"As much as I dislike the ISI, the Taliban was armed by the CIA."
The Mujadeen were armed by the CIA during the Russia/Afghan war. Some of them turned in to the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The CIA stopped arming them after Russia withdrew from Afghanistan which was a while ago.
The ISI carried the ball from that point forward. Again the U.S. let large numbers of ISI agents fly out of Afghanistan when the Taliban fell. They were just as responsible for 9/11 as the Taliban were.
The plan for Israel started before World War II in the Zionist movement in the early 20th century. I think the original plan was to just start buying up Palestine, moving Jewish immigrants in legally and illegally until they had a critical mass to push the Arabs out.
World War II and the Holocaust first interrupted the plan, then massively accelerated it when the War ended when waves of Jewish immigrants came to Palestine from the smolder ruins of Europe.
The Holocaust certainly created sympathy for a Jewish state that didn't exist before the War. The Holocaust was a tragedy but Jews have played it to the hilt to guilt trip the world in to giving them everything they want in its wake. There were a whole bunch of other genocides in the last century that were on the same scale and they have been largely forgotten by the world. Due to good PR and constant reminder no one forgets the Holocaust and Israel wants it that way. They get away with a lot they wouldn't have were it not for the Holocaust.
I wasn't "justifying" a Palestinian state. I was debunking the parents assertion the Palestinians had no right to a state because they've resorted to terrorism. Just pointing out so did Israel so they don't have a right to state either if you use that as a criteria.
"Whats so great about the past?"
Because if you are a student of history you can learn a lot about how people, especially people organized in to governments and nations work. The old saying goes that people who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Sometimes you can be historically ignorant, like most Americans are, and just roll the dice and get lucky. You can also repeat some really stupid mistakes.
One good case study, is if American invades a place like Iraq and refuses to understand the history of the place it gets in a quagmire like the one its in today. Iraq's borders are not natural. It was fabricated by the British after they took control of it from the Turkish Ottoman empire in World War I. The British fought a blood nationalist insurgency in Iraq and eventually gave up on it. That is one fact the U.S. should have remembered, Iraqi's do have a recent history for fighting against a colonial occupier.
Iraq is really 3 countries. There is Kurdistan in the north which is split between Turkey, Iraq and Iran. The Kurds have been fighting Iraq and Turkey for an indepent Kurdistan most of the last century if not longer. The Kurdish nationalist insurgency is an origin of Saddam gassing the Kurds you heard so much about in the run up to the Iraq War. The Kurds have killed their share of Turks and Iraqi's and civil wars are usually ugly. In the middle there are Sunni Arab's and in the South there are Shia Arabs.
If the Bush administration had studied their history they would have realized that when they toppled Saddam a civil war was a nearly inevitable result. They didn't so nearly two thousand American's are dead, thousand more maimed for life, hundreds of billions spent and no end in sight. The Bush administration said the U.S. would be welcomed with roses because they were historically clueless.
Not sure I managed to convey the reason why understanding history is important here but I hope you got an idea.
The modern chapter starts with the rise of Zionism in the early 20th century. I read a pretty good history of it a while ago but don't have a URL. Search on Zionism in the early 20th century. The problem is most writing on it is rabidly biased to either Arab or Jewish viewpoint..
If memory serves the modern chapter started when the Zionist movement started raising money, began buying land in Palestine and Jews started immigrating there, with the ultimate objective being to eventually buy enough land and get enough Jews there to wrest control of Palestine from the Arabs and either drive the British out or get them to agree to the plan. Once the Arabs figured out what the Zionist plan was resentment grew and the violence started.
The Jews had by 1948 successfully fulfilled the Zionist plan with the help of World War II, bombing the Kind David Hotel, Deir Yassin and global shame over the holocaust. The British left Palestine, the Jews out gunned the Palestinians and drove them out. It was during this period the Jews developed their fondness for holding all the high ground, something they continue today as they build their wall around the West Bank.
I forget exactly when the British got in the mix, it might have been after World War I. Pretty sure thats when they got mixed up in Iraq. Much of the Middle East was dominated by the Turkish Ottoman empire but they lost much of it in World War I to the British, Lawrence of Arabia being a key player.
Not sure I see the parallel. Altalena was after the Jews had pretty much achieved victory. Maybe you could say Hagana/IDF were suppressing a more extremist Irgun but it could also just as easily be interpreted as a turf battle where Hagana and Ben-Gurion were consolidating their power at Irgun's expense. They were always bitter rivals.
By contrast you are in a way suggesting that the Palestinians have to unilaterally disarm now to prove their worthiness, and hope that Israel will out of the goodness of their heart, in return, give them back little bits and pieces of Gaza and the West bank when they feel like it, under the terms they dictate, and with the obvious condition that the Israeli army and air force will sweep in to this supposed Palestinian state whenever they feel like it arresting, killing and bulldozing as they go. The "state" Israel is proposing is more like a series of walled ghettos in to which they want to lock the Palestinians and forget about them, until the inevitable rocket or suicide bombing happens at which point Israel will roll in just like they do today.
I really doubt any Palestinian with a spine would see it your way. Hamas is really the closest counterpart to Hagana, excepting Hagana won their war and Hamas has not. The Palestinian authority is so compromised by trying to curry favor with the U.S., Israel and everyone but the Palestinian people it will never be able to exert control over the place.
Of course if you take this to the logical conclusion and you really want to accomplish this objective you need to stop all communication between everyone, except in approved government and military channels, because "they" are everywhere, "they" are behind every bush. How do you know that benign looking little web site over there isn't really an Al Qaeda front and they are just using code. There is a real shortage of Arabic translators in U.S. and British Intelligence so maybe to be safe you better just start shutting down all Arabic web sites. Of course then maybe Al Qaeda will start using English or French in code. Maybe better still you do what China does and create a great firewall so you can filter and monitor everything.
Bottomline is I fall in the camp that if they were really Al Qaeda website you would have been way better off cracking their codes and reading their mail. Starting a wave of censorship, based on unproven suspicion is just one of the classic signs of a government under attack by insurgents turning in to a repressive police state in a futile effort to counter the insurgency. The insurgents want that because they want the U.S. and Britain to turn in to unpleasant repressive police states, so the formerly free people there can get a flavor for what its like to live in the repressive places they grew up, like Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
Saudi Arabia and Egypt keep their enemies from communicating too. Their definition of enemy is unfortunately a tad broad, they throw a wide net for their enemies. For example it includes anyone who happens to object to a repressive dictatorship or a corrupt monarchy. The definition of enemies in Saudi Arabia and Egypt apparently includes people who use the term "Freedom and Democracy". If you were to actually try to create a political party and run in elections against the powers that be there, you would probably have your ability to communicate amongst yourselves ruthlessly terminated.
"And yet a government cannot do 'nothing' in response to a terrorist act or threat."
Simple answer. The U.S. should have used everything it had to swiftly and massively crush Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, using every civilian airliner and ship it could find to get the forces there as quickly as it could. If Pakistan objected they should have been crushed too because the Pakistan secret service more than any other organization help nurture and create the Taliban and Al Qaeda and they are still unscathed today. They are also most probably still sheltering the Taliban and Al Qaeda today possibly including Bin Laden.
Instead they fought a weak proxy war in Afghanistan using local war lords, with very dubious motives and loyalties, mixed with special forces and air power(though there were very few actual targets to bomb). They managed to scatter Al Qaeda and the Taliban instead of ruthlessly crush it. They certainly failed to strike a crucial blow at Tora Bora. Once Al Qaeda and the Taliban made it to sanctuary in the tribal areas of Palestine and the mountains of Afghanistan they have gone largely untouched for the last four years.
Where did the U.S. focus its attention, and the lion's share of its military, money, and resource instead, Iraq which had NOTHING to do with 9/11 or Al Qaeda.
So today Al Qaeda is alive and well, spread around the globe, and using Iraq as a recruiting poster for the malevolence of the U.S. towards the Muslim world. Instead of crushing the problem at the source, the U.S. and British are engaged in a futile strategy to try to stop attacks which are by nature nearly impossible to stop. Israel has been trying for decades, using much harsher measures in a much smaller country and failed. The effort is costing a fortune and its mauling civil rights.
All in all it was a strategy conceived by morons who, to cover their tracks, constantly tell everyone what a great job they are doing, and what great war time administrations they are. In fact they are making no headway in the war and seem to mostly be playing right in to Al Qaeda's strategy. One of Al Qaeda's main goals is to launch a small number of attacks and let the U.S, Britain etc. mangle their own economies and political standing in the war with misguided overreaction.
In Iraq Al Qaeda no doubt sees a replay of Russia in Afghanistan. Tie up the U.S. there with an insurgency for the next 10 years and inflict massive economic, political and morale damage on the U.S and Britain. The U.S.S.R's misguided war in Afghanistan was the single biggest contributor to its ultimate collapse. Al Qaeda came in to being figthing that war with CIA backing and they no doubt want to repeat their victory in Iraq against their former benefactors.
"Al Jazeera continues to grow unimpeeded by the west."
That is a provably false statement. Al-Jazeera has been continuously and massively harassed by both the U.S. military and the puppet interim Iraqi government during and since the Iraq invasion. Their offices were bombed, journalists killed by U.S. forces, their office in Iraq was closed for a time in 2004, and might still be, I'm not sure. Paul Wolfowitz in particular accused them of inciting violence and sought to shut them down.
Sometimes Al-Jazerra's reporting is a little over the top but to their credit they are one of very few new organizations with a big reach that tries to tell the whole story about what happened and is happening in Iraq and rest of the Middle East. The U.S. and its puppet government has throughout refused to count or report the number of civilian deaths their forces have caused, and they have actively suppressed pretty much all the video coverage of the carnage in Iraq during and after the invasion.
To their credit both Saddam's government and the U.S. were attacking their coverage as biased in the other sides favor during the war so they must have been doing something right.
I'm inclined to say Al-Jazeera certainly has some bias in it but its NOTHING compared to the bias in U.S. coverage of the Middle East or any of the government supported media outlets in Iraq.
"A long time ago, a bunch of countries laid out a set of rules for warfare. These rules were designed to, among other things, minimize the number of civilians killed in war."
Are you talking about the Geneva conventions? Well they didn't work. Especially with the advent of strategic bombing as practiced by both sides in World War II, civilians were killed in vast numbers and on purpose. In the Vietnam war again strategic bombing killed civilians in large numbers and there were free fire zones in which the U.S. military declared whole regions as sympathetic to the enemy and authorized killing of everyone in those zones, women, children and innocents included.
In Iraq the U.S. has in fact violated the Geneva conventions as a matter of policy and has again killed civilians in large numbers, denied them necessities of life like water and medical care, and of course arbitrary arrest, detention and abuse of civilians in prisons like Abu Graib.
The main flaw in your list is the delusion that the "civilized world" is somehow morally superior. It never has been. The British and French were brutal colonial masters throughout the 20th century. The French created the debacle that was Vietnam. The British created the root of the disasters we live with today in Iraq, Palestine and Iran. The U.S. took up where they left off after World War II, especially in Iran where the U.S. toppled the government and installed the Shah who turned in to one of the Middle East's most oppressive rulers. The Shaw was the root cause of the Iran revolution and putting the mullahs in power in Iran. Most Iranians viewed oppressive mullahs as an improvement over the U.S. backed Shah.
That is a really one sided picture of the reality that is Israel and Palestine. You should try to learn about the other side of the story, because there are always two sides in these things and you will have a lot better understanding of reality if you understand both sides. Things are never as black and white as you try to paint them.
For example Haganah and Irgun were for all practical purposes Jewish terrorists organizations. One of Haganah's more active members would end up as Israel's Prime Minister, Menahem Begin. Haganah turned in to the IDF, Israel's Defense Force when they siezed control of Palestine. In one their more famous acts of terrorism they leveled a wing of the King David Hotel with a bomb just like the Palestinians you hate so much will do years later. It helped drive Britain out of Palestine, which in turn allowed Haganah and Irgun to seize control of Palestine and create the state of Israel. So why exactly is it OK that the state of Israel was created on the back of terrorism of Jewish origin but its not OK for the Palestinians to use it to try and get a homeland back.
Another incident you should probably learn about to level your view is the massacre at Deir Yassin. Irgun massacred 100+ residents, many women and children in a Palestinian town that had remained largely neutral in the fighting between Arabs and Jews. The Palestinian didn't just pack up and abandon their homes to the Zionists, and opt willing for life as stateless persons in refugee camps. Incidents like Deir Yassin caused many of them to flee for fear they would be massacred if they stayed in Palestine after Haganah and Irgun started gaining control of the place. Many suspect Deir Yassin was perpetrated precisely to start a Palestinian flight which allowed Jews to seize their homes, farms and business for free and with no further bloodshed. It is a classic ethnic cleansing tactic just like you saw in Yugoslavia in more recent times, or Sudan today.
Though to be fair and balanced (don't you hate that Fox tag line that everyone uses now) there were Palestinians massacring Jews and Jews massacring Palestinians through most of the 20th century as soon as it became obvious Zionists were in the process of trying to buy control of Palestine land followed by waves of Jewish immigration both legal and illegal from 1920 through the late 40's.
"Therefore to accept the legitimacy of a Palestinian state would also mean accepting the legitimacy of the means that they used to achieve it."
So again how come you and most of the rest of the world are willing to accept the legitimacy of Israel when they used the same techniques to create their state?
"Every national sales tax proposal includes a universal rebate, where every taxpayer gets a check from the government every month which covers the tax on spending up to the poverty level or thereabouts."
The fairness and feasibility of that sure is open to debate. If I'm a multimillionaire I get a check from Uncle Sam every month? If I don't buy anything I get a check from Uncle Sam?
"The poor would have a very low effective tax rate, often zero or negative"
Ok so you give the poor a free ride, at some point you are going to have to tax someone and the rich are going to get a free ride too unless they are lavish spenders, or you are going to do a luxury tax. A luxury tax is picking winners and losers too and it always gets overturned when the party of the rich is in power.
If you give the poor a free ride and the rich don't spend most of their income the lucky middle class is going to be the one taxed in to the ground like they already are only worse since the percentage of the tax burden on the rich is going to plunge. Not really sure what you are changing at this point other than individuals may not have to mess with tax returns. Anyone who sells anything will though.
All the sales tax does is pick new winners and losers. If your don't tweak it it hammers the poor and middle class. If you tweak it as proposed it totally hammers the middle class. No matter how you tweak it the rich make out like bandits. They aren't going to pay anything close to 30% of their income in taxes unless they are lavish spenders.
" out early US space flights were essentially "ballistic" the pilot had *little* influence over the spacecrafts direction."
Well in the case of SpaceShipOne the pilot has complete control over the trajectory so I fail to see your point. The pilot has an LCD that is guiding him to the optimal trajectory but he is totally responsible for flying it, and he can fly any trajectory loads will let him get away with though obviously he is usually shooting for peak altitude.
There is no difference between a ballisitic trajectory and an orbital insertion trajectory except velocity. Altitude is only important because you prefer to escape most atmospheric drag.
Not sure why you qualified "early US space flights. The pilots on NASA missions seldom have any influence over the spacecraft's direction. Space shuttle orbital insertion and reentry are computer controlled. The only missions I can think that were really piloted were the LEM landings because the astronauts demanded to fly them, Apollo 13 where the computers were down and U.S. astronauts hand flew a lot of docking operations, versus the Russians where they are mostly computer controlled.
"Space starts at approximately the 100Mile (160KM) mark - and SpaceShipOne *did NOT* manage that."
That altitude is pretty arbitrary, you are just trying to discern the bounds of the atmosphere. You can orbit the earth at 100 KM, but yes there is a lot of atmospheric drag so you wont maintain it long unless you have a lot of power. There is drag at the altitudes ISS, Mir and the shuttle orbit at its just less.
SpaceShipOne is flying to 100 KM because that is the altitude the X-Prize set, that is where you get astronaut wings and that is the altitude some have set for the edge of space. If it had been 160 KM Scaled Composites would, no doubt, have built a bigger engine and gone there instead. Its really arbitrary and always will be.
Uh dude, this tax IS a sales tax. It has nothing to do with the IRS, it is Congress, your supposedly elected representatives that write the tax code. You could get completely rid of the IRS and politicians can keep writing tax codes whether they be income or sales tax. Only requirement is they have someone to enforce it and threaten you with jail, or to sieze your property, if you don't pay. ALL governments have some enforcement arm that will do that regardless of the tax system. If you switch to a sales tax there still has to be an enforcement arm its just aimed entirely at businesses instead of individuals.
The problem with switching to a sales tax is it totally hammers the poor who spend most of their income to survive and so are heavily taxed, while it results in a massive acceleration in the concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich, since they don't spend most of their income, they reinvest it, and their investment profits would be untaxed. Thats why its no accident wealthy Republicans are the first to favor switching to a sales tax, because its a financial boon to them. It would probably be a boon to the economy, it would spur investment, until the adverse effects of wealth concentration really kick in. In particular there will be massive unrest as the poor get poorer and the rich get richer at breakneck speed. If you want to look back in history you saw the same effect in the late 19th and early 20th century when the robber barons reigned supreme. It led to the Progressive movement where little people banded together to fight the powers that be and wealth concentration in way largely unprecedented in U.S. history. It lead to progressive income tax and antitrust laws to try to place checks on wealth concentration and abusive monopolies. At the time railroad monopolies in particular where evit incarnate. The railroads were a monopoly in transportation then, and they were using that monopoly to bleed farmers and business white transporting their goods to markets). It was also an era of labor unrest and unionization as workers sought to put an end to 80 hour work weeks for bare subsistence wages.
You can give sale tax exemptions for food, and other essentials, but then you are back to a situation where the government is picking winners and losers, just the thing you are objecting to. Again this porn tax IS A SALES TAX. The fact is you are going to have to apply sales tax to something, and in a big way, to support a government as pork and spend happy as the U.S. government.
From what I saw on the news about this plan last week it is obviously and fatally flawed. It is being actively fought by civil rights groups because it is selective taxation of speech which is for all intents and purposes censorship, and obviously it wont even touch porn sites outside the U.S. The only way the U.S. could make this stick would be to create a great firewall, like China, which some in government would no doubt like to do as phase 2 of this plan, and of then start engaging in full fledged censorship of the Internet. Its a fact of life the U.S. government, using the threat of child porn and terrorism, is heading down a road that ends at oppressive police state.
The other insane part of the plan was they wanted to mandate age identification, for example using a credit card. Only people with no grip on reality would propose this. In an era of rampant identify theft, I assure you criminals will LOVE Congress if they make people type their credit card numbers, more than they already are, to get access to porn. It will be a bonanza for identity thieves. There will also no doubt be a boom in chat rooms and web sites that hand out other people's credit card numbers which kids and everyone else will seek out so they can look at porn without hinderance or risk.
There isn't anything about this plan that will work and its obvious that the people that wrote the bill have no clue or they have as the real ulterior motive eventual massive censorship just like China.
"We have a duty, through government, to prevent our national companies from doing significant harm as part of their business plan, and I think shareholders should also have the right, if not the duty, to put pressure on the company they own to also act in a more socially responsible way."
What a quaint idea, only there is no such thing as "our national companies" anymore. Most multinationals are approaching stateless entities. Many are moving headquarters to offshore havens with tax codes and regulation friendly to big corporations. If government really tried to pressure any of them out of China they could easily do the same and wave goodby to the U.S. as their home base.
John Chambers, Cisco's CEO, has given some infamous speeches where he has declared Cisco is becoming a "Chinese company". Some excerpts. So if you want to argue what nation Cisco belongs to they may have already seceeded from the U.S. and raised their flag in Beijing.
In the case of Cisco, if you read the link above you see China is the one dicatating to Cisco what to do, not the U.S. government.
The other obvious fact is most of the big multinationals are so powerful, and have such massive influence on the politicians and bureaucrats that run the U.S. government, its much more a case where they are pressuring the government and dictating to it on how to treat China, not vice versa. In particular they are demanding the U.S. throw open American markets to Chinese goods (same for NAFTA and CAFTA nations) because there is short term profit in it for those multinationals because they help make and sell those goods, and especially because they want the cheap labor, no environmental regulation etc. They are in most respects dictating to the U.S. government a policy towards China that is already very detrimental and could eventually be devestating to the U.S. economy. The U.S economy simply can't sustain half trillion dollar, and exploding, deficits. If the U.S. government were acting in the interest of the people and the long term health of the U.S. as a nation it would be erecting trade barriers, raising tariffs on Chinese goods, and withdrawing most favored status. Instead the government is collapsing barriers to Chinese goods and Chinese investment in the U.S. at the same time the Chinese maintain MASSIVE barriers to U.S. goods being sold in China and U.S. companies doing business there. In particular the only way U.S. companies get a foothold in China is they must partner with Chinese companies and usually transfer IP and markets to them to gain that entry, IBM's sale to Lenovo being the classic example.
Now shareholders certainly do have a right to dictate the direction of the corporation but ONLY if they can muster enough votes to dictate that direction. Shareholder pressure certainly has dictated corprate responsibility in the past on places like South Africa. But China is a LOT bigger economic prize than South Africa. For all the socially responsible investors that might want to get a company out of China, there are probably as many or more that want to dive in head first because there are potentially large profits to be made there, if they pass on them some competitor will reap them. Unfortunately in free markets, free markets get to decide which side wins in the end. Profits almost always win out over social responsibility. South Africa was was an exception because it wasn't that important to most companies, and being associated with it did cut in to their profits because it was such a pariah. Cisco is betting its entire future in China so it wont cut China loose without a major fight in the boardroom and shareholder's meeting.
"Remember that such a resolution would impede the company's ability to do business in the single fastest growing tech market in the world."
Its interesting in the 1930's you could said exactly the same thing about Nazi Germany. It was the world's booming economy during a time that much of the world was languishing in depression, they were pushing tech frontiers too. During this period Germany was the must invest place for many affluent American's, including the Bush family. George W's grandfather Prescott was a principle at Union Banking in New York and one of his biggest clients was the Thyssen family, one of Germany's richest industrial dynasties. Fritz Thyssen bank rolled Hitler's rise to power and help consolidate German industrialists behind the Nazi's at a key juncture, something they came to very much regret. He wrote a dull book about it "I Paid Hitler". Union Banking's assets were siezed when the U.S. entered the war much to the embarrassment of the Bush family. They weren't alone though, MANY wealthy Americans, Brits and major corporations were heavily invested in Nazi Germany in the 30's. They too saw profit potential, a booming ecomony while the rest of the west was languishing, and chose to disregard the realities of a regime with an appalling human rights record.
In many respects China might be a mirror image. China has in recent years jumped from a supposed Communist state to very much a Fascist one. In the communist state the state owned everything. In the Fascist state there are corporations and private ownership, but party members have a huge head start in every business venture thanks to massive state intervention and backing on their behalf, just like Nazi Germany. A brief article on how heavily China's big new corporations are infused with Communist party members, family members of high ranking members, and state ownership and backing. For example Haier their big name in appliances which recently tried a bid for Maytag:
"Haier's longtime chief executive, Zhang Ruimin, likes to call himself the "Chinese Jack Welch" after the famous American business icon and former head of GE. But Jack Welch was never a member of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party."
When China was a communist state, with state ownership the West would have nothing to do with it. Nothing has really changed on its repression or human rights front, but as soon as it jumped to a Fascist state which allowed private ownership, investment and profit, it suddently became a darling of Western businessmen and politicians, just as Nazi Germany was.
I think this is a place where the addage applies that people who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. In the rush for profit, as in the 1930's in Nazi Germany, are western businessmen accellerating the rise of an economic and military power that might seek to dominate the world and spread its brand of repression across the globe. Historians will contend China has never really sought to project its power outward, but then China has never been a fascist power in a globalized world, riding a rising ride of wealth, military power and technical prowess that will soon make it possible for it to achieve global superpower status. The big question then is will it be benign or will it follow in the footsteps of its Fascist forebearers and seek to dominate the world militarily, and inflicts it repression on the rest of the world in the process.
First off you are totally off base using the word "CONTROLLED" here. SpaceShipOne is totally controlled. It has a pilot that lights the engine and can shut it off. He uses a stick and pedals to steer it. In fact he is more of a pilot than Space Shuttle pilots are. SpaceShipOne has no flight control computers. I think the Space Shuttle's computers could with some tweaking fly an entire mission without astronauts aboard. I suspect it would be dangerous to impossible to fly a Shuttle launch or reentry by the seat of the pants, if the computers all went down. The SpaceShipOne's feathered wing is fantastic innovation that make piloted reentry possible and safe, though of course its not bleeding off as much speed as the Shuttle is coming from LEO.
I think the subject of your rant is not "control" but duration and maybe velocity. The fact is SpaceShipOne is getting to the same elevation as the lowest of low earth orbits, you will get the same view, its just brief. It just lacks the speed or fuel to stay there. This is exactly like the Wright brothers, their first flights barely left the ground too. With time, more R&D, better engines they increased the duration of their fligths, so will Rutan. The Wright Brothers had to scrape together private funding for their R&D so does Rutan.
"Would you really be impressed with someone who rode this thing"
No but I'd be really impressed if I could ride the thing. Its important to note I'm note really impressed with people who ride in the Space Shuttle either, nobody really is. Most of them are just passengers too, and again the flight computers do most of the flying not the "pilot" or "commander" they are mostly flipping switches per a carefully written script. Fact is todays real astronauts are boring, no one knows their names, they are only "heroes" when they get killed.
I think it would really relight enthusiasm for space travel if LOTS of people could get astronaut wings and we would break down the barrier between ordinary people and NASA astronauts. At this point we NEED for people to realize they can get in to space without doing what astronauts do, devoting their entire life to the pursuit, being an overachiever to the point of being obnoxious, have a high tolerance for bureaucracy(NASA), and be very adept at kissing ass to get to the top of the heap to get a ride.
Virgin Galactic and Rutan are trying to make the very important step where space travel starts turning in to something more like airline travel and people can buy a ticket and go if they want for fun or if they want to do business there.
Fact is there just aren't many adventures left in this world. Climbing Mt. Everest has been done so many times its not special any more. Affluent thrill seekers will probably snap this up because its something new. Once it stops being new then there will be the next goal, getting to LEO and to a space hotel, and then beyond.
" Fact is there aren't many unique thrills left on this planet. Climbing Mt. Everest has been done so many times and there are so many cheats(ladders) its not that hard if you have the gear, are in shape and don't hit bad weather. People are desperate for a new experience and this will be one for a while."
Nice legalese but what your saying doesn't really make any sense. Creditors only have priority on assets which are really SCO's. If SCO kept money that was not there's to keep(i.e. the contract clearly stated 95% of the royalties go to Novell for these deals), SCO's creditors have no right to that money at all, though the judge would have to find that to be the case before giving the money to Novell.
To put it another way, if SCO was robbing banks to stay afloat their creditors wouldn't have any rights to that loot either.
The starship was a financial disaster but it was a really revolutionary airplane. I saw a documentary on it a while ago. There is a guy that bought a couple truck loads of spare parts to keep his running because Raytheon wanted to destroy them all and write them off. He totally loves that plane. He flew it to Mojave and Rutan recruited the guy to fly chase for the X prize flights, you see it in many of the photos. It had a flight envelope that made it exceptionally well suited to fly chase.
As I recall one problem was it was one of the FAA's first encounters with a composite airframe in a commerical airplane and they had no clue how to certify it. Composites were starting to be used in military and experimental planes to reduce weight but not commerical airplanes.
It has a VERY smooth ride thanks to the pusher design.
It also had one of the first commercial glass cockpits.
In many respects it pioneered technologies that are taken for granted today especially composites and the glass cockpit.
Its biggest failing was it was to leading edge, in particular the technology for tooling composites was immature and expensive at that point and the FAA red tape certifying it pretty much killed it.
Now EVERYONE is using composites and glass cockpits.
It would be if you put a SHUTTLE up there. Don't think anyone is going to be so foolish as to put a massive heavy lift launcher and a crew carrier in to the same vehicle any time soon.
The CEV designs and Kliper are pretty tiny compared to the Shuttle.
It would be totally OK to stap a heavy lift cargo carrier where the SHuttle is because you aren't going to have it reenter the atmosphere in most cases and if you did want to return something big to earth you wouldn't have a crew in it that would die if was damaged.
"Burt would have bought a ton of good publicity for himself, then built a smaller and less capable shuttle, and taken the remainder and retired."
This isn't insightful its petty sniping, probably from a NASA employee or devotee because they can't stand Rutan thumbing his nose at them. Rutan is pretty much world famous after Voyager and X prize, he is widely admired for being the little engine that could, NASA the big bureaucracy that can't. Most people can't even think of the name of anyone at NASA, let alone someone they can look up to and admire.
" part of the reason the first SpaceShipOne flight went swooping in corkscrews is because Rutan decided it didn't need a gimbaling engine."
Which flight are you talking about exactly. I don't remember this problem at all. The worst problem I remember was 15P, but that was due to wind shear first that lead to a pitch trim problem.
There was a big roll excursion in 16p but it was pilot induced and due to very thin air was hard to cancel out. Melville was never very worried about it becuase it was mostly above the atmosphere.
You can belittle SpaceShipOne and Rutan all you want but the fact is he achieved his objective with both Voyager and SpaceShipOne and he did it on a shoestring budget. By contrast NASA has mostly failed to achieve its objectives with both the Shuttle and ISS and have run staggeringly far over their already enormous budgets. NASA needs a heavy injection of people like Rutan who have a can do attitude, do what it takes to achieve the objective and do it affortably, Doubt he would want the job because he has open contempt for the societ ministries that are NASA, Boeing and Lockheed.
If you gave him a couple billion, no strings attached to build a new spacecraft I have high confidence it would be innovative, robust and affordable.
"the shuttles have been hit with debris over 15,000 times, mostly during launch."
You can rationalize it all you want but the fact is its a bad design. A couple basic reasons:
- The foam is applied by hand to the ET, it is a hack added after the design was done to deal with all the ice that they had to know would be there. but chose to TOTALLY ignore in the original design. Applying that foam by hand is an accident waiting to happen, because it ends up different on every tank. If there are air bubbles under it at the wrong place its going to blow off and hit the shuttle. Most of the time its non fatal but it can be fatal anytime. The foma that did fly off was heading in the general diretion of the leading edge though it didn't get close.....this time. Its always a gamble.
- Prior to the Shuttle U.S. spacecraft had all the most delicate and important manned part of the stack, that had to survive the whole mission, and keep the crew alive at the top of the stack. Debris and ice rained down all over Saturn V but there wasn't anything fragile to hit and the stuff on the bottom is ditched early and isn't around for reentry. The crucial heat shield was totally protected since is was between the capsule and the stage below so it couldn't get damaged by debris. All the new designs return to putting the vehicle at the top of the stack because that is a good design. Handing it on the side of a cryo tank was a now fatal mistake.
The shuttle by contrast has a massive, very fragile array of heat shields all of which are out in the open and most of which are right next to the ET which sheds debris and or ice every flight. Its an accident waiting to happen. Its a crap shoot if debris falls off in the right place to strike the wrong place on the shuttle. In Columbia it did. There are odds it will happen again, so now NASA knows it has to spend half of every mission just checking to make sure a debris strike or a faulty tile isn't in the wrong place, and it can't fly any place but the ISS in the event the roll snake eyes again and get damage to the heat shield in the wrong place.
Burt Rutan does NOT work for NASA. He has worked on one NASA project that I remember and it was killed.
He worked for the Air Force at Edwards doing Flight test early in his career.
Scaled Composites built the shell for the X-38 which was a lifting body demonstrator for the Crew Return Vehicle which was supposed to hang on the ISS and would have allowed it to be fully manned for the first time in its existence. It was canceled in 2002, like all recent attempts to build new vehicles at NASA. With no replacement the ISS may never be manned beyond a minimal crew to maintain it.
He was part of a consortium of small companies that considered bidding on CEV. As best I recall they gave up soon after the RFP(Request for Proposal) came out. It was so laden with bureaucracy only really big, really bureaucratic aerospace contractors could stand it. Its a given NASA was going to pick Boeing/Lockeheed/Northrop to build it anyway, the deck was already stacked. Last I heard the CEV flyoff has been cancelled and in 2006 NASA will make all the big aerospace companies form one team to build CEV. It will be interesting to see if Boeing wins and its a capsule or Lockheed wins and its a mini-me Shuttle.
And why would that be? It might be the end of NASA and U.S involvement in the ISS. I wouldn't be surprised if the Russians would keep ISS going. They have an inexpensive, ultra reliable pair of spacecraft unlike NASA, and can service it though at modest levels. They wont ferry any more U.S. astronauts there because NASA has been a deadbeat for the duration of the last 2 1/2 years, and hasn't paid Russia to carry U.S. astronauts and supplies to the ISS (because Congress slapped an embargo on Russia over Iran's Russian reactor). The Russian's said no more to the free ride a few months ago.
As you recall the Russian's were forced to abandon Mir as the price for their participation in ISS. The core of the ISS is essentially Russian built Mir-2. Don't imagine they want to let NASA incompetence torpedo their long running permenent presence in space.
I imagine at this point the Russians would dance a jig if the U.S. threw in the towel on ISS so the Russian could take complete ownership of it, and partner with the ESA and countries who aren't so wellll, NASA. Russian's have zero reason to partner with NASA at this point since they get no funding from the U.S. NASA didn't have much to offer the RSA except money and that is no more.
ISS is of marginal real value but the Russians haven't squandered the vast sums on it NASA has so its a better return on investment for them especially with NASA out of the way.
A few weeks ago the Russian government green ligthed development of the next gen Russian manned spacecraft Kliper and ESA is very interested in partnering with them so Europe will have a manned space program free of NASA's poor performance in recent decades. I'm taking bets Kliper flies before CEV does (though Mike Griffin sure is an improvement over O'Keefe').
This isn't exacly news. The big studios started migrating to Linux years ago.
All these studios used to be SGI and IRIX based, they are just dumping SGI and IRIX because SGI raw performance is so poor and price/performance is even worse. SGI's only two offerings are MIPS and Itanic, both of which suck for animation and rendering especially compared to dirt cheap, very fast Intel IA32 and AMD CPU's. Maybe SGI has an IA32 Linux box, but why would anyone bother to buy one there.
Windows was never a viable options for these places. They've built vast infrastructure based on Unix, both scripting and applications. You have to look to smaller, newer studios to find heavy Windows usage.
Not sure that its entirely true that Pixar is going to Linux, I imagine maybe they are for rendering but I'm pretty sure they going Mac's and OSX for artists desktops. OSX is a dream OS for this business, really strong multimedia capabilites and Unix infrastructure in the OS underneath.
Linux multimedia support by contrast, sucks, and these people need good audio and video. Linux really needs to work out a scheme to port over the BeOS multimedia API or at least the spirit of it. Its producer and consumer audio and video node concept rocks, its API's are really easy to use and consistently designed, best of all there is only one API, instead of 10 like Linux. Best of all in BeOS every audio source creates its own volume control clearly labeled so adjusting audio levels when you are running multiple audio streams is a breeze. Linux is a complete nightmare by comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
"As much as I dislike the ISI, the Taliban was armed by the CIA."
The Mujadeen were armed by the CIA during the Russia/Afghan war. Some of them turned in to the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The CIA stopped arming them after Russia withdrew from Afghanistan which was a while ago.
The ISI carried the ball from that point forward. Again the U.S. let large numbers of ISI agents fly out of Afghanistan when the Taliban fell. They were just as responsible for 9/11 as the Taliban were.
The plan for Israel started before World War II in the Zionist movement in the early 20th century. I think the original plan was to just start buying up Palestine, moving Jewish immigrants in legally and illegally until they had a critical mass to push the Arabs out.
World War II and the Holocaust first interrupted the plan, then massively accelerated it when the War ended when waves of Jewish immigrants came to Palestine from the smolder ruins of Europe.
The Holocaust certainly created sympathy for a Jewish state that didn't exist before the War. The Holocaust was a tragedy but Jews have played it to the hilt to guilt trip the world in to giving them everything they want in its wake. There were a whole bunch of other genocides in the last century that were on the same scale and they have been largely forgotten by the world. Due to good PR and constant reminder no one forgets the Holocaust and Israel wants it that way. They get away with a lot they wouldn't have were it not for the Holocaust.
I wasn't "justifying" a Palestinian state. I was debunking the parents assertion the Palestinians had no right to a state because they've resorted to terrorism. Just pointing out so did Israel so they don't have a right to state either if you use that as a criteria.
"Whats so great about the past?"
Because if you are a student of history you can learn a lot about how people, especially people organized in to governments and nations work. The old saying goes that people who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Sometimes you can be historically ignorant, like most Americans are, and just roll the dice and get lucky. You can also repeat some really stupid mistakes.
One good case study, is if American invades a place like Iraq and refuses to understand the history of the place it gets in a quagmire like the one its in today. Iraq's borders are not natural. It was fabricated by the British after they took control of it from the Turkish Ottoman empire in World War I. The British fought a blood nationalist insurgency in Iraq and eventually gave up on it. That is one fact the U.S. should have remembered, Iraqi's do have a recent history for fighting against a colonial occupier.
Iraq is really 3 countries. There is Kurdistan in the north which is split between Turkey, Iraq and Iran. The Kurds have been fighting Iraq and Turkey for an indepent Kurdistan most of the last century if not longer. The Kurdish nationalist insurgency is an origin of Saddam gassing the Kurds you heard so much about in the run up to the Iraq War. The Kurds have killed their share of Turks and Iraqi's and civil wars are usually ugly. In the middle there are Sunni Arab's and in the South there are Shia Arabs.
If the Bush administration had studied their history they would have realized that when they toppled Saddam a civil war was a nearly inevitable result. They didn't so nearly two thousand American's are dead, thousand more maimed for life, hundreds of billions spent and no end in sight. The Bush administration said the U.S. would be welcomed with roses because they were historically clueless.
Not sure I managed to convey the reason why understanding history is important here but I hope you got an idea.
The modern chapter starts with the rise of Zionism in the early 20th century. I read a pretty good history of it a while ago but don't have a URL. Search on Zionism in the early 20th century. The problem is most writing on it is rabidly biased to either Arab or Jewish viewpoint..
If memory serves the modern chapter started when the Zionist movement started raising money, began buying land in Palestine and Jews started immigrating there, with the ultimate objective being to eventually buy enough land and get enough Jews there to wrest control of Palestine from the Arabs and either drive the British out or get them to agree to the plan. Once the Arabs figured out what the Zionist plan was resentment grew and the violence started.
The Jews had by 1948 successfully fulfilled the Zionist plan with the help of World War II, bombing the Kind David Hotel, Deir Yassin and global shame over the holocaust. The British left Palestine, the Jews out gunned the Palestinians and drove them out. It was during this period the Jews developed their fondness for holding all the high ground, something they continue today as they build their wall around the West Bank.
I forget exactly when the British got in the mix, it might have been after World War I. Pretty sure thats when they got mixed up in Iraq. Much of the Middle East was dominated by the Turkish Ottoman empire but they lost much of it in World War I to the British, Lawrence of Arabia being a key player.
Not sure I see the parallel. Altalena was after the Jews had pretty much achieved victory. Maybe you could say Hagana/IDF were suppressing a more extremist Irgun but it could also just as easily be interpreted as a turf battle where Hagana and Ben-Gurion were consolidating their power at Irgun's expense. They were always bitter rivals.
By contrast you are in a way suggesting that the Palestinians have to unilaterally disarm now to prove their worthiness, and hope that Israel will out of the goodness of their heart, in return, give them back little bits and pieces of Gaza and the West bank when they feel like it, under the terms they dictate, and with the obvious condition that the Israeli army and air force will sweep in to this supposed Palestinian state whenever they feel like it arresting, killing and bulldozing as they go. The "state" Israel is proposing is more like a series of walled ghettos in to which they want to lock the Palestinians and forget about them, until the inevitable rocket or suicide bombing happens at which point Israel will roll in just like they do today.
I really doubt any Palestinian with a spine would see it your way. Hamas is really the closest counterpart to Hagana, excepting Hagana won their war and Hamas has not. The Palestinian authority is so compromised by trying to curry favor with the U.S., Israel and everyone but the Palestinian people it will never be able to exert control over the place.
Of course if you take this to the logical conclusion and you really want to accomplish this objective you need to stop all communication between everyone, except in approved government and military channels, because "they" are everywhere, "they" are behind every bush. How do you know that benign looking little web site over there isn't really an Al Qaeda front and they are just using code. There is a real shortage of Arabic translators in U.S. and British Intelligence so maybe to be safe you better just start shutting down all Arabic web sites. Of course then maybe Al Qaeda will start using English or French in code. Maybe better still you do what China does and create a great firewall so you can filter and monitor everything.
Bottomline is I fall in the camp that if they were really Al Qaeda website you would have been way better off cracking their codes and reading their mail. Starting a wave of censorship, based on unproven suspicion is just one of the classic signs of a government under attack by insurgents turning in to a repressive police state in a futile effort to counter the insurgency. The insurgents want that because they want the U.S. and Britain to turn in to unpleasant repressive police states, so the formerly free people there can get a flavor for what its like to live in the repressive places they grew up, like Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
Saudi Arabia and Egypt keep their enemies from communicating too. Their definition of enemy is unfortunately a tad broad, they throw a wide net for their enemies. For example it includes anyone who happens to object to a repressive dictatorship or a corrupt monarchy. The definition of enemies in Saudi Arabia and Egypt apparently includes people who use the term "Freedom and Democracy". If you were to actually try to create a political party and run in elections against the powers that be there, you would probably have your ability to communicate amongst yourselves ruthlessly terminated.
"Kinda what the left has done for a majority of people the last few decades."
You pretty much failed to make your point here, whatever it was.
"And yet a government cannot do 'nothing' in response to a terrorist act or threat."
Simple answer. The U.S. should have used everything it had to swiftly and massively crush Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, using every civilian airliner and ship it could find to get the forces there as quickly as it could. If Pakistan objected they should have been crushed too because the Pakistan secret service more than any other organization help nurture and create the Taliban and Al Qaeda and they are still unscathed today. They are also most probably still sheltering the Taliban and Al Qaeda today possibly including Bin Laden.
Instead they fought a weak proxy war in Afghanistan using local war lords, with very dubious motives and loyalties, mixed with special forces and air power(though there were very few actual targets to bomb). They managed to scatter Al Qaeda and the Taliban instead of ruthlessly crush it. They certainly failed to strike a crucial blow at Tora Bora. Once Al Qaeda and the Taliban made it to sanctuary in the tribal areas of Palestine and the mountains of Afghanistan they have gone largely untouched for the last four years.
Where did the U.S. focus its attention, and the lion's share of its military, money, and resource instead, Iraq which had NOTHING to do with 9/11 or Al Qaeda.
So today Al Qaeda is alive and well, spread around the globe, and using Iraq as a recruiting poster for the malevolence of the U.S. towards the Muslim world. Instead of crushing the problem at the source, the U.S. and British are engaged in a futile strategy to try to stop attacks which are by nature nearly impossible to stop. Israel has been trying for decades, using much harsher measures in a much smaller country and failed. The effort is costing a fortune and its mauling civil rights.
All in all it was a strategy conceived by morons who, to cover their tracks, constantly tell everyone what a great job they are doing, and what great war time administrations they are. In fact they are making no headway in the war and seem to mostly be playing right in to Al Qaeda's strategy. One of Al Qaeda's main goals is to launch a small number of attacks and let the U.S, Britain etc. mangle their own economies and political standing in the war with misguided overreaction.
In Iraq Al Qaeda no doubt sees a replay of Russia in Afghanistan. Tie up the U.S. there with an insurgency for the next 10 years and inflict massive economic, political and morale damage on the U.S and Britain. The U.S.S.R's misguided war in Afghanistan was the single biggest contributor to its ultimate collapse. Al Qaeda came in to being figthing that war with CIA backing and they no doubt want to repeat their victory in Iraq against their former benefactors.
"Al Jazeera continues to grow unimpeeded by the west."
That is a provably false statement. Al-Jazeera has been continuously and massively harassed by both the U.S. military and the puppet interim Iraqi government during and since the Iraq invasion. Their offices were bombed, journalists killed by U.S. forces, their office in Iraq was closed for a time in 2004, and might still be, I'm not sure. Paul Wolfowitz in particular accused them of inciting violence and sought to shut them down.
Sometimes Al-Jazerra's reporting is a little over the top but to their credit they are one of very few new organizations with a big reach that tries to tell the whole story about what happened and is happening in Iraq and rest of the Middle East. The U.S. and its puppet government has throughout refused to count or report the number of civilian deaths their forces have caused, and they have actively suppressed pretty much all the video coverage of the carnage in Iraq during and after the invasion.
To their credit both Saddam's government and the U.S. were attacking their coverage as biased in the other sides favor during the war so they must have been doing something right.
I'm inclined to say Al-Jazeera certainly has some bias in it but its NOTHING compared to the bias in U.S. coverage of the Middle East or any of the government supported media outlets in Iraq.
"A long time ago, a bunch of countries laid out a set of rules for warfare. These rules were designed to, among other things, minimize the number of civilians killed in war."
Are you talking about the Geneva conventions? Well they didn't work. Especially with the advent of strategic bombing as practiced by both sides in World War II, civilians were killed in vast numbers and on purpose. In the Vietnam war again strategic bombing killed civilians in large numbers and there were free fire zones in which the U.S. military declared whole regions as sympathetic to the enemy and authorized killing of everyone in those zones, women, children and innocents included.
In Iraq the U.S. has in fact violated the Geneva conventions as a matter of policy and has again killed civilians in large numbers, denied them necessities of life like water and medical care, and of course arbitrary arrest, detention and abuse of civilians in prisons like Abu Graib.
The main flaw in your list is the delusion that the "civilized world" is somehow morally superior. It never has been. The British and French were brutal colonial masters throughout the 20th century. The French created the debacle that was Vietnam. The British created the root of the disasters we live with today in Iraq, Palestine and Iran. The U.S. took up where they left off after World War II, especially in Iran where the U.S. toppled the government and installed the Shah who turned in to one of the Middle East's most oppressive rulers. The Shaw was the root cause of the Iran revolution and putting the mullahs in power in Iran. Most Iranians viewed oppressive mullahs as an improvement over the U.S. backed Shah.
That is a really one sided picture of the reality that is Israel and Palestine. You should try to learn about the other side of the story, because there are always two sides in these things and you will have a lot better understanding of reality if you understand both sides. Things are never as black and white as you try to paint them.
For example Haganah and Irgun were for all practical purposes Jewish terrorists organizations. One of Haganah's more active members would end up as Israel's Prime Minister, Menahem Begin. Haganah turned in to the IDF, Israel's Defense Force when they siezed control of Palestine. In one their more famous acts of terrorism they leveled a wing of the King David Hotel with a bomb just like the Palestinians you hate so much will do years later. It helped drive Britain out of Palestine, which in turn allowed Haganah and Irgun to seize control of Palestine and create the state of Israel. So why exactly is it OK that the state of Israel was created on the back of terrorism of Jewish origin but its not OK for the Palestinians to use it to try and get a homeland back.
Another incident you should probably learn about to level your view is the massacre at Deir Yassin. Irgun massacred 100+ residents, many women and children in a Palestinian town that had remained largely neutral in the fighting between Arabs and Jews. The Palestinian didn't just pack up and abandon their homes to the Zionists, and opt willing for life as stateless persons in refugee camps. Incidents like Deir Yassin caused many of them to flee for fear they would be massacred if they stayed in Palestine after Haganah and Irgun started gaining control of the place. Many suspect Deir Yassin was perpetrated precisely to start a Palestinian flight which allowed Jews to seize their homes, farms and business for free and with no further bloodshed. It is a classic ethnic cleansing tactic just like you saw in Yugoslavia in more recent times, or Sudan today.
Though to be fair and balanced (don't you hate that Fox tag line that everyone uses now) there were Palestinians massacring Jews and Jews massacring Palestinians through most of the 20th century as soon as it became obvious Zionists were in the process of trying to buy control of Palestine land followed by waves of Jewish immigration both legal and illegal from 1920 through the late 40's.
"Therefore to accept the legitimacy of a Palestinian state would also mean accepting the legitimacy of the means that they used to achieve it."
So again how come you and most of the rest of the world are willing to accept the legitimacy of Israel when they used the same techniques to create their state?
"Every national sales tax proposal includes a universal rebate, where every taxpayer gets a check from the government every month which covers the tax on spending up to the poverty level or thereabouts."
The fairness and feasibility of that sure is open to debate. If I'm a multimillionaire I get a check from Uncle Sam every month? If I don't buy anything I get a check from Uncle Sam?
"The poor would have a very low effective tax rate, often zero or negative"
Ok so you give the poor a free ride, at some point you are going to have to tax someone and the rich are going to get a free ride too unless they are lavish spenders, or you are going to do a luxury tax. A luxury tax is picking winners and losers too and it always gets overturned when the party of the rich is in power.
If you give the poor a free ride and the rich don't spend most of their income the lucky middle class is going to be the one taxed in to the ground like they already are only worse since the percentage of the tax burden on the rich is going to plunge. Not really sure what you are changing at this point other than individuals may not have to mess with tax returns. Anyone who sells anything will though.
All the sales tax does is pick new winners and losers. If your don't tweak it it hammers the poor and middle class. If you tweak it as proposed it totally hammers the middle class. No matter how you tweak it the rich make out like bandits. They aren't going to pay anything close to 30% of their income in taxes unless they are lavish spenders.
" out early US space flights were essentially "ballistic" the pilot had *little* influence over the spacecrafts direction."
Well in the case of SpaceShipOne the pilot has complete control over the trajectory so I fail to see your point. The pilot has an LCD that is guiding him to the optimal trajectory but he is totally responsible for flying it, and he can fly any trajectory loads will let him get away with though obviously he is usually shooting for peak altitude.
There is no difference between a ballisitic trajectory and an orbital insertion trajectory except velocity. Altitude is only important because you prefer to escape most atmospheric drag.
Not sure why you qualified "early US space flights. The pilots on NASA missions seldom have any influence over the spacecraft's direction. Space shuttle orbital insertion and reentry are computer controlled. The only missions I can think that were really piloted were the LEM landings because the astronauts demanded to fly them, Apollo 13 where the computers were down and U.S. astronauts hand flew a lot of docking operations, versus the Russians where they are mostly computer controlled.
"Space starts at approximately the 100Mile (160KM) mark - and SpaceShipOne *did NOT* manage that."
That altitude is pretty arbitrary, you are just trying to discern the bounds of the atmosphere. You can orbit the earth at 100 KM, but yes there is a lot of atmospheric drag so you wont maintain it long unless you have a lot of power. There is drag at the altitudes ISS, Mir and the shuttle orbit at its just less.
SpaceShipOne is flying to 100 KM because that is the altitude the X-Prize set, that is where you get astronaut wings and that is the altitude some have set for the edge of space. If it had been 160 KM Scaled Composites would, no doubt, have built a bigger engine and gone there instead. Its really arbitrary and always will be.
Uh dude, this tax IS a sales tax. It has nothing to do with the IRS, it is Congress, your supposedly elected representatives that write the tax code. You could get completely rid of the IRS and politicians can keep writing tax codes whether they be income or sales tax. Only requirement is they have someone to enforce it and threaten you with jail, or to sieze your property, if you don't pay. ALL governments have some enforcement arm that will do that regardless of the tax system. If you switch to a sales tax there still has to be an enforcement arm its just aimed entirely at businesses instead of individuals.
The problem with switching to a sales tax is it totally hammers the poor who spend most of their income to survive and so are heavily taxed, while it results in a massive acceleration in the concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich, since they don't spend most of their income, they reinvest it, and their investment profits would be untaxed. Thats why its no accident wealthy Republicans are the first to favor switching to a sales tax, because its a financial boon to them. It would probably be a boon to the economy, it would spur investment, until the adverse effects of wealth concentration really kick in. In particular there will be massive unrest as the poor get poorer and the rich get richer at breakneck speed. If you want to look back in history you saw the same effect in the late 19th and early 20th century when the robber barons reigned supreme. It led to the Progressive movement where little people banded together to fight the powers that be and wealth concentration in way largely unprecedented in U.S. history. It lead to progressive income tax and antitrust laws to try to place checks on wealth concentration and abusive monopolies. At the time railroad monopolies in particular where evit incarnate. The railroads were a monopoly in transportation then, and they were using that monopoly to bleed farmers and business white transporting their goods to markets). It was also an era of labor unrest and unionization as workers sought to put an end to 80 hour work weeks for bare subsistence wages.
You can give sale tax exemptions for food, and other essentials, but then you are back to a situation where the government is picking winners and losers, just the thing you are objecting to. Again this porn tax IS A SALES TAX. The fact is you are going to have to apply sales tax to something, and in a big way, to support a government as pork and spend happy as the U.S. government.
From what I saw on the news about this plan last week it is obviously and fatally flawed. It is being actively fought by civil rights groups because it is selective taxation of speech which is for all intents and purposes censorship, and obviously it wont even touch porn sites outside the U.S. The only way the U.S. could make this stick would be to create a great firewall, like China, which some in government would no doubt like to do as phase 2 of this plan, and of then start engaging in full fledged censorship of the Internet. Its a fact of life the U.S. government, using the threat of child porn and terrorism, is heading down a road that ends at oppressive police state.
The other insane part of the plan was they wanted to mandate age identification, for example using a credit card. Only people with no grip on reality would propose this. In an era of rampant identify theft, I assure you criminals will LOVE Congress if they make people type their credit card numbers, more than they already are, to get access to porn. It will be a bonanza for identity thieves. There will also no doubt be a boom in chat rooms and web sites that hand out other people's credit card numbers which kids and everyone else will seek out so they can look at porn without hinderance or risk.
There isn't anything about this plan that will work and its obvious that the people that wrote the bill have no clue or they have as the real ulterior motive eventual massive censorship just like China.
"We have a duty, through government, to prevent our national companies from doing significant harm as part of their business plan, and I think shareholders should also have the right, if not the duty, to put pressure on the company they own to also act in a more socially responsible way."
What a quaint idea, only there is no such thing as "our national companies" anymore. Most multinationals are approaching stateless entities. Many are moving headquarters to offshore havens with tax codes and regulation friendly to big corporations. If government really tried to pressure any of them out of China they could easily do the same and wave goodby to the U.S. as their home base.
John Chambers, Cisco's CEO, has given some infamous speeches where he has declared Cisco is becoming a "Chinese company". Some excerpts. So if you want to argue what nation Cisco belongs to they may have already seceeded from the U.S. and raised their flag in Beijing.
In the case of Cisco, if you read the link above you see China is the one dicatating to Cisco what to do, not the U.S. government.
The other obvious fact is most of the big multinationals are so powerful, and have such massive influence on the politicians and bureaucrats that run the U.S. government, its much more a case where they are pressuring the government and dictating to it on how to treat China, not vice versa. In particular they are demanding the U.S. throw open American markets to Chinese goods (same for NAFTA and CAFTA nations) because there is short term profit in it for those multinationals because they help make and sell those goods, and especially because they want the cheap labor, no environmental regulation etc. They are in most respects dictating to the U.S. government a policy towards China that is already very detrimental and could eventually be devestating to the U.S. economy. The U.S economy simply can't sustain half trillion dollar, and exploding, deficits. If the U.S. government were acting in the interest of the people and the long term health of the U.S. as a nation it would be erecting trade barriers, raising tariffs on Chinese goods, and withdrawing most favored status. Instead the government is collapsing barriers to Chinese goods and Chinese investment in the U.S. at the same time the Chinese maintain MASSIVE barriers to U.S. goods being sold in China and U.S. companies doing business there. In particular the only way U.S. companies get a foothold in China is they must partner with Chinese companies and usually transfer IP and markets to them to gain that entry, IBM's sale to Lenovo being the classic example.
Now shareholders certainly do have a right to dictate the direction of the corporation but ONLY if they can muster enough votes to dictate that direction. Shareholder pressure certainly has dictated corprate responsibility in the past on places like South Africa. But China is a LOT bigger economic prize than South Africa. For all the socially responsible investors that might want to get a company out of China, there are probably as many or more that want to dive in head first because there are potentially large profits to be made there, if they pass on them some competitor will reap them. Unfortunately in free markets, free markets get to decide which side wins in the end. Profits almost always win out over social responsibility. South Africa was was an exception because it wasn't that important to most companies, and being associated with it did cut in to their profits because it was such a pariah. Cisco is betting its entire future in China so it wont cut China loose without a major fight in the boardroom and shareholder's meeting.
"Remember that such a resolution would impede the company's ability to do business in the single fastest growing tech market in the world."
Its interesting in the 1930's you could said exactly the same thing about Nazi Germany. It was the world's booming economy during a time that much of the world was languishing in depression, they were pushing tech frontiers too. During this period Germany was the must invest place for many affluent American's, including the Bush family. George W's grandfather Prescott was a principle at Union Banking in New York and one of his biggest clients was the Thyssen family, one of Germany's richest industrial dynasties. Fritz Thyssen bank rolled Hitler's rise to power and help consolidate German industrialists behind the Nazi's at a key juncture, something they came to very much regret. He wrote a dull book about it "I Paid Hitler". Union Banking's assets were siezed when the U.S. entered the war much to the embarrassment of the Bush family. They weren't alone though, MANY wealthy Americans, Brits and major corporations were heavily invested in Nazi Germany in the 30's. They too saw profit potential, a booming ecomony while the rest of the west was languishing, and chose to disregard the realities of a regime with an appalling human rights record.
In many respects China might be a mirror image. China has in recent years jumped from a supposed Communist state to very much a Fascist one. In the communist state the state owned everything. In the Fascist state there are corporations and private ownership, but party members have a huge head start in every business venture thanks to massive state intervention and backing on their behalf, just like Nazi Germany. A brief article on how heavily China's big new corporations are infused with Communist party members, family members of high ranking members, and state ownership and backing. For example Haier their big name in appliances which recently tried a bid for Maytag:
"Haier's longtime chief executive, Zhang Ruimin, likes to call himself the "Chinese Jack Welch" after the famous American business icon and former head of GE. But Jack Welch was never a member of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party."
When China was a communist state, with state ownership the West would have nothing to do with it. Nothing has really changed on its repression or human rights front, but as soon as it jumped to a Fascist state which allowed private ownership, investment and profit, it suddently became a darling of Western businessmen and politicians, just as Nazi Germany was.
I think this is a place where the addage applies that people who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. In the rush for profit, as in the 1930's in Nazi Germany, are western businessmen accellerating the rise of an economic and military power that might seek to dominate the world and spread its brand of repression across the globe. Historians will contend China has never really sought to project its power outward, but then China has never been a fascist power in a globalized world, riding a rising ride of wealth, military power and technical prowess that will soon make it possible for it to achieve global superpower status. The big question then is will it be benign or will it follow in the footsteps of its Fascist forebearers and seek to dominate the world militarily, and inflicts it repression on the rest of the world in the process.
First off you are totally off base using the word "CONTROLLED" here. SpaceShipOne is totally controlled. It has a pilot that lights the engine and can shut it off. He uses a stick and pedals to steer it. In fact he is more of a pilot than Space Shuttle pilots are. SpaceShipOne has no flight control computers. I think the Space Shuttle's computers could with some tweaking fly an entire mission without astronauts aboard. I suspect it would be dangerous to impossible to fly a Shuttle launch or reentry by the seat of the pants, if the computers all went down. The SpaceShipOne's feathered wing is fantastic innovation that make piloted reentry possible and safe, though of course its not bleeding off as much speed as the Shuttle is coming from LEO.
I think the subject of your rant is not "control" but duration and maybe velocity. The fact is SpaceShipOne is getting to the same elevation as the lowest of low earth orbits, you will get the same view, its just brief. It just lacks the speed or fuel to stay there. This is exactly like the Wright brothers, their first flights barely left the ground too. With time, more R&D, better engines they increased the duration of their fligths, so will Rutan. The Wright Brothers had to scrape together private funding for their R&D so does Rutan.
"Would you really be impressed with someone who rode this thing"
No but I'd be really impressed if I could ride the thing. Its important to note I'm note really impressed with people who ride in the Space Shuttle either, nobody really is. Most of them are just passengers too, and again the flight computers do most of the flying not the "pilot" or "commander" they are mostly flipping switches per a carefully written script. Fact is todays real astronauts are boring, no one knows their names, they are only "heroes" when they get killed.
I think it would really relight enthusiasm for space travel if LOTS of people could get astronaut wings and we would break down the barrier between ordinary people and NASA astronauts. At this point we NEED for people to realize they can get in to space without doing what astronauts do, devoting their entire life to the pursuit, being an overachiever to the point of being obnoxious, have a high tolerance for bureaucracy(NASA), and be very adept at kissing ass to get to the top of the heap to get a ride.
Virgin Galactic and Rutan are trying to make the very important step where space travel starts turning in to something more like airline travel and people can buy a ticket and go if they want for fun or if they want to do business there.
Fact is there just aren't many adventures left in this world. Climbing Mt. Everest has been done so many times its not special any more. Affluent thrill seekers will probably snap this up because its something new. Once it stops being new then there will be the next goal, getting to LEO and to a space hotel, and then beyond.
" Fact is there aren't many unique thrills left on this planet. Climbing Mt. Everest has been done so many times and there are so many cheats(ladders) its not that hard if you have the gear, are in shape and don't hit bad weather. People are desperate for a new experience and this will be one for a while."
Nice legalese but what your saying doesn't really make any sense. Creditors only have priority on assets which are really SCO's. If SCO kept money that was not there's to keep(i.e. the contract clearly stated 95% of the royalties go to Novell for these deals), SCO's creditors have no right to that money at all, though the judge would have to find that to be the case before giving the money to Novell.
To put it another way, if SCO was robbing banks to stay afloat their creditors wouldn't have any rights to that loot either.
The starship was a financial disaster but it was a really revolutionary airplane. I saw a documentary on it a while ago. There is a guy that bought a couple truck loads of spare parts to keep his running because Raytheon wanted to destroy them all and write them off. He totally loves that plane. He flew it to Mojave and Rutan recruited the guy to fly chase for the X prize flights, you see it in many of the photos. It had a flight envelope that made it exceptionally well suited to fly chase.
As I recall one problem was it was one of the FAA's first encounters with a composite airframe in a commerical airplane and they had no clue how to certify it. Composites were starting to be used in military and experimental planes to reduce weight but not commerical airplanes.
It has a VERY smooth ride thanks to the pusher design.
It also had one of the first commercial glass cockpits.
In many respects it pioneered technologies that are taken for granted today especially composites and the glass cockpit.
Its biggest failing was it was to leading edge, in particular the technology for tooling composites was immature and expensive at that point and the FAA red tape certifying it pretty much killed it.
Now EVERYONE is using composites and glass cockpits.
It would be if you put a SHUTTLE up there. Don't think anyone is going to be so foolish as to put a massive heavy lift launcher and a crew carrier in to the same vehicle any time soon.
The CEV designs and Kliper are pretty tiny compared to the Shuttle.
It would be totally OK to stap a heavy lift cargo carrier where the SHuttle is because you aren't going to have it reenter the atmosphere in most cases and if you did want to return something big to earth you wouldn't have a crew in it that would die if was damaged.
"Burt would have bought a ton of good publicity for himself, then built a smaller and less capable shuttle, and taken the remainder and retired."
This isn't insightful its petty sniping, probably from a NASA employee or devotee because they can't stand Rutan thumbing his nose at them. Rutan is pretty much world famous after Voyager and X prize, he is widely admired for being the little engine that could, NASA the big bureaucracy that can't. Most people can't even think of the name of anyone at NASA, let alone someone they can look up to and admire.
" part of the reason the first SpaceShipOne flight went swooping in corkscrews is because Rutan decided it didn't need a gimbaling engine."
Which flight are you talking about exactly. I don't remember this problem at all. The worst problem I remember was 15P, but that was due to wind shear first that lead to a pitch trim problem.
There was a big roll excursion in 16p but it was pilot induced and due to very thin air was hard to cancel out. Melville was never very worried about it becuase it was mostly above the atmosphere.
They are all described in detail here
You can belittle SpaceShipOne and Rutan all you want but the fact is he achieved his objective with both Voyager and SpaceShipOne and he did it on a shoestring budget. By contrast NASA has mostly failed to achieve its objectives with both the Shuttle and ISS and have run staggeringly far over their already enormous budgets. NASA needs a heavy injection of people like Rutan who have a can do attitude, do what it takes to achieve the objective and do it affortably, Doubt he would want the job because he has open contempt for the societ ministries that are NASA, Boeing and Lockheed.
If you gave him a couple billion, no strings attached to build a new spacecraft I have high confidence it would be innovative, robust and affordable.
"the shuttles have been hit with debris over 15,000 times, mostly during launch."
You can rationalize it all you want but the fact is its a bad design. A couple basic reasons:
- The foam is applied by hand to the ET, it is a hack added after the design was done to deal with all the ice that they had to know would be there. but chose to TOTALLY ignore in the original design. Applying that foam by hand is an accident waiting to happen, because it ends up different on every tank. If there are air bubbles under it at the wrong place its going to blow off and hit the shuttle. Most of the time its non fatal but it can be fatal anytime. The foma that did fly off was heading in the general diretion of the leading edge though it didn't get close.....this time. Its always a gamble.
- Prior to the Shuttle U.S. spacecraft had all the most delicate and important manned part of the stack, that had to survive the whole mission, and keep the crew alive at the top of the stack. Debris and ice rained down all over Saturn V but there wasn't anything fragile to hit and the stuff on the bottom is ditched early and isn't around for reentry. The crucial heat shield was totally protected since is was between the capsule and the stage below so it couldn't get damaged by debris. All the new designs return to putting the vehicle at the top of the stack because that is a good design. Handing it on the side of a cryo tank was a now fatal mistake.
The shuttle by contrast has a massive, very fragile array of heat shields all of which are out in the open and most of which are right next to the ET which sheds debris and or ice every flight. Its an accident waiting to happen. Its a crap shoot if debris falls off in the right place to strike the wrong place on the shuttle. In Columbia it did. There are odds it will happen again, so now NASA knows it has to spend half of every mission just checking to make sure a debris strike or a faulty tile isn't in the wrong place, and it can't fly any place but the ISS in the event the roll snake eyes again and get damage to the heat shield in the wrong place.
"Burt Rutan not work for NASA?"
Burt Rutan does NOT work for NASA. He has worked on one NASA project that I remember and it was killed.
He worked for the Air Force at Edwards doing Flight test early in his career.
Scaled Composites built the shell for the X-38 which was a lifting body demonstrator for the Crew Return Vehicle which was supposed to hang on the ISS and would have allowed it to be fully manned for the first time in its existence. It was canceled in 2002, like all recent attempts to build new vehicles at NASA. With no replacement the ISS may never be manned beyond a minimal crew to maintain it.
He was part of a consortium of small companies that considered bidding on CEV. As best I recall they gave up soon after the RFP(Request for Proposal) came out. It was so laden with bureaucracy only really big, really bureaucratic aerospace contractors could stand it. Its a given NASA was going to pick Boeing/Lockeheed/Northrop to build it anyway, the deck was already stacked. Last I heard the CEV flyoff has been cancelled and in 2006 NASA will make all the big aerospace companies form one team to build CEV. It will be interesting to see if Boeing wins and its a capsule or Lockheed wins and its a mini-me Shuttle.
"and essentially the practical end of the ISS"
And why would that be? It might be the end of NASA and U.S involvement in the ISS. I wouldn't be surprised if the Russians would keep ISS going. They have an inexpensive, ultra reliable pair of spacecraft unlike NASA, and can service it though at modest levels. They wont ferry any more U.S. astronauts there because NASA has been a deadbeat for the duration of the last 2 1/2 years, and hasn't paid Russia to carry U.S. astronauts and supplies to the ISS (because Congress slapped an embargo on Russia over Iran's Russian reactor). The Russian's said no more to the free ride a few months ago.
As you recall the Russian's were forced to abandon Mir as the price for their participation in ISS. The core of the ISS is essentially Russian built Mir-2. Don't imagine they want to let NASA incompetence torpedo their long running permenent presence in space.
I imagine at this point the Russians would dance a jig if the U.S. threw in the towel on ISS so the Russian could take complete ownership of it, and partner with the ESA and countries who aren't so wellll, NASA. Russian's have zero reason to partner with NASA at this point since they get no funding from the U.S. NASA didn't have much to offer the RSA except money and that is no more.
ISS is of marginal real value but the Russians haven't squandered the vast sums on it NASA has so its a better return on investment for them especially with NASA out of the way.
A few weeks ago the Russian government green ligthed development of the next gen Russian manned spacecraft Kliper and ESA is very interested in partnering with them so Europe will have a manned space program free of NASA's poor performance in recent decades. I'm taking bets Kliper flies before CEV does (though Mike Griffin sure is an improvement over O'Keefe').
This isn't exacly news. The big studios started migrating to Linux years ago.
All these studios used to be SGI and IRIX based, they are just dumping SGI and IRIX because SGI raw performance is so poor and price/performance is even worse. SGI's only two offerings are MIPS and Itanic, both of which suck for animation and rendering especially compared to dirt cheap, very fast Intel IA32 and AMD CPU's. Maybe SGI has an IA32 Linux box, but why would anyone bother to buy one there.
Windows was never a viable options for these places. They've built vast infrastructure based on Unix, both scripting and applications. You have to look to smaller, newer studios to find heavy Windows usage.
Not sure that its entirely true that Pixar is going to Linux, I imagine maybe they are for rendering but I'm pretty sure they going Mac's and OSX for artists desktops. OSX is a dream OS for this business, really strong multimedia capabilites and Unix infrastructure in the OS underneath.
Linux multimedia support by contrast, sucks, and these people need good audio and video. Linux really needs to work out a scheme to port over the BeOS multimedia API or at least the spirit of it. Its producer and consumer audio and video node concept rocks, its API's are really easy to use and consistently designed, best of all there is only one API, instead of 10 like Linux. Best of all in BeOS every audio source creates its own volume control clearly labeled so adjusting audio levels when you are running multiple audio streams is a breeze. Linux is a complete nightmare by comparison.