilian leadership at the top of the pyramid has let them down in a monumental fashion."
To understand Iraq and why it is like it is you need to understand the real motivation of the people that started it. A good primer often posted on Slashdot is The Power of Nightmares a 3 part BBC documentary. It gets a little weak in chapter 3 but chapters 1 and 2 are priceless in understanding the Bush/Blair administrations, Islamic fundamentalists and how much alike they are.
In synopsis, there are a number of people in the Bush administration, who subscribe to the theories of or were educated by Leo Strauss.
Strauss' driving theory was the western liberalism and moral relativism was a disastrous failure, people are losing their compass in life because of it, and this was leading to a breakdown in society. The solution Strauss proposed was that the leaders of the nation need to create easily understood myths, that could be used to unite people behind causes they could easily understand and support, causes that would give their lives meaning, direction and purpose.
Anytime you hear Western leaders describing the world in terms of good and evil these days chances are you are hearing echoes of Leo Strauss and neoconservative speechwriters of his school. Their objective is to paint their nation, its leaders and its people as champions of good and their nations enemies as the epitome of evil.
One of the first modern instances of this philosophy, in action, occurred during the Reagan administration. The neocons created a shadow intelligence agency called Team B. Team B analyzed all the same intelligence the CIA analyzed on the Soviet Union. Who was on Team B, among other Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. The CIA found no evidence of a serious buildup or military threat from the Soviet Union. Team B found evidence of nothing but a massive buildup, secret weapons and an imminent danger of sneak attack. The neocons, in particular William Casey, head of the CIA insisted the Soviet Union was behind a global terrorism network. CIA analysts said it wasn't the case. Why because they had planted all the propaganda about this global terrorism network and they knew it was a lie but the neocons insisted it was reality.
You see the neocons were manufacturing a myth, that the Soviet Union was the epitome of evil and an imminent threat to the U.S. and the world when in fact it was a decrepit and incompetent regime heading towards collapse. You might remember Reagan calling it the "evil empire" which is classic Staussian rhetoric.
Fast forward to Iraq and you find George W. Bush calling them part of the "axis of evil", classic Straussian rhetoric. You find once again a special office was created, this time in the Pentagon, to analyze all the evidence on Iraq that the CIA was analyzing. It was called the Office of Special Plans, though it was really Team B, the sequel. CIA analysts found no case for WMD's in Iraq, or ties to 9/11. This special office under Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle, found nothing but evidence of WMD's, ties to 9/11 and imminent danger to the U.S. from Iraq. You might recall the one about drones from Iraq spraying American cities with chemical and biological weapons Fox News in particular played to great effect right before the war.
What you see in Iraq today was another case of the neocons creating a myth, one in which America was the force of good while Saddam's Iraq was evil incarnate. The war in Iraq had no real justification because all of the purported threats posed by Iraq were based on fantasy and myth creation. The only purpose of the war in Iraq was to unite the American people against a regime that was easy to portray as evil. It was an easy myth for the American people to understand, and it was a target that was easy to destroy with a modern military, while scattered underground Islamic extremists were not.
"So is the fact that work is being done on a replacement'
Wait to see if its any good and see how much it costs per launch before you start singing praises of this. Its really easy to be at the artists conception stage. NASA has been there about a dozen times with shuttle replacements and they have all died quick deaths. Some other fundamental dangers:
- The CEV ends up being Shuttle derived vehicles and all of the people now working on the Shuttle will just transfer to the new program and it will end up just as expensive as the shuttle is. Congressmen from Florida and Texas may well mandate this so they don't lose jobs in their districts.
- The CEV will turn in to a capsule that just flys back and forth to the ISS so we won't have moved ahead an inch billions of dollars and years later.
You can keep saying they are doing the right all day but again they spent 2 1/2 years and billions of dollars and they ended up with the same basic problem happen that destroyed Columbia, a big chunk of foam peeling.
I'll be first in line to sing praises of NASA when they do something praiseworthy. JPL does great stuff all the time, as do the great observatories. The manned program hasn't done anything praiseworthy since the Hubble repair mission.
You seem to arguing that if they are just less bad than they have been that somehow has turned them in to heroes. I disagree. I'm not sure they are even less bad. Now they are suffocating under excessive caution, still flying with dangerous problems, and now are grounded again which is about the worst possible combination.
Thanks but I meant to use peak not pique so stop being a pedant. Maybe it was a bad choice of words since it implies a down hill slope once interest has peaked but I sure don't need you to put alternate words in my mouth, but thanks for the fish.
You really don't get it. The government decides what is extremism, they can expand the definition pretty much at a whim, and you will always be in doubt as to what qualifies. For example since some Palestinians indulge in suicide bombings it could be promoting extremism to say anything sympathetic to Palestinians something that Israel will no doubt love.
When you start going after book stores you have crossed a dangerous line. They all now get to review everything on their shelves and pull anything controversial and in the process narrow the scope of thought available to people.
When the Mujadeen were fighting the Soviet Union as allies they were "freedom fighters", when they turned in to Al Qaeda and started fighting the U.S. they were terrorists. Palestinian suicide bombers are terrorists, Israel dropping bombs on apartment building full of women and children is somehow OK.
The youth of Christianity are taught that murder is OK as long as you are in the military. Dropping bombs from airplanes on civilian targets, in gods name, is especially detestable, but the U.S. and U.K have been doing it regularly since World War II.
If you want to get holier than thou about killing you need to apply an equal standard and condemn it at all levels.
One of the reporters at the Blair conference was especially insightful and brave and asked if by persecuting Muslims, including clerics, in this way that they might in fact be playing in to the hands of extremists, by alienating moderate Muslims more than they already are.
Dude I read the article you didn't need to repeat it. You and he are still totally missing the point.
For NASA to just now be attempting to get it "right", and doing test flights, 114 missions in to a 130 mission program is pathetic, its not something to be praising them for. They should have fixed all of this crap back when they WERE test flying it and before it killed people. They KNEW all this debris and tile damage was a problem but as long as they got away with it they talked themselves in to saying it must be OK. WRONG, BAD, BAD MANAGEMENT.
They pretty obviously ignored another known problem in the foam this time around so they still didn't get this test flight right, leading to another long grounding and no doubt another test flight, or who know how many more test flights. At over a billion a pop for these test flights a for a program struggling to survive they REALLY needed to nail this flight and they obviously didn't.
"This kind of thing is why the general public needs a bitch-slap. They never listen."
Thats an elitist thing to say. I think the public is starting to listen damn well for the first time. They aren't listening to shuttle management anymore because they have zero credibility. Read Feynman's rant about shuttle management saying the risks for various Shuttle failures were 1 in 100,000 when in fact they were more like 1 in 300 by any scientifically based measure.
The general public and me and everyone else ranting about this are the ones in the right here. The Shuttle and ISS programs have been messed up for the duration of their existence. People like you and this guy keep making apologies for it and saying how it really isn't as bad as it seems, when in fact it IS as bad as it seems and the public should have demanded better a LONG time ago.
Maybe it will peak some interest but the simple fact is that by the time most of those kids reach college and start actually picking a career many are going to realize science and engineering are hard fields and the pay off is poor compared to:
- business - marketing - law - medicine though the payoff there isn't so great either
The reason the U.S. is cratering in science and engineering is that, other than during the dot com bubble, they are career paths for people who don't want to make a killing. Most talented Americans want to make a killing so they opt for business, law, etc.
You want to get more scientist and engineers you have to do two things both nearly impossible:
- Fix the education system where athletics is a 10 and academics is a 1 in the real priority scale of kids, parents, teachers and administrators. In the upper class parts of India academics is a 10 and athletics a 1 though cricket is a passion. This is nearly impossible to fix because the jockocracy is entrenched in nearly every school, football and basketball are fun, exciting and glamorous, physics and chemistry is not.
- Fix the financial rewards system so that CxO's stop making 400X what people who actually invent, design and build things make. This being a free market system you can't. fix it.
Engineering and science pay better than a lot of jobs but anyone who understands where the money is, is going to go in to management, sales and accounting tricks.
The point you missed, and the parent was alluding to, was there is a potentially BIG difference between what was actually required by the court order and what the officers who came banging at the door actually demanded, verbally and for which there is no evidence trail other than the poor admin's word and he probably is either gagged or to scared to talk.
If the police come banging on the door most people go in to shock, they may not stop to think, demand the company lawyer be there or that they even read the order themselves. Most people except for people with experience being busted just start complying with anything the officers demand even if it exceeds the specific wording in the order.
I can easily see the officers with the court order not being satisfied with the admin copying off just the logs, in the event the admin intentionally or unintentionally does a bad job or deletes some of the logs to obstruct the investigation. I could easily see the officers demanding he halt the machine and pull the drives, and surrender the drives so they can pull the logs themselves and look at anything else on the drive that amuses them after the copy it. Its really the only way they can insure there is no evidence tampering, even if that wasn't what the court order specified.
There are some substantially more serious problems in the UK as of today's speech by Tony Blair anyway. Among other things he is planning to:
- Outlaw bookstores the government decides are promoting Islamic extremism - Outlaw web sites promoting extremism presumably including any outside of the UK viewed in the UK. - Outlaw anyone promoting, condoning or rationalizing extremism, which could for example include people speaking on behalf of Palestine or maybe news outlets showing the latest video of Al Qaeda leaders. Needless to say no one really even knows what qualifies as extremism, the UK government and courts will decide when they see it.
Anyone in Britain who is not a citizen who frequents or maybe even has frequented said bookstores, web sites or made statements justifying extremism will be swiftly deported often to countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia where they may be dealt with swiftly and harshly if they are suspected Islamists which they will be when Britain deports them.
British citizens doing the same may be charged with crimes.
You better hope you don't Google something and go to one of these web sites inadvertently because Scotland yard will now come knocking.
If you've listened to the prosecution underway for the London bombings, two women and man have been charged under the new "withholding information" statute. In Britain now if you are falsely accused and can't tell them about a terror plot you go to jail. It creates an interesting situation where people falsely arrested are given incentive to make up a plot and falsely accuse other people to avoid being charged with withholding information, resulting in a pyramid scheme of false accusation.
If you do have information you are apparently pretty much compelled to divulge it even if it entails self incrimination. Either you confess and are sent up the river or you don't confess and you are sent up the river for withholding information. Nothing resembling a fifth amendment in the UK now. Innocent people are totally screwed if someone has falsely implicated them. Based on terror cell investigations in the U.S. there is a high frequency of false accusations.
Two Muslim men in Detroit, in a showcase DOJ terror trial, were convicted based on a tourist tape to Disneyland which the government said was a terrorist planning tape, disguised to look like a tourist video, and on the word of a conman charged with fraud who got his charges reduced for implicating the two men. He later admitted in jail he was lying to get his sentence reduced and the convictions were overturned. The government insisted the Disneyland tape was evidence of terrorism and even more so because they had made it "look" like a tourist tape to conceal it was a planning tape. It really looked like a home made movie of a trip to Disneyland. Apparently everyone needs to stop using video cameras on vacation because THAT is terrorism now, especially if you are Muslim.
For all this guys cheerleading he missed some fundamental problems here. Its not really that space flight or the Shuttle is dangerous though it obviously it, its that both the Shuttle and the ISS are now complete, indisputable dead ends and the risk just isn't worth it. They are doing nothing to justify the money or the risk at the moment. NASA is spending staggering sums on all these new safety fixes on a vehicle that is somewhere between zero and 15 flights away from retirement. Its not something to sing praises of, its a total waste. Spending all this effort to defend, map and repair shuttle tiles 114 missions in to a 130 mission program is insane, because they wont be there in the next vehicle.
Even if the shuttle does come out of the next grounding what is the BEST you can hope for? Fifteen or so flights to attempt to finish the ISS. We can pray for one worthwhile mission to save Hubble but that is a long shot at this point. The ISS will never be fully manned because the only emergency vehicle is one 3 man Soyuz. Even if you do get all the partners modules up there you wont have enough people on it to do much science with a 3 man crew. They mostly spend their time just maintaining things and exercising. CEV is already being bent to just be a capsule to fly back and forth to ISS at which point billions of dollars and years more will go down the drain on a dead end.
Michael Griffin said it best in congressional testimony before he became administrator:
"But the more important question is whether the return to be obtained from the use of ISS to support exploration objectives is worth the money yet to be invested in its completion. The nation, through the NASA budget, plans to allocate $32 B to ISS (including ISS transport) through 2016, and another $28 B to shuttle operations through 2011. This total of $60 B is significantly higher than NASA's current allocation for human lunar return. It is beyond reason to believe that ISS can help to fulfill any objective, or set of objectives, for space exploration that would be worth the $60 B remaining to be invested in the program."
Thats $60 billion being poured down the drain that could better go to something that is not a dead end, a real CEV, a new heavy lifter, the moon and Mars.
"In short, NASA is back. Get over it."
NASA isn't back. This flight had a piece of foam flying off just like Columbia did. If it had flown off when the Shuttle was at a different angle of attack it could have well struck the wing in an exact replay of Columbia. They spent 2 1/2 years, billions of dollars, and they didn't fix the fundamental problem. Not only that the shuttles are all grounded again for who knows how long.
NASA isn't back, its still struggling for its survival.
To whomever modded this offtopic, it most certainly isn't. The thread is about blocking IP addresses as a form of censorship. Slashdot does exactly the same thing though in the opposite direction. It is a legitimate thing to do deal with DDOS attacks but I'm pretty sure Slashdot also IP blocks in a feeble attempt at censorship and when they do it to ISP's that channel multiple users through one IP address it does collateral damage to every user of that ISP.
I'm glad I read Slashdot, they would never block IP addresses..... oh wait..... they do it all the time too, and if you are on an ISP which randomly assigns your IP address or have multiple customers routed through one server you get RANDOMLY blocked. Fortunately there is privoxy and tor which completely defeat this totally ineffective censorship
"Cisco corporate officers arranged to have Bruce Schneier call them "thugs"
This one is pretty easy to explain. though its kind of a long proof, follow along.
You may recall John Chambers, Cisco CEO, a while ago said:
"What we're trying to do is outline an entire strategy of becoming a Chinese company"
The people running China are now in fact no longer Communist. There is a prerequisite that there be state ownership of Capital to be Communist/Socialist. When China started transferring control of capital to private individuals, mostly highly place members of the party and their relatives, it did in fact transform from being Communist China to Fascist China.
Under Fascism you have a repressive one party state but you can have private ownership of capital. The party just usually makes sure most of it wealth is in the hands of favored party members and the party liberally intervenes in the economy to pick the winners and losers. This is exactly the political and economic model you have in China today.
So if you've followed this far:
- The Chinese are now Fascists - Fascists are Thugs - Cisco is a "Chinese company"
"I think they'd also have to go through the Van Allen radiation belts which could also be a concern."
There are proposals out there to use high voltage tethers that would scatter most of the particles out of the belts and reduce the energy in them 1% of their current level in about a half a year. If you are transporting a lot of people, on a regular basic, from LEO to GEO and beyond you would probably want to do it.
Damn for books you hate so much you sure did pay a lot of attention to them.
"For example, about half of the Martians don't want to terra-form the planet, and so become terrorists to prevent terra-forming. This flies in the face of 10,000 years of human history"
We haven't had environmentalists for most of the last 10,000 years of history. We also have technology now that has elevated man from spending all day everyday trying to find the next meal which is why people like grass, because its what you field cattle and sheep to get meat. Though I'll agree on Mars people would early on probably be pretty focused on insuring the next meal, drink and breath of air.
"The spinning of the windmill powers a small generator...."
I think if you look in the middle of Green Mars Sax goes to a conference on terraforming and a presenter presents estimates on the windmills contribution and finds they were in fact a waste of time(though it still gives them a credit for a tiny net gain which might be bogus). I don't remember exactly but I think Sax had some ulterior motive for them that had to do with local heating not global heating.
Like I said even when its wrong it makes you think about the issues, maybe even more so if you are picking holes in his science. Obviously it got you to THINKING:)
"These books are unadulterated crap"
Don't hold back what do you really think about them!!
"Another post filled with deliberate bias and deliberate ignorance."
Yes your post certainly is, LOL!!
"The Shuttle has been flying successfully for almost 30 years. You seem to be defining success as perfection."
You have a funny definition of success:
- Its had two fatal crashes and killed two crews - Its been grounded 5 1/2 years of the 30 because it was unsafe, it is now working towards 6 years because it is grounded again because it is unsafe - After Challenger it was largely abandoned by the DoD along with a $6 billion launch pad that was never used. This launch pad lead to the 1100 mile crossrange capability which lead to the massive increase in size and weight of the shuttle and it was a capability never used. - After Challenger it was abandoned as a satellite launch vehicle. Expendable launchers which had been abandoned had to be restarted. - After Columbia it can no do mission but fly to the ISS and back and then it spends half of the mission just figuring out if it can back to the ground safely and that is apparently still iffy. - It was supposed to average 12 flights a year if not more. Its barely managed 4 and that average is dropping. - It was supposed to be inexpensive but has in fact become the most expensive launcher in history averaging $1.3 billion per launch.
I'm totally missing where the success part is in this picture.
"Soyuz and Progress alone cannot adequately support ISS, and in no way can they even pretend to be able to complete the station."
Soyuz and Progress certainly could if someone paid for enough launches but NASA has been deadbeating the Russians for the last 2 1/2 years. They've been flying what they can afford.
Obviously Soyuz and Progress can't finish ISS, they aren't heavy launchers. Energiya has the lift capability but I imagine NASA designed the assembly plan around the Shuttle. NASA put all its eggs in the shuttle basket, they are all scrambled now and it would be more egg on their face to pay the Russians to finish building it if it was even possible. Who cares if its finished anyway, its a waste of money, everyone knows it. They would be better served building launchers that work, and start on a moon base.
"You couldn't even staff the ISS at full crew complement because there is no way to attac enough empty Soyuz's to it to effect an escape"
That is such a dumb thing to say.
And exactly what would the staffing be without the RUSSIAN Soyuz capsule. Zero. If someone had actually planned the ISS maybe they would have put another docking port on it and hung two Soyuz on it so it could be fully manned thanks to the Russians.
"NASA spends money on the Shuttle and ISS because the President and Congress command them to do that."
Wrong again. Congress allocates it NASA spends it and the people at NASA are the ones that pitched both the Shuttle and the ISS to Congress. They were the best they could think up after Nixon killed Apollo, and their thinking was bad. They needed the Shuttle to fly to the ISS and they needed the ISS so the Shuttle, stuck in LEO as it is, would have a place to fly to, circular insanity.
"Figures. A Slashdot loser measuring things by how "cool" he thinks they are. Go away, child."
You can sling ad hominem attacks all you want but you ducked the question, what has NASA's manned space program done in the last 30 years that deserves a footnote in history. Ad hominem attacks are a weapon of last resort used by people who can't make a coherent argument on the issues. You were shooting blanks though this whole post.
The thing I love about cloning and will find most amusing when a human is successfully cloned is that it plays HAVOC with the religious fanatics who insist life begins at "conception" and that a man and a women are required to create life, preferably as part of a monogamous marriage.
When does life begin if a happy normal and maybe even religious person begins life from DNA out of a skin cell.
It tends to show that life is just an amazing almost accidental byproduct of the chemistry of amino acids, plus billions of years of trial and error, a process we refer to these days as evolution. Life isn't really so special and sacred no matter how much the religious types try to insist it is.
As an aside, I've always wondered how religious fanatics can obsess over abortion, or pulling the feeding tube from Terry Schiavo, but seem to be totally OK with sending people to kill and be killed in optional wars in places like Iraq. Weren't the lives of the Marines killed today just as sacred as that of a fetus aborted today, or maybe they were just a tad more sacred because they had families who depended on them, and family and friends who knew and loved them. So why is it OK to send them to die, while we obsess over abortions and euthanasia of someone whose brain is gone.
Values of the religious are just totally whacky, I'll never figure them out.
I hold nothing but extreme vitriol towards people that have children when there are so children that are out on the streets, starving and in orphanage's needing good homes. Same goes towards any religion that forbids birth control.
People, please spay yourselves and don't allow your ego to perpetuate the suffering of homeless children.
Slashdot Mirror
Well all I can say to this is any religion where people seriously ponder, expect or at worst promote an imminent and apocalyptic end to all life on earth is pretty much psychotic.
It just never ceases to amaze me what people will accept when its shovelled by a religion, especially one that has achieved a dominant and majority position in society.
I have a pretty high confidence if Judaism and Christianity hadn't existed until now, and something resembling a cult were to try to propagate Christianity, and the books of Revelations, from a standing start today they would be persecuted mercilessly, like for example David Koresh was in Waco, or like the early Christians were by the Roman empire.
Apocalyptic religions are simply nuts, and when their believers gain control of a government with apocalyptic weapons its beyond nuts, its immensely dangerous.
If you get people with an apocalyptic belief system in charge of government you can be sure they wont care about things like global warming because they are of a mindset that life on earth wont be around long enough for it to matter anyway.
"However just because it is a common thing does not make it a good thing."
... and you were wrong. They were for all practical purposes instituted in the intelligence "reform" bill in December 2004. This bill was 3000 pages long, most who voted for it hadn't read it and it passed 89-2 in the Senate and 336-75 in the house. In many respects it was more dangerous to civil liberties than the Patriot act and it was passed with 99+% of the American public completely oblivious to its implications.
Well its a "good thing" for ex politicians and ex generals. Its a "good thing" for the companies that hire them. If you outlawed it the number of people willing to enter government service would plummet. The actual pay checks for government service aren't the greatest by private industry standards. Aside from a few idealists, and a larger number of people who are already rich, most people enter public service with the intent of helping out their friends while in office and cashing in on their knowledge and connections as soon as they retire from public service. Its a well known fact that the second term for two term Presidents is often rocky. A key reason is many of the President's best people leave at the end of the first term so they can cash in on their power and connections while their friends are still in power in the second term. Tommy Thompson is just a classic example of this.
"At any rate, you are probably right that these things won't ever become mandatory-- in the United States."
You probably said that about National ID cards
All in all I think it would be GREAT if the Republicans passed a bill mandating chipping everyone. It would drive home to more people how much of a police state they are really living in today. Eventually you might create enough critical mass to mobilize Americans to take their government back. Its not likely but you never now what might be the trigger to wake people out of their slumber.
"a very unreasonable interpretation of Revelations"
Could you point me to some reasonable interpretations of Revelations?
"if it's all random psychotic rambling"
I'm pretty sure whomever wrote that book must have gotten a dose of ergot mold off some rotten rye (the natural precursor for LSD was).
"most Christians actually want to stave off the end times"
Did you do a poll or something to figure this out? What was the results 56% against Satan taking over the earth, 44% for and 10% have never heard of Satan?
This source, which I am sure is as above reproach as your data says 85% of bible scholars believe in the rapture. The rapture is a BOOMING business in fundamentalist Christian circle these days, especially thanks to the Internet.
To use your phrasing, and with the assurance my poll has as much validity as yours... "most" born agains who subscribe to the rapture are bursting with anticipation of the end times so they can be called to heaven and on the way up can have the last laugh as all the non believers and worshipers of false gods burn in hell.
"That doesn't necessarily mean that all Christians will oppose things like implantable RFID tags"
I wager "most" can with suitable conditioning(i.e. nightmare scenarios of danger and insecurity) be made to see this as essential to their security, essential to "protect the children", essential to being able to identify bad elements in society. Pre 2001 I would have though it impossible that Americans would stand for national ID cards and those were authorized as an obscure provision in the recent nation intelligence "reform" act and are now nearly inevitable, and will no doubt be chipped in one way or another.
If this company wants a slam dunk way to get support for this all they need to do is point out all sex offenders will have these tags, their tag information will be made available on the Internet, and they will market do it yourself readers so you to can instantly identify if there are sex offenders within 100 feet of your home. You could hook it up to an alarm so if sex offender gets near your home alarms will sound and the police will be notified.
Another slam dunk way to sell it, with tiny ethical problems, you could maybe put mandatory religious preference and ethnic identifiers in the chip so you could setup alarms to go off if Muslims, Atheists, or whatever ethnic or religious group you despise gets to close to you, your children or your home.
Stop it :)
"We have done very little under the Bush Administration to truly put a lid on nuclear proliferation, and many have even exacerbated it by stepping up development of bunker-buster nukes."
The Bush administration has almost certainly dramatically accelerated proliferation. They've adopted an obvious bifurcated policy in dealing with nations depending on whether they have nukes, or at least they say they have them, or they don't.
North Korea says they have nukes so the Bush administration negotiates with them, and treats them with a hands off policy focused on diplomatic efforts and not much saber rattling.
Iraq has no nukes, though the neocons say they are trying to get them and they get whacked.
Iran has no nukes, though the neocons say they are trying to get them, and the implication is they may well be in line to get whacked one way or another, air strikes on their reactor before it goes online, fomenting revolution thanks to the CIA, or outright invasion if they can gin up a case and get out of the quagmire in Iraq.
Libya has something of a contrived nuclear program, give it up and are showered with benefits. Leads you to think you should start a sham program, just to give it up to see what you can get for it in concessions from the U.S. and U.K.
There is an obvious pattern here a 5 year old can see. If you are on the wrong side of the U.S. the best policy you can pursue is to acquire nukes or at least say you acquired them and fake a good case to support it. If you do you're safe from American aggression. If you don't have nukes and you get on the wrong side of the U.S. chances are you get whacked. Therefor every enemy the U.S. has, has been incentivized to get nukes.
No really that is the word I meant to use whether you like it or not. I'll abuse the English language in my posts as I see fit, always do cuz I ain't gonna waste the time obsessing over the grammar, the ideas are the only interesting part.
Rather than obsess about that abuse why don't you try to post something relevant to the topic at hand instead of being a pedant. Pedants are not popular because they don't add anything of value to a discussion, they distract from the discussion and leap on to pointless tangents.
"... all the while knowing that the civilian leadership at the top of the pyramid has let them down in a monumental fashion."
To understand Iraq and why it is like it is you need to understand the real motivation of the people that started it. A good primer often posted on Slashdot is The Power of Nightmares a 3 part BBC documentary. It gets a little weak in chapter 3 but chapters 1 and 2 are priceless in understanding the Bush/Blair administrations, Islamic fundamentalists and how much alike they are.
In synopsis, there are a number of people in the Bush administration, who subscribe to the theories of or were educated by Leo Strauss.
Strauss' driving theory was the western liberalism and moral relativism was a disastrous failure, people are losing their compass in life because of it, and this was leading to a breakdown in society. The solution Strauss proposed was that the leaders of the nation need to create easily understood myths, that could be used to unite people behind causes they could easily understand and support, causes that would give their lives meaning, direction and purpose.
Anytime you hear Western leaders describing the world in terms of good and evil these days chances are you are hearing echoes of Leo Strauss and neoconservative speechwriters of his school. Their objective is to paint their nation, its leaders and its people as champions of good and their nations enemies as the epitome of evil.
One of the first modern instances of this philosophy, in action, occurred during the Reagan administration. The neocons created a shadow intelligence agency called Team B. Team B analyzed all the same intelligence the CIA analyzed on the Soviet Union. Who was on Team B, among other Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. The CIA found no evidence of a serious buildup or military threat from the Soviet Union. Team B found evidence of nothing but a massive buildup, secret weapons and an imminent danger of sneak attack. The neocons, in particular William Casey, head of the CIA insisted the Soviet Union was behind a global terrorism network. CIA analysts said it wasn't the case. Why because they had planted all the propaganda about this global terrorism network and they knew it was a lie but the neocons insisted it was reality.
You see the neocons were manufacturing a myth, that the Soviet Union was the epitome of evil and an imminent threat to the U.S. and the world when in fact it was a decrepit and incompetent regime heading towards collapse. You might remember Reagan calling it the "evil empire" which is classic Staussian rhetoric.
Fast forward to Iraq and you find George W. Bush calling them part of the "axis of evil", classic Straussian rhetoric. You find once again a special office was created, this time in the Pentagon, to analyze all the evidence on Iraq that the CIA was analyzing. It was called the Office of Special Plans, though it was really Team B, the sequel. CIA analysts found no case for WMD's in Iraq, or ties to 9/11. This special office under Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle, found nothing but evidence of WMD's, ties to 9/11 and imminent danger to the U.S. from Iraq. You might recall the one about drones from Iraq spraying American cities with chemical and biological weapons Fox News in particular played to great effect right before the war.
What you see in Iraq today was another case of the neocons creating a myth, one in which America was the force of good while Saddam's Iraq was evil incarnate. The war in Iraq had no real justification because all of the purported threats posed by Iraq were based on fantasy and myth creation. The only purpose of the war in Iraq was to unite the American people against a regime that was easy to portray as evil. It was an easy myth for the American people to understand, and it was a target that was easy to destroy with a modern military, while scattered underground Islamic extremists were not.
The problem wi
"So is the fact that work is being done on a replacement'
Wait to see if its any good and see how much it costs per launch before you start singing praises of this. Its really easy to be at the artists conception stage. NASA has been there about a dozen times with shuttle replacements and they have all died quick deaths. Some other fundamental dangers:
- The CEV ends up being Shuttle derived vehicles and all of the people now working on the Shuttle will just transfer to the new program and it will end up just as expensive as the shuttle is. Congressmen from Florida and Texas may well mandate this so they don't lose jobs in their districts.
- The CEV will turn in to a capsule that just flys back and forth to the ISS so we won't have moved ahead an inch billions of dollars and years later.
You can keep saying they are doing the right all day but again they spent 2 1/2 years and billions of dollars and they ended up with the same basic problem happen that destroyed Columbia, a big chunk of foam peeling.
I'll be first in line to sing praises of NASA when they do something praiseworthy. JPL does great stuff all the time, as do the great observatories. The manned program hasn't done anything praiseworthy since the Hubble repair mission.
You seem to arguing that if they are just less bad than they have been that somehow has turned them in to heroes. I disagree. I'm not sure they are even less bad. Now they are suffocating under excessive caution, still flying with dangerous problems, and now are grounded again which is about the worst possible combination.
Thanks but I meant to use peak not pique so stop being a pedant. Maybe it was a bad choice of words since it implies a down hill slope once interest has peaked but I sure don't need you to put alternate words in my mouth, but thanks for the fish.
You really don't get it. The government decides what is extremism, they can expand the definition pretty much at a whim, and you will always be in doubt as to what qualifies. For example since some Palestinians indulge in suicide bombings it could be promoting extremism to say anything sympathetic to Palestinians something that Israel will no doubt love.
When you start going after book stores you have crossed a dangerous line. They all now get to review everything on their shelves and pull anything controversial and in the process narrow the scope of thought available to people.
When the Mujadeen were fighting the Soviet Union as allies they were "freedom fighters", when they turned in to Al Qaeda and started fighting the U.S. they were terrorists. Palestinian suicide bombers are terrorists, Israel dropping bombs on apartment building full of women and children is somehow OK.
The youth of Christianity are taught that murder is OK as long as you are in the military. Dropping bombs from airplanes on civilian targets, in gods name, is especially detestable, but the U.S. and U.K have been doing it regularly since World War II.
If you want to get holier than thou about killing you need to apply an equal standard and condemn it at all levels.
One of the reporters at the Blair conference was especially insightful and brave and asked if by persecuting Muslims, including clerics, in this way that they might in fact be playing in to the hands of extremists, by alienating moderate Muslims more than they already are.
Dude I read the article you didn't need to repeat it. You and he are still totally missing the point.
For NASA to just now be attempting to get it "right", and doing test flights, 114 missions in to a 130 mission program is pathetic, its not something to be praising them for. They should have fixed all of this crap back when they WERE test flying it and before it killed people. They KNEW all this debris and tile damage was a problem but as long as they got away with it they talked themselves in to saying it must be OK. WRONG, BAD, BAD MANAGEMENT.
They pretty obviously ignored another known problem in the foam this time around so they still didn't get this test flight right, leading to another long grounding and no doubt another test flight, or who know how many more test flights. At over a billion a pop for these test flights a for a program struggling to survive they REALLY needed to nail this flight and they obviously didn't.
"This kind of thing is why the general public needs a bitch-slap. They never listen."
Thats an elitist thing to say. I think the public is starting to listen damn well for the first time. They aren't listening to shuttle management anymore because they have zero credibility. Read Feynman's rant about shuttle management saying the risks for various Shuttle failures were 1 in 100,000 when in fact they were more like 1 in 300 by any scientifically based measure.
The general public and me and everyone else ranting about this are the ones in the right here. The Shuttle and ISS programs have been messed up for the duration of their existence. People like you and this guy keep making apologies for it and saying how it really isn't as bad as it seems, when in fact it IS as bad as it seems and the public should have demanded better a LONG time ago.
Maybe it will peak some interest but the simple fact is that by the time most of those kids reach college and start actually picking a career many are going to realize science and engineering are hard fields and the pay off is poor compared to:
- business
- marketing
- law
- medicine though the payoff there isn't so great either
The reason the U.S. is cratering in science and engineering is that, other than during the dot com bubble, they are career paths for people who don't want to make a killing. Most talented Americans want to make a killing so they opt for business, law, etc.
You want to get more scientist and engineers you have to do two things both nearly impossible:
- Fix the education system where athletics is a 10 and academics is a 1 in the real priority scale of kids, parents, teachers and administrators. In the upper class parts of India academics is a 10 and athletics a 1 though cricket is a passion. This is nearly impossible to fix because the jockocracy is entrenched in nearly every school, football and basketball are fun, exciting and glamorous, physics and chemistry is not.
- Fix the financial rewards system so that CxO's stop making 400X what people who actually invent, design and build things make. This being a free market system you can't. fix it.
Engineering and science pay better than a lot of jobs but anyone who understands where the money is, is going to go in to management, sales and accounting tricks.
The point you missed, and the parent was alluding to, was there is a potentially BIG difference between what was actually required by the court order and what the officers who came banging at the door actually demanded, verbally and for which there is no evidence trail other than the poor admin's word and he probably is either gagged or to scared to talk.
If the police come banging on the door most people go in to shock, they may not stop to think, demand the company lawyer be there or that they even read the order themselves. Most people except for people with experience being busted just start complying with anything the officers demand even if it exceeds the specific wording in the order.
I can easily see the officers with the court order not being satisfied with the admin copying off just the logs, in the event the admin intentionally or unintentionally does a bad job or deletes some of the logs to obstruct the investigation. I could easily see the officers demanding he halt the machine and pull the drives, and surrender the drives so they can pull the logs themselves and look at anything else on the drive that amuses them after the copy it. Its really the only way they can insure there is no evidence tampering, even if that wasn't what the court order specified.
There are some substantially more serious problems in the UK as of today's speech by Tony Blair anyway. Among other things he is planning to:
- Outlaw bookstores the government decides are promoting Islamic extremism
- Outlaw web sites promoting extremism presumably including any outside of the UK viewed in the UK.
- Outlaw anyone promoting, condoning or rationalizing extremism, which could for example include people speaking on behalf of Palestine or maybe news outlets showing the latest video of Al Qaeda leaders. Needless to say no one really even knows what qualifies as extremism, the UK government and courts will decide when they see it.
Anyone in Britain who is not a citizen who frequents or maybe even has frequented said bookstores, web sites or made statements justifying extremism will be swiftly deported often to countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia where they may be dealt with swiftly and harshly if they are suspected Islamists which they will be when Britain deports them.
British citizens doing the same may be charged with crimes.
You better hope you don't Google something and go to one of these web sites inadvertently because Scotland yard will now come knocking.
If you've listened to the prosecution underway for the London bombings, two women and man have been charged under the new "withholding information" statute. In Britain now if you are falsely accused and can't tell them about a terror plot you go to jail. It creates an interesting situation where people falsely arrested are given incentive to make up a plot and falsely accuse other people to avoid being charged with withholding information, resulting in a pyramid scheme of false accusation.
If you do have information you are apparently pretty much compelled to divulge it even if it entails self incrimination. Either you confess and are sent up the river or you don't confess and you are sent up the river for withholding information. Nothing resembling a fifth amendment in the UK now. Innocent people are totally screwed if someone has falsely implicated them. Based on terror cell investigations in the U.S. there is a high frequency of false accusations.
Two Muslim men in Detroit, in a showcase DOJ terror trial, were convicted based on a tourist tape to Disneyland which the government said was a terrorist planning tape, disguised to look like a tourist video, and on the word of a conman charged with fraud who got his charges reduced for implicating the two men. He later admitted in jail he was lying to get his sentence reduced and the convictions were overturned. The government insisted the Disneyland tape was evidence of terrorism and even more so because they had made it "look" like a tourist tape to conceal it was a planning tape. It really looked like a home made movie of a trip to Disneyland. Apparently everyone needs to stop using video cameras on vacation because THAT is terrorism now, especially if you are Muslim.
Sprint cars?
Sorry, bad racing joke.
For all this guys cheerleading he missed some fundamental problems here. Its not really that space flight or the Shuttle is dangerous though it obviously it, its that both the Shuttle and the ISS are now complete, indisputable dead ends and the risk just isn't worth it. They are doing nothing to justify the money or the risk at the moment. NASA is spending staggering sums on all these new safety fixes on a vehicle that is somewhere between zero and 15 flights away from retirement. Its not something to sing praises of, its a total waste. Spending all this effort to defend, map and repair shuttle tiles 114 missions in to a 130 mission program is insane, because they wont be there in the next vehicle.
Even if the shuttle does come out of the next grounding what is the BEST you can hope for? Fifteen or so flights to attempt to finish the ISS. We can pray for one worthwhile mission to save Hubble but that is a long shot at this point. The ISS will never be fully manned because the only emergency vehicle is one 3 man Soyuz. Even if you do get all the partners modules up there you wont have enough people on it to do much science with a 3 man crew. They mostly spend their time just maintaining things and exercising. CEV is already being bent to just be a capsule to fly back and forth to ISS at which point billions of dollars and years more will go down the drain on a dead end.
Michael Griffin said it best in congressional testimony before he became administrator:
"But the more important question is whether the return to be obtained from the use of ISS to support exploration objectives is worth the money yet to be invested in its completion. The nation, through the NASA budget, plans to allocate $32 B to ISS (including ISS transport) through 2016, and another $28 B to shuttle operations through 2011. This total of $60 B is significantly higher than NASA's current allocation for human lunar return. It is beyond reason to believe that ISS can help to fulfill any objective, or set of objectives, for space exploration that would be worth the $60 B remaining to be invested in the program."
Thats $60 billion being poured down the drain that could better go to something that is not a dead end, a real CEV, a new heavy lifter, the moon and Mars.
"In short, NASA is back. Get over it."
NASA isn't back. This flight had a piece of foam flying off just like Columbia did. If it had flown off when the Shuttle was at a different angle of attack it could have well struck the wing in an exact replay of Columbia. They spent 2 1/2 years, billions of dollars, and they didn't fix the fundamental problem. Not only that the shuttles are all grounded again for who knows how long.
NASA isn't back, its still struggling for its survival.
To whomever modded this offtopic, it most certainly isn't. The thread is about blocking IP addresses as a form of censorship. Slashdot does exactly the same thing though in the opposite direction. It is a legitimate thing to do deal with DDOS attacks but I'm pretty sure Slashdot also IP blocks in a feeble attempt at censorship and when they do it to ISP's that channel multiple users through one IP address it does collateral damage to every user of that ISP.
I'm glad I read Slashdot, they would never block IP addresses ..... oh wait ..... they do it all the time too, and if you are on an ISP which randomly assigns your IP address or have multiple customers routed through one server you get RANDOMLY blocked. Fortunately there is privoxy and tor which completely defeat this totally ineffective censorship
"Cisco corporate officers arranged to have Bruce Schneier call them "thugs"
This one is pretty easy to explain. though its kind of a long proof, follow along.
You may recall John Chambers, Cisco CEO, a while ago said:
"What we're trying to do is outline an entire strategy of becoming a Chinese company"
The people running China are now in fact no longer Communist. There is a prerequisite that there be state ownership of Capital to be Communist/Socialist. When China started transferring control of capital to private individuals, mostly highly place members of the party and their relatives, it did in fact transform from being Communist China to Fascist China.
Under Fascism you have a repressive one party state but you can have private ownership of capital. The party just usually makes sure most of it wealth is in the hands of favored party members and the party liberally intervenes in the economy to pick the winners and losers. This is exactly the political and economic model you have in China today.
So if you've followed this far:
- The Chinese are now Fascists
- Fascists are Thugs
- Cisco is a "Chinese company"
Cisco = thugs
Bruce was stating the obvious.
"I think they'd also have to go through the Van Allen radiation belts which could also be a concern."
There are proposals out there to use high voltage tethers that would scatter most of the particles out of the belts and reduce the energy in them 1% of their current level in about a half a year. If you are transporting a lot of people, on a regular basic, from LEO to GEO and beyond you would probably want to do it.
Damn for books you hate so much you sure did pay a lot of attention to them.
:)
"For example, about half of the Martians don't want to terra-form the planet, and so become terrorists to prevent terra-forming. This flies in the face of 10,000 years of human history"
We haven't had environmentalists for most of the last 10,000 years of history. We also have technology now that has elevated man from spending all day everyday trying to find the next meal which is why people like grass, because its what you field cattle and sheep to get meat. Though I'll agree on Mars people would early on probably be pretty focused on insuring the next meal, drink and breath of air.
"The spinning of the windmill powers a small generator...."
I think if you look in the middle of Green Mars Sax goes to a conference on terraforming and a presenter presents estimates on the windmills contribution and finds they were in fact a waste of time(though it still gives them a credit for a tiny net gain which might be bogus). I don't remember exactly but I think Sax had some ulterior motive for them that had to do with local heating not global heating.
Like I said even when its wrong it makes you think about the issues, maybe even more so if you are picking holes in his science. Obviously it got you to THINKING
"These books are unadulterated crap"
Don't hold back what do you really think about them!!
"Another post filled with deliberate bias and deliberate ignorance."
Yes your post certainly is, LOL!!
"The Shuttle has been flying successfully for almost 30 years. You seem to be defining success as perfection."
You have a funny definition of success:
- Its had two fatal crashes and killed two crews
- Its been grounded 5 1/2 years of the 30 because it was unsafe, it is now working towards 6 years because it is grounded again because it is unsafe
- After Challenger it was largely abandoned by the DoD along with a $6 billion launch pad that was never used. This launch pad lead to the 1100 mile crossrange capability which lead to the massive increase in size and weight of the shuttle and it was a capability never used.
- After Challenger it was abandoned as a satellite launch vehicle. Expendable launchers which had been abandoned had to be restarted.
- After Columbia it can no do mission but fly to the ISS and back and then it spends half of the mission just figuring out if it can back to the ground safely and that is apparently still iffy.
- It was supposed to average 12 flights a year if not more. Its barely managed 4 and that average is dropping.
- It was supposed to be inexpensive but has in fact become the most expensive launcher in history averaging $1.3 billion per launch.
I'm totally missing where the success part is in this picture.
"Soyuz and Progress alone cannot adequately support ISS, and in no way can they even pretend to be able to complete the station."
Soyuz and Progress certainly could if someone paid for enough launches but NASA has been deadbeating the Russians for the last 2 1/2 years. They've been flying what they can afford.
Obviously Soyuz and Progress can't finish ISS, they aren't heavy launchers. Energiya has the lift capability but I imagine NASA designed the assembly plan around the Shuttle. NASA put all its eggs in the shuttle basket, they are all scrambled now and it would be more egg on their face to pay the Russians to finish building it if it was even possible. Who cares if its finished anyway, its a waste of money, everyone knows it. They would be better served building launchers that work, and start on a moon base.
"You couldn't even staff the ISS at full crew complement because there is no way to attac enough empty Soyuz's to it to effect an escape"
That is such a dumb thing to say.
And exactly what would the staffing be without the RUSSIAN Soyuz capsule. Zero. If someone had actually planned the ISS maybe they would have put another docking port on it and hung two Soyuz on it so it could be fully manned thanks to the Russians.
"NASA spends money on the Shuttle and ISS because the President and Congress command them to do that."
Wrong again. Congress allocates it NASA spends it and the people at NASA are the ones that pitched both the Shuttle and the ISS to Congress. They were the best they could think up after Nixon killed Apollo, and their thinking was bad. They needed the Shuttle to fly to the ISS and they needed the ISS so the Shuttle, stuck in LEO as it is, would have a place to fly to, circular insanity.
"Figures. A Slashdot loser measuring things by how "cool" he thinks they are. Go away, child."
You can sling ad hominem attacks all you want but you ducked the question, what has NASA's manned space program done in the last 30 years that deserves a footnote in history. Ad hominem attacks are a weapon of last resort used by people who can't make a coherent argument on the issues. You were shooting blanks though this whole post.
The thing I love about cloning and will find most amusing when a human is successfully cloned is that it plays HAVOC with the religious fanatics who insist life begins at "conception" and that a man and a women are required to create life, preferably as part of a monogamous marriage.
When does life begin if a happy normal and maybe even religious person begins life from DNA out of a skin cell.
It tends to show that life is just an amazing almost accidental byproduct of the chemistry of amino acids, plus billions of years of trial and error, a process we refer to these days as evolution. Life isn't really so special and sacred no matter how much the religious types try to insist it is.
As an aside, I've always wondered how religious fanatics can obsess over abortion, or pulling the feeding tube from Terry Schiavo, but seem to be totally OK with sending people to kill and be killed in optional wars in places like Iraq. Weren't the lives of the Marines killed today just as sacred as that of a fetus aborted today, or maybe they were just a tad more sacred because they had families who depended on them, and family and friends who knew and loved them. So why is it OK to send them to die, while we obsess over abortions and euthanasia of someone whose brain is gone.
Values of the religious are just totally whacky, I'll never figure them out.
I hold nothing but extreme vitriol towards people that have children when there are so children that are out on the streets, starving and in orphanage's needing good homes. Same goes towards any religion that forbids birth control.
People, please spay yourselves and don't allow your ego to perpetuate the suffering of homeless children.