"Even if we go nuclear, we don't have enough warheads to destroy China."
That is pretty silly rhetoric. No, the U.S. cant wipe every Chinese peasant off the face of the earth. The U.S. could really easily wipe out every major and not so major city and most of its military and industrial capacity. There is simply no way China would provoke the U.S. to that point, why would they, everything is going their way already if they just let America transfer all its wealth and IP to them through peaceful economic means. Risky a nuclear war is a no win situation for either side your scare tactics are silly. And of course if Little George's missile defense works as great as they keep claiming the Chinese wouldn't be able to reciprocate. It must work great because we are squandering $8 billion a year on it.
All in all this is the same kind of rhetoric the U.S. has used almost non stop since World War II to justify never ending massive military spending and militarization of our economy. This rhetoric always works in the U.S. because most Americans are either dumb, easy to scare, or reaping the benefits of being a part of the military industrial complex.
Country X is going to outspend us and we are vulnerable so we have to spend more, more, more. If Country X stops being a threat then you are just going to switch to country Y. You are NEVER going to stop dredging up some mortal danger that we have to keep spending ever more on weapons to save us from.
The U.S. currently spends more on defense than the other top 15 nations in the world combined, (though obviously China gets a lot more bang for the buck thanks to cheap labor and they don't have companies like Boeing and Lockheed in the sucking money out of taxpayers pocket). The Chinese also don't have to work as hard to develop technology or capitalize factories since Americans are giving it to them for basicly free and shipping machine tools wholesale from the U.S. to China. We better hope we don't have a war with China in 10-20 years because the U.S. will have NO manufacturing base left to sustain a prolonged war.
In the end I think the hawks were in fact royally pissed when the Soviet Union cratered because the rational for the massive defense spending cratered with them. After a few years of the U.S. scaling back bases and cutting defense spending to something approaching reasonable levels they were desperate for a new enemy, and 9/11 gave them one. Unfortunately shadowy terrorists don't make a good case for massive conventional military spending because they rarely present themselves as a target for precision bombing, so they have to build up two bit third world dictatorships like Iraq, Iran, Syria and North Korea. If that doesn't work then they can start ranting like you are about China being an imminent threat, and China is going to win the arms race unless we spend a trillion a year on defense. It is an insane argument as long as the U.S. is spending the massive sums its spending on weapons. The U.S. Air Force and Navy completely dominate every other force on the planet. The only thing the U.S. lack is the boots on the ground because its politicians are afraid, very afraid, of the consequences of reinstating the draft which is not a problem the Chinese have.
A. The U.S. government is dependent on the current Social Security surplus to offset its massive deficit
B. During a very long transition period the government is still going to have to pay full benefits to everyone 55 or over while payroll taxes are plunging, they are already plunging, thanks to baby boomers retiring, young workers being so out numbered by retirees who are living forever, and declining real wages thanks to pressure from outsourcing and illegal immigrants.
The government is going to have to make up the difference and its going to explode already exploding deficits no matter how you cut it, unless you raise taxes or cut benefits.
If you are a tweener like me, to young to stay with the Social Security because they are going to start axing it before I retire and to old to reap huge benefits from private accounts like a 20 year old all this might be exceptionally ugly. If I dont get back at least what I've paid in it there is going to be hell to pay. Me personally I would rather have the money now when I'm young enough to either enjoy it or do something useful with it instead of letting government rob it from and then give it back to me when my health is shot, and even that assumes:
A. I'm fortunate it enough to make it to 65 or whatever the retirement age is when I get there
B. And I live long enough to draw out what I put in
Private accounts don't help with B because I don't have kids and I have a limited appreciation for people giving an inheritence to their kids in the first place because it mostly just brings out the greed and the worst in their children as they circle like vultures waiting for you to die, and its giving people something for nothing.
No all in all I just want the 12.5% to not come out of my pay check anymore and if I'm starving when I hit retirement that is my problem. That is what personal responsibility and "ownership" is all about, not just replacing Socialist Security with Fascist Security.
I really doubt that this has anything to do with gradually terminating it. It is just moving from Socialist Security to Fascist Security. Instead of having a big intrusive government swallowing our paychecks to fund big government, we are just trading that for a big intrusive government redirecting our paychecks to giant corproate entities who are for the most part closely allied with the party in power, that is basicly Fascist economics. It is still a massive government intervention because they will dictate how much is deducted from your paycheck and what companies will be approved to take that money, there is very little free market about it.
I really doubt either party will allow people to decide for themselves whether they save for retirement or spend as they go. The obvious problem is you have huge numbers of people living 10, 20 and 30 years after retirement, which you didn't before Social Security started, and if you don't force them to save for retirement the poverty and misery among seniors will be appalling. Only way you might be able to moderate it is you also cut off Medicare/Medicaid for the poor so they die younger which seems to be a likely Republican strategy too.
Don't think I was arguing pro or con against reforming Social Security and I'm sure now fan of Al Gore and the Dems so don't try to tar me with that Bursh. There is just a basic reality associated with privatizing social security.
You see Bush is going around the country declaring Social Security is going to go bankrupt to scare everyone in to "reforming" it.
His solution is to let people move their payroll taxes from Social Security to private accounts. What does that do. It reduces Social Security funding, and accelerates its demise UNLESS the government pumps huge sums, like 2 trillion dollars out of the general fund to shore up the even huger shortfall his "reform" is going to cause.
Its is a bizarre, behind the looking glass world, where the President can rant about Social Security bankruptcy and then propose a plan that will hasten its bankruptcy rather than prevent it.
Me personally I'd be overjoyed if the Government either:
A. just stopped taking 12.5% out of my income and I'll just live without the whole bloody thing. B. or ideally just gave me back what I've paid in a lump sum.
Mostly what the Republican's are proposing is that instead of taking all that money out of our paychecks and putting it in to government debt, instead they are going to force us to invest it in carefully defined investment vehicles controlled by their friends on Wall Street and they will profit from it in a huge way.
If the Republican's were actually conservatives they would be putting an end to this particular brand of social engineering all together, instead they are just redirecting the money to their rich friends instead of to the government.
So bottomline I personally oppose both the Republican and Democratic position on Social Security which is usually where I am on most issues... opposed to both parties.
If I'm so wrong and you are so smart next time why don't you try making a coherent arguement and make your case. Lobing this kind of vicious bile as an AC just proves you are what the name suggests, a coward.
Next time, why don't you at least attempt to make one arguement highlighting where I'm wrong. If you make a good case and I see your point I'll learn, change and say thanks.
Its incredibly easy to just say everything I say is wrong, and everything is a lie but not actually making a single valid point. If you are too dumb, or just incapable of stating your case, maybe next time you should try just keeping your empty venom to yourself.
I dont think going nuclear is going to do much to eliminate dependence on oil any time soon, unless you make a second large leap and move transportation to hydrogen or electricity which would be more feasible if you had a huge abundance of cheap electricty. You also have to phase out home heatin oil which is still used extensively on the East Cost.
An expansion in nuclear capacity, in the near term, is primarily going to reduce natural gas use which is increasingly used to produce electricty because its cleaner than coal, and the big win is to stop using coal for power generation because it is a HUGE contributor to greenhouse gas, and very dirty unless you install extensive and modern pollution control equipment. That equipment don't stop CO2 and I'm not sure they entirely solve nitrate, sulfate, mercury and lead pollution.
I'd have to agree that pebble bed reactors might be a lesser evil at this point but they aren't entirely risk free.
In particular you have to insure the integrity of the coating around the pebbles. They can and have developed serious defects in manufacturing handling. If you do compromise the exterior coating you find that inside they are propbably graphite moderator. If you get graphite hot and its exposed to Oxygen it burns furiously. It was a key contributor to Chernoybl being the epic disaster it was. You aren't supposed to have compromised coatings coupled with exposure to Oxygen in these reactors but if the unexpected happens, which it usually does in "accidents", you could end up with one or more burning or exploding pebbles which could damage more pebbles around them and you end up with a conventional chain reaction and a giant burning pile of radioactive laced graphite. Its kind of a worst case scenario, and its not real likely but just don't let pro nuke fanatics tell you that there is zero risk of an accident with these reactors because there is never zero risk in anything that is full of radioactivity and operating at high temperatures.
No doubt China can press full steam ahead and it might work for them. Thanks to being a dictatorship they can overlook safety issues and cover up accidents unless they turn epic. The world should cheer them on because China has become one of the world's largest and dirtiest users of coal, their whole country is turning in to an ecological disaster as a result, and most of the pollution and green house gases are being shared with the rest of the world.
The U.S. wont be able to sustain its current military excess if the rest of its economy craters, or if it does it will suck the life out of everything else as it did in the Soviet Union and when American economy starts looking like the Soviet Union's support for the government will collapse just as it did in the Soviet Union.
The only other option for maintaining a huge military without a robust economy is to use it to dominate the economy and resources of the rest of the world though blackmail or outright intervention.
In many respects the Chinese, and the Japanese, are already funding the U.S. military because they are the primary purchasers of the U.S. governments debt which is necessary to support the huge deficits, and a big chunk of those deficits are going in to exploding defense and homeland security spending.
If the Chinese were to stop buying that debt they can place substantial pressure on the U.S. government unless someone else picks up the slack and that is likely to get worse not better. I'm not sure of the exact mechanics but I think if the chinese stop pegging their currency to the dollar, something the U.S. is pushing hard, that may also lead them to stop buying U.S. dollars and debt.
If the Republican's were so foolish as to actualize start privatizing Social Security in the near term that is going to place even more pressure on the U.S. deficits because:
A. the government will have to make up the shortfall it will create in paying out benefits to everyone over 55
B. The current large Social Security surplus that is funding U.S. government debt will disappear meaning there will be even less money going to support the excess of the U.S. government.
Based on the recent budget it appears the Bush administration plan is to continue inflating defense and homeland security spending, continue cutting taxes for the wealthy and slashing everything else(unless it benefits big corporations that support the Republicans (i.e. the Medicare reform sham for drug and health companies, Energy bill for big oil, coal and nuke, Social Security privitization for the big banks and investment firms, CEV and missile defense for Lockheed and Boeing).
Not sure I want to be defending the practical value of Hubble in particular and astronomy in general since it was my original argument that astronomy outside our solar system is of marginal real value, but...
The obvious role powerful telescopes would play if you have near light speed travel would be to locate potentially habitable planets around stars within 10-12 light years, like the Alpha Centauri system, Sirius, Lalande 21185, Ross 154, Luyten 726-8 AB, Barnard's Star, and Wolf 359.
I think its a product of having a bean counter as NASA administrator. NASA desperately needs to retire O'Keefe NOW because everyday he stays he is going to drive morale further in to the ground and further crater an agency that is almost past the point of no return. But I shudder to think what kind of loser and sycophant Bush will pick to replace him.
O'Keefe has NO background in aerospace and he has no grasp of what he's doing when it comes to space exploration or aeronautics. Closest he came was a stint as Navy secretary, here is his bio. I think Bush appointed him because he viewed NASA as a management problem to be cleaned up and he wasn't there because he has any vision for making NASA relevent again. As I recall when he arrived, they put NASA on a hard deadline to complete ISS launches, they even created a screen saver counting down the seconds until the next ISS launch deadline and they created an atmosphere where managers sacrificed Columbia because they were so busy obsessing over O'Keefe's bean counter deadline.
To O'Keefe the Hubble is:
- A safety problem
- An untidy accounting problem he needs to zero out
so he's willing to wast hundreds of millions of dollars to do nothing but burn it up in an orderly way.
As for the safety issue that O'Keefe is obesessing over, well you see he is a bean counter not a test pilot, not an engineer, not an astronaut, and he apparently can't cope with risk or danger. When Columbia crashed on his watch it so bent his head that its completely crippled his ability to move forward, and he, with the help of the commission that investigated Columbia has effectively crippled NASA's manned space program. At this point the shuttle can do nothing but fly back and forth to the ISS and then only very carefully and at great expense. The shuttle is essentially no more valuable than the ISS and the ISS has no value anyone can discern in its current crippled configuration and its deadend future.
The dangers of Hubble reentering on its own are wildly overblown. Fact is most its going to burn up and what doesn't is probably going to land in the middle of nowhere, most of the earth being empty. Columbia is a lot bigger than Hubble and it broke up over the U.S. and the debris didn't cause widespread loss of life. It is no more danger than a not particularly large meteor.
Wasting precious resources just to deorbit Hubble is insanity.
You can hold out hope all this will change with the holy grail, the CEV, but just note that the EARLIEST a manned CEV launch will launch is 2014 and that is assuming there aren't massive schedule slips which is the NASA/Boeing/Lockheed wat. That is ten years out just to put a small crew back in to space in a capsule. Apollo put men on the moon in less than ten years using now ancient technology and they were pushing back real frontiers and doing things never done before.
The CEV schedule alone is just completely pathetic. It has all the earmarks of an excuse to funnel large quantities of money in to the pockets of Lockheed and Boeing and never actually fly anything.
Well thats because you are thinking in terms of science and not practical benefit to mankind. I hate to break it to you but looking at objects that are light years away is good science, nice art, and intellectually interesting but its nearly meaningless in practical value until mankind develops a spacecraft that can manage a significant percentage of the speed of light so can either send something there or go there. Maybe if you contact another intelligence there that will make it worthwhile but those are long odds. A cosmology case can be made if you might answer how the universe originated but I expect the best you will do is identify an origin point and not a cause. The only part of astronomy that strikes me as having real near term value to our planet is the search for objects that are going to run in to, because if the object is big enough it might wipe us off this planet which is why we might want a second biosphere.....
So we come to Mars, as a precious resource, it is the only planetary body close enough to Earth to reach in a reasonable time, and with temperature, gravity, and a minimal atmosphere that will make it viable, though not pleasant for people to live there. It also probably has the resources to sustain life which is something the Moon probably never can. With some terraforming it might be possible to make it relatively habitable.
Putting a colony on Mars would result in wide ranging benefit to mankind, most importantly it would create a second biosphere, which we may need as we continue to overpopulate and stress the one we have, or if ours runs in to a natural or manmade cataclysm.
Its also likely the mere act of colonizing mars would push the technology envelope at a unprecedented pace in a lot of areas.
Aside from that it would open a new frontier and create a place for pioneers, explorers and adventurers which is something sorely lacking in this overcrowded world we live in. I think the sociology potential for a colony on another planet alone would be priceless, it would be a chance for a small group of people to start fresh without a lot of the cultural baggage and bigotry that infects every culture on this planet.
I get tired of saying it but if you have trouble letting Mars capture your imagination read Kim Stanley Robinson's excellent Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars trilogy.
There is no particularly good reason to worry about the "return from there" part. The objective is to get people and cargo there on a regular basis and keep them alive there to form a permanent colony.
They are going to have a real problem adapting to earth gravity after a long duration Mars mission anyway so its probably better if they get to 1/3G and stay there.
I doubt you will have any shortage of adventurous people willing to go and stay.
So the objective is reliable and economical mechanism to get large masses to Mars, and land them safely, and on a regular basis so you can supply everything colonists can't find on Mars. But you do want to find everything on planet you can and you will find a lot more essentials on Mars than you will on the Moon as others have listed.
First and foremost you want to find abundant water close to the colony. From there Oxygen and Hydrogen follow if you have enough power. For abundant power you land a number of nuclear reactors which is, no suprise a key focus of the Russian space agencies mars plan. You also need to get fertilizer so nitrogen or sulfur are needed to make things like ammonium nitrare. You also need phosphorous and potassium most probably.
Ideally you would quickly stop relying on Earth for raw materials and the essentials for life and the cargo shipments would be confined to manufactured goods.
"The Space Shuttle can only go as high as 643km, and wouldn't be able to service the proposed probe."
The obvious downside being if it fails at launch or early in its life the whole thing is lost. Obviously if its cheaper to build a new one than send the shuttle launch to repair it, a sad commentary on the cost of shuttle launches, you can launch another, but if it takes 5 years to build a new one you are dead in the water for a long period.
The ability to service Hubble with the Shuttle proved priceless, you wonder if this new Hubble will regret not having that luxury.
I wonder if the CEV will be able to reach it if they actually manage to ever build one.
One thing I didn't entirely follow from the articles, though I didn't read them all, is this going to be placed in high enough an orbit that it won't decay enough to hit the atmosphere before its useful lifetime is up. I'd imagine that if that were the case it would preclude servicing with a shuttle mission if it were to have a major failure early in its life, not that thats ever happened:)
Would hope that they are planning to either put it in a high enough orbit it will last for 10-15 years or that they put a module in to boost its own orbit, though that would probably add to the cost and complexity of building it.
To me the deorbit module is a lot less important than a module to boost the orbit. All the hand wringing over Hubble reentering of its own accord is misplaced in my opinion. Chances are not many big pieces are going to survive reentry, the earth is still a relatively empty place and its not much more risk than a mid size meteor.
As I recall a key reason the mirror was wrong in the Hubble, or actually the reason it wasn't caught before launch, was that the only facility suitable for testing it was a top secret facility, run by Lockheed I believe, to test optical spy satellites and none of the NASA people involved wanted to sell their soul to the DoD to get the clearances necessary to work in it so they passed on testing that would have caught the problem on the ground.
Chances are you would have to clear the same hurdle with Hubble II to properly test it.
Your a little confused. I was saying that the original post was flamebait and you were a nitwit for saying it wasn't and that it was some kind of liberal conspiracy on Slashdot that led to it being marked as such.
Sorry but you, and every American like you, need slapped up side of the head if you think its OK for the U.S. to invade any country it feels like, whenever it feels like it.
CNN is running a story in the other direction, apparently the Bush administration and the Pentagon are astroturfing too.
The Pentagon has setup a number of web sites that look like news sites for various regions of interest around the globe. They've apparently hired a number of journalists to write article for them and post legitimate newswire articles. Unfortunately they are also psyops designed to shape public opinion in the target region and to tell the news with a pro American and pro Pentagon spin. Its not entirely new, Voice of America having been around for decades though everyone knows VOA is a propaganda station and listened to it for the music anyway, but its kind of new that this is on the web, and is another reason to be a little skeptical of what you read on the web.
There is apparently a less than obvious link on the page, with the disclaimer that the web sites are run by the Department of Defense but you really have to look to discover this.
Running this kind of operation in the U.S. is, I believe, illegal because its essentially government propaganda, but thanks to the web American's can be suckered by these sites as much as anyone else. I wouldn't be surprised if they get pulled in to news aggregators like Google News.
"All you've shown is that you disagree with the poster. That doesn't make it flamebait."
I think unless you are both far right wing and American it does. Quite obviously it DID invite a flame throwing contest, which I think is the definition of "flamebait", its saying something designed to provoke anger.
I object to the fact you were trying to do to Slashdot the same thing right wingers do to American media and America in general, start screaming "liberal bias" everytime something doesn't have a blatant right wing bias. It has been a quite successful tactic to pull American media to the right, in the case of Fox to the far right. That in turn has helped pull the whole country so far to the right its officially scary.
Me personally I'm glad Slashdot doesn't have a right wing bias. There still seem to be plenty of thinking, informed, rational people here, who reject fascism and scare mongering. There are also a lot of Slashdot readers who live outside the U.S. who can still recognize what was wrong in the post we are taking about here. Their minds aren't blinded by right wing propaganda, because they don't live in the U.S. They in general seem to have no use for the insanity thats infected the U.S. since the Republicans siezed power and since they were blessed with 9/11 to justify every excess. Thanks be there are still people left in the rest of the world who aren't dumb enough to fall for Republican propaganda. It a source of woe that the number of Americans who haven't been brainwashed by it appears to dwindle everyday.
"The people that work for the government are still just regular joes like you and me who will try their best to be good and do their jobs well."
Thats probably true of many, lifer, civil servents. Its not at all true of all the political appointess that RUN all those bureaucracies. They can and often are just as much idealogs as their commander-in-chief. They also can aggressively recruit some zealots who who have no concept of right and wrong. Especially since 9/11 they are in abundance, people who will lie, cheat, steal, torture, kill, eavesdrop, as long as they think they are avenging 9/11 and making America safe from the rest of the world. Pretty sure the DOD is full of them, special forces, etc. The CIA and FBI are a little more complicated. I think they have a lot of smart people who know right from wrong but they are no doubt being marginalized by the zealots and fanatics who have no concept of right and wrong.
Lets just look at the CIA. There were a bunch of people at the CIA that knew how full of crap the White House, the Pentagon and their own director were on just about everything about Iraq. And they fought it at every step often by leaking the truth. So if we stop at that point I've proven your theory of government correct. These good people did the right thing when their bosses didn't.
Unfortunately time kept moving and the President appointed a guy named Porter Goss to head the CIA. He has been purging all the disloyal from the top echelons of the CIA and encouraging everyone that isn't going to drink the Koolaid to leave, and many are. Taken to its logical conclusion the CIA will end up as a bunch of idealogs marching to Republican hymns, and rubber stamping their political agenda with phony intelligance.
Lets move over to the Pentagon. There was a head of the Joint Chiefs General Shinseki who made the mistake of saying in public that it would take several hundreds of thousands of troops to occupy and pacify Iraq. For making his "own decision about right and wrong" he was run out of the military on a rail. He in fact was correct and if the U.S. had another hundred thousand boots on the ground in Iraq during the invasion they probably could have controlled the looting and lawlessness that devastated Iraq's basic infrastructure and created a climate of fear and insecurity that persists to this day. They might have had enough troops to guard Abu Graib so it wouldn't have descended in to anarchy.
All in all I'd like to agree with your post and it does sound good on paper but unfortunately in practice it doesn't hold water. The government is a rigid hierarchy driven by very political master, more so today than ever, and the current administration can eliminate the people who do the right thing, and reward, promote and reinforce the people who do the wrong things. Bremer's tenure in Iraq was a disaster but he was rewarded with the Medal of Freedom. Alberto Gonzalez has consistently sought to obstruct congressional oversight, to circumvent the law, to justify the use of torture, and create a basis under which the President can immunize people from the law when he orders them to engage in illegal acts, in effect placing him and everyone working for him above the law. For his misdeeds he's been promoted to Attorney General.
"And just for my 2 cents on topic, tough luck Canada."
I would have to agree with you on this. I'm pretty sure the NSA, through Echelon, has been spying on Canadian's and most of the rest of the world for decades. Not sure there is any reason to get upset about it now if you've been OK with the U.S. spying on the world for all these years.
Its really only Americans that should be pissed off about all this new spying. Previously Americans were mostly exempt from being spied on by the CIA and the NSA, at least since early '70's when they were reigned in by Congress for all of the massive abuses they practiced in the '50's and '60's. Of course those abuses are most probably nothing compared to what they are engaged in today.
"If anything should be pushed into a decaying orbit, it should be that big fat waste of cash."
I kind of agree but I think that might be a bit extreme. I think you should probably give the Russian's the option of taking it over, or do something they may do anyway, undock the modules they built from the American bits and go it alone. Its lost on most American's but the Russian built components are pretty much a self contained space station, and are in may respects a successor to Mir, while the U.S. part is useless without the Russian modules. The Russian Space Agency is pretty strapped for cash but Russia might well keep it going as they did Mir, using the increasing bounty of their oil revenue, just for the prestige, if they can get rid of NASA as partners.
I'm inclined to think its pointless to debate Hubble's future at the moment. I'd wait until NASA gets a new administrator and hope he isn't as pathetic as the current one, though with George W. doing the picking my hopes for that are low.
Sean O'Keefe has consistently been the focal point of all the bad decision making regarding Hubble. He is the one that has refused to allow a shuttle mission to service it because its "DANGEROUS" though its been done multiple times before. He has been completely paralyzed by the Columbia disaster and he has paralyzed all of NASA as a consequence. I think is also the one that green lighted the robotic rescue mission which is an insane waste of even more money than a shuttle mission, and one with a dramaticly lower possibility of success.
I'd vote for NASA to call for volunteers and if seven astronauts do, in spite of it being "DANGEROUS", go for it. If they lose another shuttle in the process then its time to admit the Shuttle is hopeless, stop squandering the huge sums trying to make it safe, and build something new, though it might be "DANGEROUS" too because space flight is inherently dangerous. I guess you can stop going in to space at all if you can't cope with that fact.
I've wondered why it is we obsess so much over the 14 shuttle astronauts who've lost their lives while 30+ soldiers dieing in Iraq in a day doesn't even register.
"Ohhh, yeah that really looked like flamebait. "I am proud of my President and here's why.""
Nice editing. I think you quoted the only part of that post that WASN'T flambebait, to recap:
"Because Iraq was a potential threat"
Hate to break it to you but every country on the face of the earth is a "potential" threat by the rather low bar set by the Bush administration. You can fabricate a WMD case against any country on the planet and it will be impossible for them to disprove it. Once you flatten them then you just do what others have done in this thread and insist they were buried or spirited away to the next country on your take down list(so you can start working on the WMD case against them).
Thats why nearly every country on the planet, including many former allies are more afraid of the U.S. than of Al Qaida lately. I was interested to hear George W, in his State of the Union, had the nerve to openly threaten Saudi Arabia and Egypt. I imagine as of today there are two more former allies who will start actively siding against the U.S. even more than they have already. I assure you the Saudi royal family, corrupt and despicable as they are, can do a world of hurt to the U.S economicly.
"Not by striking back, but by striking first, hard and furiously."
That's how Nazi Germany protected itself too. To them France was a "potential" threat, and Poland, Czechoslovakia, Great Britain, Russia etc. If you think this is a valid way for a nation to act in this world, then you are saying it was A-OK for Nazi Germany to occupy Europe for the same reason.
As soon as a nation bestows upon itself the prerogative to attack any nation it chooses, on the flimsiest of evidence, or in fact no evidence at all, just the word of its leaders, it transforms itself into an outlaw and a rogue nation. Its called "Aggressive Warfare" and when a country engages in it, it is a tripwire for the rest of the world to band together against that country.
"Even look at us the wrong way, we won't be afraid to lay the smackdown on you or even glass you."
At this point the guy you are defending it just pure scary friend. The scarier thing is the majority of American's probably agree with him. Its a pretty sad commentary on what kind of a people Americans have turned in to. No doubt a product of to much TV, and TV violence, to much wealth, to little education, to little adversity, and a non stop diet of propaganda that American's are a superior people, and that the use of force is their prerogative and the preferred approach to dealing with every problem. An unfortunate consequence of being one of the few nations not devastated by World War II, which was more an accident of geography more than any inherent superiority of its people.
"He's got a big gun and he's not afraid to use it."
To quote the Wizard of Oz refering to the Scarecrow, now if he "only had a brain" to know when and when not to use it. A big gun and no brain is exactly why the rest of the world is increasingly turning against the U.S. Your friend seems to be confused thinking George W has taught the world to "respect" the U.S. I think its more probably fear and loathing, with a little contempt. Nations might be laughing behind the backs of America too, were this all not so dangerous.
Actually I don't think there is any hope for them. Note that its going to take them 3-4 years and billions of dollar just to develop an unmanned prototype of a capsule that probably wont differ a lot from ones flown 40 years ago. I assume the prototypes are launching on an existing modified rocket design. Its not going to be sitting on top of a Saturn V so I doubt its going to reach anything past LEO. So you will need either multiple launches or a whole new heavy lifter to get past LEO.
So after unmanned launches in 2008 it will be some untold number of years after that before it becomes manned and operational. And then there all the undefined steps after that to to get to lunar orbit and build a vehicle that will land and take off from the moon, and lets not even think about Mars. And god forbid there is an accident or failure because NASA will go down for the count or least 2-3 years while the wring their hands over how DANGEROUS space flight is.
And of course this all assume they can maintain the funding and I assure you pouring money in to Boeing and Lockheed's coffers is going to take buckets of money at every phase.
The original submission was great about all the competitors and T/Space being in there but the key point is that there are only two slots in the competition. This is NASA, business as usual, things never change. One slot is for a Boeing led consortium and one is for Lockheed's. T/Space has zero chance of competing on their own. Either they bow out or they join one of the two big prime contractors. When they join a Boeing or Lockheed team any innovation the might want to try is probably going to have the life squeezed out of it. They will be lucky if they get to build the seat cushions or the toilet in the thing.
I hope I'm wrong but NASA more closely resembles a Soviet era politburo than a lean mean space exploring machine. I'd give anything if we could do a one for one trade and give NASA to Russia and get the Russian Space Agency in return. If they has NASA's funding without developing its overhead and ineptitude they would do great things.
I do dearly wish O'Keefe would get the hell out of the way and they appoint someone with some guts and some vision real soon. I saw him on the NASA channel last night doing the only thing he's done since Columbia, whining about how space flight is DANGEROUS and what a great thing it is even they are even launching the shuttle again because its so DANGEROUS. The guy is a morale destroying disaster all unto himself.
Burt Rutan would do nicely to completely shake the NASA up but the entrenched bureaucracy would kill him before he could kill it. He absolutely hates red tape, bureaucracy, paper work etc. I really can't see any way he is going to be able to stand getting entangled in the CEV competition because it going to be nothing but red tape and political infighting.
NASA HAS a heavy lift launch stack if they ever caught a clue.
The space shuttle stack is a GREAT heavy lift capability if you just get rid of all the Shuttle's dead weight. Replace it with a cargo module with some simpler disposable engines and you could lift a lot of cargo in to space for a lot less than starting a new booster from scratch. The external tank could also probably be boosted in to orbit and made use of as an orbit fuel tank if nothing else. If you retained even a fraction of its liquid hydrogen and oxygen in to orbit it would fuel all kinds of trips to the moon and back.
If the SRB's could be filled with the new parafin based fuel some university(Standford?) was working on they would be even better for cargo lifting, less toxic waste, and probably easier to manufacture. Solid rockets COMPLETElY suck for launching people because they are dangerous, once you light them you cant stop them and you are along for the ride. But they are wonderful for launching cargo where the safety standards are lower, with the caveat they are a little intense on G's and probably vibration. Its almost impossible for them to fail like a complex liquid fuel motor often does.
"It will work a whole hell of a lot better than on earth assembly."
No it wont unless by assembly you just mean "docking". Actually building stuff in space would be extraordinarily expensive.
First it would be really expensive to get engineers and machinists in to space that know how to build things, and train them to be astronauts and train them to work in zero G. Then you have to get all their tools in to space, and then you have to get all the raw materials in to space, nuts, bolts, etc., and you have to dispose of all the debris from building things, like metal shavings from drills which would be a complete nightmare inside an on orbit station. The mass you will have to lift to build things in space it far more than the mass to build them on the ground and launch them.
Maybe someday if you have a HUGE colony on the moon or Mars, or are mining and refining asteroids in space this might change but at the pace we are going that is at least a century out.
No, unless you are insane everything is going to be built on Earth for a long time to come and all you are going to do is dock modules together in space and maybe hook up cables and pipes like they have for decades on Skylab, Mir and the ISS.
Think you are mistaken. The X-35 is Lockheeds prototype for the Joint Strike Fighter.
Maybe you are refering to the X-30 National Aerospace Plane(NASP). OK you are mistaken there too. About the only part of that was built was a prototype Hydrogen fuel tank built by Lockheed. An old timer told them that using composites for it would never work, they didn't listen. As soon as they started testing it the layers in the tank started separating and it basicly fell part. Then the program was killed. They should have listened to the old timer.
As for the engines the closest thing they've gotten to the engines were the recent SCRAMJET tests NASA did. They are tiny scale models, being brought up to the narrow speed envelope where they actually work by a Pegasus booster, and only burned for a very short interval. The NASP design isn't even close to being feasible and may never be. You have to overcome the hurdle of find air breathing engines that work across a huge range of Mach numbers, or have multiple engines and rockets. IT has the same problem as the shuttle, huge amounts of dead weight that are being hauled into orbit and back again. Really the ONLY thing it gains is it not carrying oxygen on board since its getting it out of the atmosphere as long as its in the atmosphere.
All in all I would say this was mostly another NASA/Lockheed/Boeing fantasy. Not sure Lockheed or Boeing even believed in it they just wanted to suck as much money out of NASA's veins as they could before it got killed. They all created so many, promo films, and 3D models of it that they flew around on computers they actually kidded themselves in to thinking it would work.
Slashdot Mirror
"Even if we go nuclear, we don't have enough warheads to destroy China."
That is pretty silly rhetoric. No, the U.S. cant wipe every Chinese peasant off the face of the earth. The U.S. could really easily wipe out every major and not so major city and most of its military and industrial capacity. There is simply no way China would provoke the U.S. to that point, why would they, everything is going their way already if they just let America transfer all its wealth and IP to them through peaceful economic means. Risky a nuclear war is a no win situation for either side your scare tactics are silly. And of course if Little George's missile defense works as great as they keep claiming the Chinese wouldn't be able to reciprocate. It must work great because we are squandering $8 billion a year on it.
All in all this is the same kind of rhetoric the U.S. has used almost non stop since World War II to justify never ending massive military spending and militarization of our economy. This rhetoric always works in the U.S. because most Americans are either dumb, easy to scare, or reaping the benefits of being a part of the military industrial complex.
Country X is going to outspend us and we are vulnerable so we have to spend more, more, more. If Country X stops being a threat then you are just going to switch to country Y. You are NEVER going to stop dredging up some mortal danger that we have to keep spending ever more on weapons to save us from.
The U.S. currently spends more on defense than the other top 15 nations in the world combined, (though obviously China gets a lot more bang for the buck thanks to cheap labor and they don't have companies like Boeing and Lockheed in the sucking money out of taxpayers pocket). The Chinese also don't have to work as hard to develop technology or capitalize factories since Americans are giving it to them for basicly free and shipping machine tools wholesale from the U.S. to China. We better hope we don't have a war with China in 10-20 years because the U.S. will have NO manufacturing base left to sustain a prolonged war.
In the end I think the hawks were in fact royally pissed when the Soviet Union cratered because the rational for the massive defense spending cratered with them. After a few years of the U.S. scaling back bases and cutting defense spending to something approaching reasonable levels they were desperate for a new enemy, and 9/11 gave them one. Unfortunately shadowy terrorists don't make a good case for massive conventional military spending because they rarely present themselves as a target for precision bombing, so they have to build up two bit third world dictatorships like Iraq, Iran, Syria and North Korea. If that doesn't work then they can start ranting like you are about China being an imminent threat, and China is going to win the arms race unless we spend a trillion a year on defense. It is an insane argument as long as the U.S. is spending the massive sums its spending on weapons. The U.S. Air Force and Navy completely dominate every other force on the planet. The only thing the U.S. lack is the boots on the ground because its politicians are afraid, very afraid, of the consequences of reinstating the draft which is not a problem the Chinese have.
That doesn't change the fact that:
A. The U.S. government is dependent on the current Social Security surplus to offset its massive deficit
B. During a very long transition period the government is still going to have to pay full benefits to everyone 55 or over while payroll taxes are plunging, they are already plunging, thanks to baby boomers retiring, young workers being so out numbered by retirees who are living forever, and declining real wages thanks to pressure from outsourcing and illegal immigrants.
The government is going to have to make up the difference and its going to explode already exploding deficits no matter how you cut it, unless you raise taxes or cut benefits.
If you are a tweener like me, to young to stay with the Social Security because they are going to start axing it before I retire and to old to reap huge benefits from private accounts like a 20 year old all this might be exceptionally ugly. If I dont get back at least what I've paid in it there is going to be hell to pay. Me personally I would rather have the money now when I'm young enough to either enjoy it or do something useful with it instead of letting government rob it from and then give it back to me when my health is shot, and even that assumes:
A. I'm fortunate it enough to make it to 65 or whatever the retirement age is when I get there
B. And I live long enough to draw out what I put in
Private accounts don't help with B because I don't have kids and I have a limited appreciation for people giving an inheritence to their kids in the first place because it mostly just brings out the greed and the worst in their children as they circle like vultures waiting for you to die, and its giving people something for nothing.
No all in all I just want the 12.5% to not come out of my pay check anymore and if I'm starving when I hit retirement that is my problem. That is what personal responsibility and "ownership" is all about, not just replacing Socialist Security with Fascist Security.
I really doubt that this has anything to do with gradually terminating it. It is just moving from Socialist Security to Fascist Security. Instead of having a big intrusive government swallowing our paychecks to fund big government, we are just trading that for a big intrusive government redirecting our paychecks to giant corproate entities who are for the most part closely allied with the party in power, that is basicly Fascist economics. It is still a massive government intervention because they will dictate how much is deducted from your paycheck and what companies will be approved to take that money, there is very little free market about it.
I really doubt either party will allow people to decide for themselves whether they save for retirement or spend as they go. The obvious problem is you have huge numbers of people living 10, 20 and 30 years after retirement, which you didn't before Social Security started, and if you don't force them to save for retirement the poverty and misery among seniors will be appalling. Only way you might be able to moderate it is you also cut off Medicare/Medicaid for the poor so they die younger which seems to be a likely Republican strategy too.
Don't think I was arguing pro or con against reforming Social Security and I'm sure now fan of Al Gore and the Dems so don't try to tar me with that Bursh. There is just a basic reality associated with privatizing social security.
... opposed to both parties.
You see Bush is going around the country declaring Social Security is going to go bankrupt to scare everyone in to "reforming" it.
His solution is to let people move their payroll taxes from Social Security to private accounts. What does that do. It reduces Social Security funding, and accelerates its demise UNLESS the government pumps huge sums, like 2 trillion dollars out of the general fund to shore up the even huger shortfall his "reform" is going to cause.
Its is a bizarre, behind the looking glass world, where the President can rant about Social Security bankruptcy and then propose a plan that will hasten its bankruptcy rather than prevent it.
Me personally I'd be overjoyed if the Government either:
A. just stopped taking 12.5% out of my income and I'll just live without the whole bloody thing.
B. or ideally just gave me back what I've paid in a lump sum.
Mostly what the Republican's are proposing is that instead of taking all that money out of our paychecks and putting it in to government debt, instead they are going to force us to invest it in carefully defined investment vehicles controlled by their friends on Wall Street and they will profit from it in a huge way.
If the Republican's were actually conservatives they would be putting an end to this particular brand of social engineering all together, instead they are just redirecting the money to their rich friends instead of to the government.
So bottomline I personally oppose both the Republican and Democratic position on Social Security which is usually where I am on most issues
If I'm so wrong and you are so smart next time why don't you try making a coherent arguement and make your case. Lobing this kind of vicious bile as an AC just proves you are what the name suggests, a coward.
Next time, why don't you at least attempt to make one arguement highlighting where I'm wrong. If you make a good case and I see your point I'll learn, change and say thanks.
Its incredibly easy to just say everything I say is wrong, and everything is a lie but not actually making a single valid point. If you are too dumb, or just incapable of stating your case, maybe next time you should try just keeping your empty venom to yourself.
I dont think going nuclear is going to do much to eliminate dependence on oil any time soon, unless you make a second large leap and move transportation to hydrogen or electricity which would be more feasible if you had a huge abundance of cheap electricty. You also have to phase out home heatin oil which is still used extensively on the East Cost.
An expansion in nuclear capacity, in the near term, is primarily going to reduce natural gas use which is increasingly used to produce electricty because its cleaner than coal, and the big win is to stop using coal for power generation because it is a HUGE contributor to greenhouse gas, and very dirty unless you install extensive and modern pollution control equipment. That equipment don't stop CO2 and I'm not sure they entirely solve nitrate, sulfate, mercury and lead pollution.
I'd have to agree that pebble bed reactors might be a lesser evil at this point but they aren't entirely risk free.
In particular you have to insure the integrity of the coating around the pebbles. They can and have developed serious defects in manufacturing handling. If you do compromise the exterior coating you find that inside they are propbably graphite moderator. If you get graphite hot and its exposed to Oxygen it burns furiously. It was a key contributor to Chernoybl being the epic disaster it was. You aren't supposed to have compromised coatings coupled with exposure to Oxygen in these reactors but if the unexpected happens, which it usually does in "accidents", you could end up with one or more burning or exploding pebbles which could damage more pebbles around them and you end up with a conventional chain reaction and a giant burning pile of radioactive laced graphite. Its kind of a worst case scenario, and its not real likely but just don't let pro nuke fanatics tell you that there is zero risk of an accident with these reactors because there is never zero risk in anything that is full of radioactivity and operating at high temperatures.
No doubt China can press full steam ahead and it might work for them. Thanks to being a dictatorship they can overlook safety issues and cover up accidents unless they turn epic. The world should cheer them on because China has become one of the world's largest and dirtiest users of coal, their whole country is turning in to an ecological disaster as a result, and most of the pollution and green house gases are being shared with the rest of the world.
The U.S. wont be able to sustain its current military excess if the rest of its economy craters, or if it does it will suck the life out of everything else as it did in the Soviet Union and when American economy starts looking like the Soviet Union's support for the government will collapse just as it did in the Soviet Union.
The only other option for maintaining a huge military without a robust economy is to use it to dominate the economy and resources of the rest of the world though blackmail or outright intervention.
In many respects the Chinese, and the Japanese, are already funding the U.S. military because they are the primary purchasers of the U.S. governments debt which is necessary to support the huge deficits, and a big chunk of those deficits are going in to exploding defense and homeland security spending.
If the Chinese were to stop buying that debt they can place substantial pressure on the U.S. government unless someone else picks up the slack and that is likely to get worse not better. I'm not sure of the exact mechanics but I think if the chinese stop pegging their currency to the dollar, something the U.S. is pushing hard, that may also lead them to stop buying U.S. dollars and debt.
If the Republican's were so foolish as to actualize start privatizing Social Security in the near term that is going to place even more pressure on the U.S. deficits because:
A. the government will have to make up the shortfall it will create in paying out benefits to everyone over 55
B. The current large Social Security surplus that is funding U.S. government debt will disappear meaning there will be even less money going to support the excess of the U.S. government.
Based on the recent budget it appears the Bush administration plan is to continue inflating defense and homeland security spending, continue cutting taxes for the wealthy and slashing everything else(unless it benefits big corporations that support the Republicans (i.e. the Medicare reform sham for drug and health companies, Energy bill for big oil, coal and nuke, Social Security privitization for the big banks and investment firms, CEV and missile defense for Lockheed and Boeing).
Not sure I want to be defending the practical value of Hubble in particular and astronomy in general since it was my original argument that astronomy outside our solar system is of marginal real value, but...
The obvious role powerful telescopes would play if you have near light speed travel would be to locate potentially habitable planets around stars within 10-12 light years, like the Alpha Centauri system, Sirius, Lalande 21185, Ross 154, Luyten 726-8 AB, Barnard's Star, and Wolf 359.
I think its a product of having a bean counter as NASA administrator. NASA desperately needs to retire O'Keefe NOW because everyday he stays he is going to drive morale further in to the ground and further crater an agency that is almost past the point of no return. But I shudder to think what kind of loser and sycophant Bush will pick to replace him.
O'Keefe has NO background in aerospace and he has no grasp of what he's doing when it comes to space exploration or aeronautics. Closest he came was a stint as Navy secretary, here is his bio. I think Bush appointed him because he viewed NASA as a management problem to be cleaned up and he wasn't there because he has any vision for making NASA relevent again. As I recall when he arrived, they put NASA on a hard deadline to complete ISS launches, they even created a screen saver counting down the seconds until the next ISS launch deadline and they created an atmosphere where managers sacrificed Columbia because they were so busy obsessing over O'Keefe's bean counter deadline.
To O'Keefe the Hubble is:
- A safety problem
- An untidy accounting problem he needs to zero out
so he's willing to wast hundreds of millions of dollars to do nothing but burn it up in an orderly way.
As for the safety issue that O'Keefe is obesessing over, well you see he is a bean counter not a test pilot, not an engineer, not an astronaut, and he apparently can't cope with risk or danger. When Columbia crashed on his watch it so bent his head that its completely crippled his ability to move forward, and he, with the help of the commission that investigated Columbia has effectively crippled NASA's manned space program. At this point the shuttle can do nothing but fly back and forth to the ISS and then only very carefully and at great expense. The shuttle is essentially no more valuable than the ISS and the ISS has no value anyone can discern in its current crippled configuration and its deadend future.
The dangers of Hubble reentering on its own are wildly overblown. Fact is most its going to burn up and what doesn't is probably going to land in the middle of nowhere, most of the earth being empty. Columbia is a lot bigger than Hubble and it broke up over the U.S. and the debris didn't cause widespread loss of life. It is no more danger than a not particularly large meteor.
Wasting precious resources just to deorbit Hubble is insanity.
You can hold out hope all this will change with the holy grail, the CEV, but just note that the EARLIEST a manned CEV launch will launch is 2014 and that is assuming there aren't massive schedule slips which is the NASA/Boeing/Lockheed wat. That is ten years out just to put a small crew back in to space in a capsule. Apollo put men on the moon in less than ten years using now ancient technology and they were pushing back real frontiers and doing things never done before.
The CEV schedule alone is just completely pathetic. It has all the earmarks of an excuse to funnel large quantities of money in to the pockets of Lockheed and Boeing and never actually fly anything.
Well thats because you are thinking in terms of science and not practical benefit to mankind. I hate to break it to you but looking at objects that are light years away is good science, nice art, and intellectually interesting but its nearly meaningless in practical value until mankind develops a spacecraft that can manage a significant percentage of the speed of light so can either send something there or go there. Maybe if you contact another intelligence there that will make it worthwhile but those are long odds. A cosmology case can be made if you might answer how the universe originated but I expect the best you will do is identify an origin point and not a cause. The only part of astronomy that strikes me as having real near term value to our planet is the search for objects that are going to run in to, because if the object is big enough it might wipe us off this planet which is why we might want a second biosphere.....
So we come to Mars, as a precious resource, it is the only planetary body close enough to Earth to reach in a reasonable time, and with temperature, gravity, and a minimal atmosphere that will make it viable, though not pleasant for people to live there. It also probably has the resources to sustain life which is something the Moon probably never can. With some terraforming it might be possible to make it relatively habitable.
Putting a colony on Mars would result in wide ranging benefit to mankind, most importantly it would create a second biosphere, which we may need as we continue to overpopulate and stress the one we have, or if ours runs in to a natural or manmade cataclysm.
Its also likely the mere act of colonizing mars would push the technology envelope at a unprecedented pace in a lot of areas.
Aside from that it would open a new frontier and create a place for pioneers, explorers and adventurers which is something sorely lacking in this overcrowded world we live in. I think the sociology potential for a colony on another planet alone would be priceless, it would be a chance for a small group of people to start fresh without a lot of the cultural baggage and bigotry that infects every culture on this planet.
I get tired of saying it but if you have trouble letting Mars capture your imagination read Kim Stanley Robinson's excellent Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars trilogy.
"return from there?"
There is no particularly good reason to worry about the "return from there" part. The objective is to get people and cargo there on a regular basis and keep them alive there to form a permanent colony.
They are going to have a real problem adapting to earth gravity after a long duration Mars mission anyway so its probably better if they get to 1/3G and stay there.
I doubt you will have any shortage of adventurous people willing to go and stay.
So the objective is reliable and economical mechanism to get large masses to Mars, and land them safely, and on a regular basis so you can supply everything colonists can't find on Mars. But you do want to find everything on planet you can and you will find a lot more essentials on Mars than you will on the Moon as others have listed.
First and foremost you want to find abundant water close to the colony. From there Oxygen and Hydrogen follow if you have enough power. For abundant power you land a number of nuclear reactors which is, no suprise a key focus of the Russian space agencies mars plan. You also need to get fertilizer so nitrogen or sulfur are needed to make things like ammonium nitrare. You also need phosphorous and potassium most probably.
Ideally you would quickly stop relying on Earth for raw materials and the essentials for life and the cargo shipments would be confined to manufactured goods.
"The Space Shuttle can only go as high as 643km, and wouldn't be able to service the proposed probe."
The obvious downside being if it fails at launch or early in its life the whole thing is lost. Obviously if its cheaper to build a new one than send the shuttle launch to repair it, a sad commentary on the cost of shuttle launches, you can launch another, but if it takes 5 years to build a new one you are dead in the water for a long period.
The ability to service Hubble with the Shuttle proved priceless, you wonder if this new Hubble will regret not having that luxury.
I wonder if the CEV will be able to reach it if they actually manage to ever build one.
One thing I didn't entirely follow from the articles, though I didn't read them all, is this going to be placed in high enough an orbit that it won't decay enough to hit the atmosphere before its useful lifetime is up. I'd imagine that if that were the case it would preclude servicing with a shuttle mission if it were to have a major failure early in its life, not that thats ever happened :)
Would hope that they are planning to either put it in a high enough orbit it will last for 10-15 years or that they put a module in to boost its own orbit, though that would probably add to the cost and complexity of building it.
To me the deorbit module is a lot less important than a module to boost the orbit. All the hand wringing over Hubble reentering of its own accord is misplaced in my opinion. Chances are not many big pieces are going to survive reentry, the earth is still a relatively empty place and its not much more risk than a mid size meteor.
As I recall a key reason the mirror was wrong in the Hubble, or actually the reason it wasn't caught before launch, was that the only facility suitable for testing it was a top secret facility, run by Lockheed I believe, to test optical spy satellites and none of the NASA people involved wanted to sell their soul to the DoD to get the clearances necessary to work in it so they passed on testing that would have caught the problem on the ground.
Chances are you would have to clear the same hurdle with Hubble II to properly test it.
"advocating physical abuse"
He,he,he you're funny.
"*I* said was flamebait"
Your a little confused. I was saying that the original post was flamebait and you were a nitwit for saying it wasn't and that it was some kind of liberal conspiracy on Slashdot that led to it being marked as such.
Sorry but you, and every American like you, need slapped up side of the head if you think its OK for the U.S. to invade any country it feels like, whenever it feels like it.
CNN is running a story in the other direction, apparently the Bush administration and the Pentagon are astroturfing too.
The Pentagon has setup a number of web sites that look like news sites for various regions of interest around the globe. They've apparently hired a number of journalists to write article for them and post legitimate newswire articles. Unfortunately they are also psyops designed to shape public opinion in the target region and to tell the news with a pro American and pro Pentagon spin. Its not entirely new, Voice of America having been around for decades though everyone knows VOA is a propaganda station and listened to it for the music anyway, but its kind of new that this is on the web, and is another reason to be a little skeptical of what you read on the web.
There is apparently a less than obvious link on the page, with the disclaimer that the web sites are run by the Department of Defense but you really have to look to discover this.
Running this kind of operation in the U.S. is, I believe, illegal because its essentially government propaganda, but thanks to the web American's can be suckered by these sites as much as anyone else. I wouldn't be surprised if they get pulled in to news aggregators like Google News.
"All you've shown is that you disagree with the poster. That doesn't make it flamebait."
I think unless you are both far right wing and American it does. Quite obviously it DID invite a flame throwing contest, which I think is the definition of "flamebait", its saying something designed to provoke anger.
I object to the fact you were trying to do to Slashdot the same thing right wingers do to American media and America in general, start screaming "liberal bias" everytime something doesn't have a blatant right wing bias. It has been a quite successful tactic to pull American media to the right, in the case of Fox to the far right. That in turn has helped pull the whole country so far to the right its officially scary.
Me personally I'm glad Slashdot doesn't have a right wing bias. There still seem to be plenty of thinking, informed, rational people here, who reject fascism and scare mongering. There are also a lot of Slashdot readers who live outside the U.S. who can still recognize what was wrong in the post we are taking about here. Their minds aren't blinded by right wing propaganda, because they don't live in the U.S. They in general seem to have no use for the insanity thats infected the U.S. since the Republicans siezed power and since they were blessed with 9/11 to justify every excess. Thanks be there are still people left in the rest of the world who aren't dumb enough to fall for Republican propaganda. It a source of woe that the number of Americans who haven't been brainwashed by it appears to dwindle everyday.
"The people that work for the government are still just regular joes like you and me who will try their best to be good and do their jobs well."
Thats probably true of many, lifer, civil servents. Its not at all true of all the political appointess that RUN all those bureaucracies. They can and often are just as much idealogs as their commander-in-chief. They also can aggressively recruit some zealots who who have no concept of right and wrong. Especially since 9/11 they are in abundance, people who will lie, cheat, steal, torture, kill, eavesdrop, as long as they think they are avenging 9/11 and making America safe from the rest of the world. Pretty sure the DOD is full of them, special forces, etc. The CIA and FBI are a little more complicated. I think they have a lot of smart people who know right from wrong but they are no doubt being marginalized by the zealots and fanatics who have no concept of right and wrong.
Lets just look at the CIA. There were a bunch of people at the CIA that knew how full of crap the White House, the Pentagon and their own director were on just about everything about Iraq. And they fought it at every step often by leaking the truth. So if we stop at that point I've proven your theory of government correct. These good people did the right thing when their bosses didn't.
Unfortunately time kept moving and the President appointed a guy named Porter Goss to head the CIA. He has been purging all the disloyal from the top echelons of the CIA and encouraging everyone that isn't going to drink the Koolaid to leave, and many are. Taken to its logical conclusion the CIA will end up as a bunch of idealogs marching to Republican hymns, and rubber stamping their political agenda with phony intelligance.
Lets move over to the Pentagon. There was a head of the Joint Chiefs General Shinseki who made the mistake of saying in public that it would take several hundreds of thousands of troops to occupy and pacify Iraq. For making his "own decision about right and wrong" he was run out of the military on a rail. He in fact was correct and if the U.S. had another hundred thousand boots on the ground in Iraq during the invasion they probably could have controlled the looting and lawlessness that devastated Iraq's basic infrastructure and created a climate of fear and insecurity that persists to this day. They might have had enough troops to guard Abu Graib so it wouldn't have descended in to anarchy.
All in all I'd like to agree with your post and it does sound good on paper but unfortunately in practice it doesn't hold water. The government is a rigid hierarchy driven by very political master, more so today than ever, and the current administration can eliminate the people who do the right thing, and reward, promote and reinforce the people who do the wrong things. Bremer's tenure in Iraq was a disaster but he was rewarded with the Medal of Freedom. Alberto Gonzalez has consistently sought to obstruct congressional oversight, to circumvent the law, to justify the use of torture, and create a basis under which the President can immunize people from the law when he orders them to engage in illegal acts, in effect placing him and everyone working for him above the law. For his misdeeds he's been promoted to Attorney General.
"And just for my 2 cents on topic, tough luck Canada."
I would have to agree with you on this. I'm pretty sure the NSA, through Echelon, has been spying on Canadian's and most of the rest of the world for decades. Not sure there is any reason to get upset about it now if you've been OK with the U.S. spying on the world for all these years.
Its really only Americans that should be pissed off about all this new spying. Previously Americans were mostly exempt from being spied on by the CIA and the NSA, at least since early '70's when they were reigned in by Congress for all of the massive abuses they practiced in the '50's and '60's. Of course those abuses are most probably nothing compared to what they are engaged in today.
"If anything should be pushed into a decaying orbit, it should be that big fat waste of cash."
I kind of agree but I think that might be a bit extreme. I think you should probably give the Russian's the option of taking it over, or do something they may do anyway, undock the modules they built from the American bits and go it alone. Its lost on most American's but the Russian built components are pretty much a self contained space station, and are in may respects a successor to Mir, while the U.S. part is useless without the Russian modules. The Russian Space Agency is pretty strapped for cash but Russia might well keep it going as they did Mir, using the increasing bounty of their oil revenue, just for the prestige, if they can get rid of NASA as partners.
I'm inclined to think its pointless to debate Hubble's future at the moment. I'd wait until NASA gets a new administrator and hope he isn't as pathetic as the current one, though with George W. doing the picking my hopes for that are low.
Sean O'Keefe has consistently been the focal point of all the bad decision making regarding Hubble. He is the one that has refused to allow a shuttle mission to service it because its "DANGEROUS" though its been done multiple times before. He has been completely paralyzed by the Columbia disaster and he has paralyzed all of NASA as a consequence. I think is also the one that green lighted the robotic rescue mission which is an insane waste of even more money than a shuttle mission, and one with a dramaticly lower possibility of success.
I'd vote for NASA to call for volunteers and if seven astronauts do, in spite of it being "DANGEROUS", go for it. If they lose another shuttle in the process then its time to admit the Shuttle is hopeless, stop squandering the huge sums trying to make it safe, and build something new, though it might be "DANGEROUS" too because space flight is inherently dangerous. I guess you can stop going in to space at all if you can't cope with that fact.
I've wondered why it is we obsess so much over the 14 shuttle astronauts who've lost their lives while 30+ soldiers dieing in Iraq in a day doesn't even register.
"Ohhh, yeah that really looked like flamebait. "I am proud of my President and here's why.""
Nice editing. I think you quoted the only part of that post that WASN'T flambebait, to recap:
"Because Iraq was a potential threat"
Hate to break it to you but every country on the face of the earth is a "potential" threat by the rather low bar set by the Bush administration. You can fabricate a WMD case against any country on the planet and it will be impossible for them to disprove it. Once you flatten them then you just do what others have done in this thread and insist they were buried or spirited away to the next country on your take down list(so you can start working on the WMD case against them).
Thats why nearly every country on the planet, including many former allies are more afraid of the U.S. than of Al Qaida lately. I was interested to hear George W, in his State of the Union, had the nerve to openly threaten Saudi Arabia and Egypt. I imagine as of today there are two more former allies who will start actively siding against the U.S. even more than they have already. I assure you the Saudi royal family, corrupt and despicable as they are, can do a world of hurt to the U.S economicly.
"Not by striking back, but by striking first, hard and furiously."
That's how Nazi Germany protected itself too. To them France was a "potential" threat, and Poland, Czechoslovakia, Great Britain, Russia etc. If you think this is a valid way for a nation to act in this world, then you are saying it was A-OK for Nazi Germany to occupy Europe for the same reason.
As soon as a nation bestows upon itself the prerogative to attack any nation it chooses, on the flimsiest of evidence, or in fact no evidence at all, just the word of its leaders, it transforms itself into an outlaw and a rogue nation. Its called "Aggressive Warfare" and when a country engages in it, it is a tripwire for the rest of the world to band together against that country.
"Even look at us the wrong way, we won't be afraid to lay the smackdown on you or even glass you."
At this point the guy you are defending it just pure scary friend. The scarier thing is the majority of American's probably agree with him. Its a pretty sad commentary on what kind of a people Americans have turned in to. No doubt a product of to much TV, and TV violence, to much wealth, to little education, to little adversity, and a non stop diet of propaganda that American's are a superior people, and that the use of force is their prerogative and the preferred approach to dealing with every problem. An unfortunate consequence of being one of the few nations not devastated by World War II, which was more an accident of geography more than any inherent superiority of its people.
"He's got a big gun and he's not afraid to use it."
To quote the Wizard of Oz refering to the Scarecrow, now if he "only had a brain" to know when and when not to use it. A big gun and no brain is exactly why the rest of the world is increasingly turning against the U.S. Your friend seems to be confused thinking George W has taught the world to "respect" the U.S. I think its more probably fear and loathing, with a little contempt. Nations might be laughing behind the backs of America too, were this all not so dangerous.
"Hoo-ray for NASA! There's hope for them yet."
Actually I don't think there is any hope for them. Note that its going to take them 3-4 years and billions of dollar just to develop an unmanned prototype of a capsule that probably wont differ a lot from ones flown 40 years ago. I assume the prototypes are launching on an existing modified rocket design. Its not going to be sitting on top of a Saturn V so I doubt its going to reach anything past LEO. So you will need either multiple launches or a whole new heavy lifter to get past LEO.
So after unmanned launches in 2008 it will be some untold number of years after that before it becomes manned and operational. And then there all the undefined steps after that to to get to lunar orbit and build a vehicle that will land and take off from the moon, and lets not even think about Mars. And god forbid there is an accident or failure because NASA will go down for the count or least 2-3 years while the wring their hands over how DANGEROUS space flight is.
And of course this all assume they can maintain the funding and I assure you pouring money in to Boeing and Lockheed's coffers is going to take buckets of money at every phase.
The original submission was great about all the competitors and T/Space being in there but the key point is that there are only two slots in the competition. This is NASA, business as usual, things never change. One slot is for a Boeing led consortium and one is for Lockheed's. T/Space has zero chance of competing on their own. Either they bow out or they join one of the two big prime contractors. When they join a Boeing or Lockheed team any innovation the might want to try is probably going to have the life squeezed out of it. They will be lucky if they get to build the seat cushions or the toilet in the thing.
I hope I'm wrong but NASA more closely resembles a Soviet era politburo than a lean mean space exploring machine. I'd give anything if we could do a one for one trade and give NASA to Russia and get the Russian Space Agency in return. If they has NASA's funding without developing its overhead and ineptitude they would do great things.
I do dearly wish O'Keefe would get the hell out of the way and they appoint someone with some guts and some vision real soon. I saw him on the NASA channel last night doing the only thing he's done since Columbia, whining about how space flight is DANGEROUS and what a great thing it is even they are even launching the shuttle again because its so DANGEROUS. The guy is a morale destroying disaster all unto himself.
Burt Rutan would do nicely to completely shake the NASA up but the entrenched bureaucracy would kill him before he could kill it. He absolutely hates red tape, bureaucracy, paper work etc. I really can't see any way he is going to be able to stand getting entangled in the CEV competition because it going to be nothing but red tape and political infighting.
NASA HAS a heavy lift launch stack if they ever caught a clue.
The space shuttle stack is a GREAT heavy lift capability if you just get rid of all the Shuttle's dead weight. Replace it with a cargo module with some simpler disposable engines and you could lift a lot of cargo in to space for a lot less than starting a new booster from scratch. The external tank could also probably be boosted in to orbit and made use of as an orbit fuel tank if nothing else. If you retained even a fraction of its liquid hydrogen and oxygen in to orbit it would fuel all kinds of trips to the moon and back.
If the SRB's could be filled with the new parafin based fuel some university(Standford?) was working on they would be even better for cargo lifting, less toxic waste, and probably easier to manufacture. Solid rockets COMPLETElY suck for launching people because they are dangerous, once you light them you cant stop them and you are along for the ride. But they are wonderful for launching cargo where the safety standards are lower, with the caveat they are a little intense on G's and probably vibration. Its almost impossible for them to fail like a complex liquid fuel motor often does.
"It will work a whole hell of a lot better than on earth assembly."
No it wont unless by assembly you just mean "docking". Actually building stuff in space would be extraordinarily expensive.
First it would be really expensive to get engineers and machinists in to space that know how to build things, and train them to be astronauts and train them to work in zero G. Then you have to get all their tools in to space, and then you have to get all the raw materials in to space, nuts, bolts, etc., and you have to dispose of all the debris from building things, like metal shavings from drills which would be a complete nightmare inside an on orbit station. The mass you will have to lift to build things in space it far more than the mass to build them on the ground and launch them.
Maybe someday if you have a HUGE colony on the moon or Mars, or are mining and refining asteroids in space this might change but at the pace we are going that is at least a century out.
No, unless you are insane everything is going to be built on Earth for a long time to come and all you are going to do is dock modules together in space and maybe hook up cables and pipes like they have for decades on Skylab, Mir and the ISS.
Think you are mistaken. The X-35 is Lockheeds prototype for the Joint Strike Fighter.
Maybe you are refering to the X-30 National Aerospace Plane(NASP). OK you are mistaken there too. About the only part of that was built was a prototype Hydrogen fuel tank built by Lockheed. An old timer told them that using composites for it would never work, they didn't listen. As soon as they started testing it the layers in the tank started separating and it basicly fell part. Then the program was killed. They should have listened to the old timer.
As for the engines the closest thing they've gotten to the engines were the recent SCRAMJET tests NASA did. They are tiny scale models, being brought up to the narrow speed envelope where they actually work by a Pegasus booster, and only burned for a very short interval. The NASP design isn't even close to being feasible and may never be. You have to overcome the hurdle of find air breathing engines that work across a huge range of Mach numbers, or have multiple engines and rockets. IT has the same problem as the shuttle, huge amounts of dead weight that are being hauled into orbit and back again. Really the ONLY thing it gains is it not carrying oxygen on board since its getting it out of the atmosphere as long as its in the atmosphere.
All in all I would say this was mostly another NASA/Lockheed/Boeing fantasy. Not sure Lockheed or Boeing even believed in it they just wanted to suck as much money out of NASA's veins as they could before it got killed. They all created so many, promo films, and 3D models of it that they flew around on computers they actually kidded themselves in to thinking it would work.