If you read more than the first paragraph of my comment, the diverse individual is a goal of the Air Force, but that there are many reasons why this is often not the case.
The Academy offers degrees that are very diverse. History, Liberal Arts, Philosophy majors take courses in engineering. Engineers take quite a few courses in the liberal arts. In addition to all the military learning, you pretty much had to be a Type A personality to be successful there. Also, just taking those courses doesn't mean you learn anything from them.
Military does require diverse individuals, the jack of all trades type, or at least jack of several trades. I held several very diverse jobs while in, and some of those jobs were jack of all trades type--I rarely knew what assignment I might be working on next, all I knew is that I was expected to adapt and succeed.
Of course, often I was forced to adapt and succeed because some higher up who barely knew what was placed in front of him acted like Dilbert's Pointy Haired Boss and now I had to respond--because I was one of the more adaptable.
As far the outsourcing, you could be absolutely correct. A lot is being outsourced, a lot is being reviewed for being outsourced, or at least converted to a government civilian job, which could then be later outsourced. And the review process makes it an interminably slow process. 10% actually seems low.
The diverse individual is exactly what the US Air Force tries to encourage in its officer corps. The diverse individual is more able to think through a problem, not just what they were trained to do, especially since shit happens. This means that officers switch jobs every 2-3 years on average, even though from a business sense, this is idiotic, due to the turnover. By the time you are comfortable in your job and effective, it is time to move to the next job. This and various training offered to its officers in different portions of their careers definitely broaden their officer corps.
Now having said that, it by no means that the Air Force is successfully preparing its generals, or that only the best officers reach command. Politics and brown-nosing come into play, as well as other reasons. Plus, the plan gets tweaked every 2-3 years (surprisingly this is about the same rate that new generals take command)
The diverse individuals are the ones who go beyond the norm. As you mentioned, these people were the innovative thinkers of the past. It would be a great loss to humanity if all people stopped trying to be diverse.
In a similar situation, my mother used to teach elementary school in South Carolina. She wanted to fail four children who had underperformed all year and were not ready to learn at the next level, 4th grade. She told her principal, and he of course did not want to fail any of them. But he compromised and asked her to give them three tests and if they passed any of them (he set passing as a 25%) then they could proceed to the next grade. One still failed.
Yes, they did try to lead you early on to believe it was Jack, but as soon as they showed the video on the planet with the injured soldier and Janet, and how the reporter was talking, I got the hints that it was Janet that died.
My wife asked why would they kill her off. I told her probably cause she is headed to do something else. Janet was a decent character, but she was often just a bit character in the show. If they want a beloved character to die, but cause the least impact to the show, Janet was the one. In addition, notice how Cassandra was handled. Samantha mentions her, but she's never shown. I wonder if they even tried to get the actress who played her in for a brief cameo.
Re:Play nice with Piers Anthony
on
Singularity Sky
·
· Score: 1
On a Pale Horse is a fantastic novel. Time leaves you a little confused, you need to reread it to understand it completely. War was OK. Fates and Green Mother were substandard at best. But Anthony wove a good tale with For Love of Evil.
If nothing else, that series takes on a storyline and a world that few would have, and overall he does a good job. I agree that some of the books did not measure up, I think mostly cause of the subject matter--he forced himself in a corner by one book for each incarnation.
And to quote the above article: 'Guessing the plural of a Latin word is one of those things where a little learning is a dangerous thing (but that's still "not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance," to quote Terry Pratchett'
And if 'a little learning' isn't the definition of the/. crowd, I don't know what is.
When I get manageable flulike symptoms my first activity is to get some rest and fluids. IF it gets worse, I see a doctor. Often, it's still just the flu (or one time Mono), and I rest some more, more fluids and treat the symptoms with the OTC stuff that he usually recommends.
In those cases it's not the flu, then it's usually a sinus infection. At that point it's not antibiotics, its something stronger than OTC, because a sinus infection (at least mine) just keep getting worse unless I get prescription strength.
After those, well then I may need antibiotics. Doesn't happen too often.
Yes, I experienced that partial vision loss three times over the course of a year. Countless doctor visits and tests (a dozen vials of blood one time--wait that was for something else) And in the end they chalked it up to migraines. All three times the loss was for about 30 minutes, no more. And one other time years before, a complete loss for about a second.
And when wearing the wrong pants/shorts & boxer combination, I have sat on my testicles entirely too many times. And usually it was for baggy clothing, not tight..Allowed them to go where they shouldn't have been.
ok, so foo.net applies first and gets foo. Foo.com being slow then chooses... foocom, and foo.org choose fooorg.
And you decide that it worked so well for your new internet, that you decide to get rid of folders on your computer. All files belong at the top level. All the confusion of which folder is it in goes away. and who needed all those readme files anyways. one is good enough./sarcasm off
The domains make sense because they organize the internet somewhat. Those people who don't understand the difference between whitehouse.com and whitehouse.gov need to step away from their computer and RTFM, a FAQ or two, take a class, before they proceed any further.
In those rare times when I need to know the time and I am not near a time piece of some sort (car radio clock, work computer, home clock, vcr clock, microwave clock, the list goes on and on) I use other people wearing watches. I don't think much of watches as jewelry anyways, or jewelry for that matter. Much like the way the Dimaond Industry promoted diamonds became accepted as the must have thing when you got married, now Watchmakers promote designer watches as the thing to have.
Similarly, the French perfume makers promoted perfume as the must thing to have. Now just think if the water companies and bath tub manufacturers had stepped forward instead. The French would have be seen (and smelled) much differently by the American public. And people wouldn't pay exorbitant prices to smell like, well, whoever the current celebrity is. Wait that's the American marketing machine at work. Marketing. Only OJ's defense team and politicians spread the brown stuff deeper.
I use POPFile myself and love it. I have 7 categories and an overal 95.88% success rate (false positives and false negatives), but most of that is due to 3 somewhat overlapping categories. If I merged those three into one, I'd have about a 98% success rate. Since approximately 3/4 of the emails I get are spam, POPFile is a necessity.
I also had to tweak it a little bit, adding some entries to the ignored words in order to improve its success rate. I still have to check those declared spam, but when I do, I am just looking at who the emails are from, and I scan it quickly. And if my mother stopped forwarding junk, I would be be getting a much better success rate. Who else has a category called MOMJUNK? And POPFile has gotten pretty good at separating my mother junk forwards from her actual emails.
But having used it for quite some time now, there are going to be two types of emails that get through a POPFile user's spam filter. The first is the short email, particularly from a new email address. There's just not enough data to effectively filter it. The other is what Graham is talking about and it is somewhat unique to each user. My set of words will be different than the next person, depending on how I trained the filter. But there may be some words or group of words that will get a (short) spam message past many/most users spam filter. But as the spammers discover these words and use them against Bayesian filters, their effective will decrease. ANd the cycle will begin anew.
The contractors who build the houses want to make their money fast. The only way to do this is to have fast turnaround and build them fast. That means to build crap. Fancy looking crap, but still crap. A good solid brick apartment would take too long to get them the profit margins they want. Down here in (Central) Florida (the part where seniors (old folk) congregate-think human equivalent of elephant graveyard.)the old folk (northerners, including Canadians) buy sight unseen en masse. Before long, Florida's going to be one big retirement home/golf course community (at least Central Florida). South Florida of course will be north Puerto Rico/Cuba.
Re:How stupid do you have to be?
on
SCO Offline
·
· Score: 1
You know, all the comments about Darl got me to thinking. What needs to be done is to get that Joe Isuzu guy. (The guy who did the Isuzu commercials and they kept putting "He's lying" type words on the screen.) Just have Joe Isuzu speak the major comments that Darl has been saying, with the added on screen words similar to the Isuzu commercials.
All Open source coders are average or do they just have a high opinion of closed source ones? I think it's more likely they fall into the showing off category. If you've got it, flaunt it.
The key is the perception. It just means that the best Open source coders think that many people could match their production if they just tried. Whereas many of the closed source programmers BELIEVE their product is outside the norm and don't want it proven to be just average.
My comments were specifically about if they had noticed the foam hit before they entered orbit. Then NASA has several abort modes available to them. Re-entry is a different problem. They do have some leeway to move stress around some... but orbital speeds are very high. And the Shuttle depends on drag to reduce that speed. So as long as it is still orbital, the drag is going to be high on re-entry.
Perhaps a skip re-entry might be possible, but that might put even higher stresses on the vehicle, particularly the wings--you probably would not want to attempt it with a bad wing. NASA may or may not have considered it in the past. Hopefully they have, and determined if it was feasible or not.
There are several abort modes. First is an RTB (Return to Base). Shuttle drops the SRBs (if not already dropped) and the ET and attempts to fly back to KSC. In fact, one of the callouts is when the Shuttle can no longer return to KSC and must continue on. I used to know the approximate time for that but can not remember at this time. They also have some water ditch options I believe.
Next is land in Europe at one of the TAL (Transoceanic Abort Landing) sites. How they get the Shuttle back at that point is a good question. Probably become a museum piece over there (the normal aircraft that brings it from the west coast can't make it) or one long boat trip.
Finally is the AOA (Abort Once Around) where they have enough energy to make orbit or at least into California and they head for an Edwards AFB landing where the initial missions landed.
At 81 seconds (I am fairly sure) they still could have returned to KSC. However, first you have to recognize the damage, realize the problem (can no longer do a normal reentry), and take action (command an abort, if necessary). Whenever the damage is unclear as it was in this case (remember, no one even knew there was a foam strike till the next day) there was no possibility to make the call to RTB.
The history of this (and other problems) is in the official report but it was also in the Challenger report. Both stated the the erosion of a safety culture--Safety had voiced concerns--in fact, there thousands of waivers. The foam problem happened repeatedly. Since NASA had escaped critical damage, now managers required safety personnel to prove it was a deadly problem rather than a maintenance issue. Safety personnel were silent at meetings, having either bought into the culture or been beat down by it.
Think if your newly licensed 16 your old child began running red lights, but "only those that had just turned red Dad" After a couple times, the child will believe that it is safe to do so. It pretty much takes an accident at that point to convince them otherwise. NASA's history of safety convinced them that they were safe. In fact, NASA pretty much discounted the Challenger accident, because of all the changes they made. Except for the most important one, the management culture, which never really changed, and probably still exists as it ever was.
But this is a classic lack of communication problem, people voiced there concerns but they where shooshed away because of the "nah that won't happen" syndrom.. lets hope we all learn from this lesson.
The lack of communication is discussed in full detail in the offical report. The main report is in chapter I (hundreds of pages) with supporting details in Chapters II thru IV (at least 1000 pages) The supporting details include the report after the fact on how they determined how much foam struck the wing and where it hit. Surprising how good the initial estimates were.
When I read that document and the supporting ones, I just wanted to wring the NASA managers' necks. They may not have been able to save the astronauts, but they ruined any chances. Definitely PHB's and should have been let go (fired), not transferred.
At the end of the day they knew the risks, and they took them...
And not only that, if the Shuttle on launch were to take a left turn towards Titusville or a right turn towards Cocoa Beach or Cape Canaveral, the Flight Control Officers (FCO) might have to initiate the flight destruct units on the SRBs. The odds of that happening are much slimmer than the type of accident that befell Columbia, but it is still nonzero. Plus, the astronauts may have the chance to separate the SRBs or regain control and allow the FCO's (and especially the astronauts) a chance to breathe again. Situations abound and fortunately none have happened. NASA exercises the different possibilities regularly. And the FCO's would take action if necessary, potentially killing the astronauts onboard, to save the lives of thousands. Just one more thing of which the astronauts are fully aware.
Use 10 cheaper ones and have more forward error correction than you will ever need.
Don't forget they are under power constraints (already mentioned) and also very serious, weight constraints. It had to be launched in the first place. Start throwing 10-time redundancy on basic equipment and you're tossing the science equipment overboard. Before long you have a highly redundant brick for all it is useful for. Or, you have a humongous, heavily redundant, HEAVY piece of scientific equipment that requires two Saturn V strapped together to get it into low Earth orbit. These trade-offs are a necessity of life in designing a space mission.
However, I will also say that NASA has an extreme history of misplaced optimism. Their risk analyses are often extensive, however they either have probabilities that are an order of magnitude or more off (NASA estimated early shuttle launches probability of catastrophic failure somewhere between 400 to 1 and 10000 to 1--current estimates should be between 50 to 1 and 100 to 1. However NASA will likely evaluate it closer to 200 to 1). The other common NASA problem is to ignore problems are negligible danger, foam strikes anyone?
So when planning this mission, I would guess that NASA did realize the potential problems with the memory and either went "the chance of it happening is 100,000 to 1" or "We have built-in redundancy, no problem" or even "If those first two statements fail us, we can fix it in less than an hour and be back on mission."
Since Binding NOTA would force the big 2 parties to be more responsive to the people, you can rest assured it will happen shortly after water freezes on a hot stove.
I still love Brewster's Millions with Richard Pryor and John Candy. Great example of when a Binding NOTA should be used. Remember, the best way to change politics is with humor, not rational thought. The other way is with a great tragedy, but it also does not depend on rational thought and the results are more likely to backfire (9/11 and Patriot Act anyone?)
This whole thing is a complete fiasco. We should go back to marking a piece of paper with a pen, putting the piece of paper in a box, and counting them up. It's harder (more time consuming, more physical evidence to hide) to destroy an entire box of ballots than it is to type format c:/y
We can't get it right, because (1) we can't eliminate people based on intelligence/ability to fill in a a simple ballot (not because of the morality, but because just think who would be in charge of making the tests--that's a sure fire fiasco) (2) You will therefore find some set of people who will screw up their ballot NO MATTER what form the ballot takes (paper, see Florida or computer, see Florida--but any state would satisfy this.) (3) More importantly, that even if they do know how to vote and vote properly, they still vote for the same crooked parties every time (Republican/Democratic)
So it really matters little which one wins, all that matters is how we get punished after the election
PS. I do vote and I vote anti-Dem, anti-Rep. If I must, it's write-in votes.
Here at Cape Canaveral, for the Safety systems, it is taking ages to replace the old systems. But soon (the same thing said for the past ten years) we should be able to get rid of our 50s-70s technology and upgrade to mid 80s technology.
Slashdot Mirror
If you read more than the first paragraph of my comment, the diverse individual is a goal of the Air Force, but that there are many reasons why this is often not the case.
The Academy offers degrees that are very diverse. History, Liberal Arts, Philosophy majors take courses in engineering. Engineers take quite a few courses in the liberal arts. In addition to all the military learning, you pretty much had to be a Type A personality to be successful there. Also, just taking those courses doesn't mean you learn anything from them.
Military does require diverse individuals, the jack of all trades type, or at least jack of several trades. I held several very diverse jobs while in, and some of those jobs were jack of all trades type--I rarely knew what assignment I might be working on next, all I knew is that I was expected to adapt and succeed.
Of course, often I was forced to adapt and succeed because some higher up who barely knew what was placed in front of him acted like Dilbert's Pointy Haired Boss and now I had to respond--because I was one of the more adaptable.
As far the outsourcing, you could be absolutely correct. A lot is being outsourced, a lot is being reviewed for being outsourced, or at least converted to a government civilian job, which could then be later outsourced. And the review process makes it an interminably slow process. 10% actually seems low.
The diverse individual is exactly what the US Air Force tries to encourage in its officer corps. The diverse individual is more able to think through a problem, not just what they were trained to do, especially since shit happens. This means that officers switch jobs every 2-3 years on average, even though from a business sense, this is idiotic, due to the turnover. By the time you are comfortable in your job and effective, it is time to move to the next job. This and various training offered to its officers in different portions of their careers definitely broaden their officer corps.
Now having said that, it by no means that the Air Force is successfully preparing its generals, or that only the best officers reach command. Politics and brown-nosing come into play, as well as other reasons. Plus, the plan gets tweaked every 2-3 years (surprisingly this is about the same rate that new generals take command)
The diverse individuals are the ones who go beyond the norm. As you mentioned, these people were the innovative thinkers of the past. It would be a great loss to humanity if all people stopped trying to be diverse.
Now goto may have been the right choice. If he came from a dead end town, he may never have wanted to return.
In a similar situation, my mother used to teach elementary school in South Carolina. She wanted to fail four children who had underperformed all year and were not ready to learn at the next level, 4th grade. She told her principal, and he of course did not want to fail any of them. But he compromised and asked her to give them three tests and if they passed any of them (he set passing as a 25%) then they could proceed to the next grade. One still failed.
Yes, they did try to lead you early on to believe it was Jack, but as soon as they showed the video on the planet with the injured soldier and Janet, and how the reporter was talking, I got the hints that it was Janet that died.
My wife asked why would they kill her off. I told her probably cause she is headed to do something else. Janet was a decent character, but she was often just a bit character in the show. If they want a beloved character to die, but cause the least impact to the show, Janet was the one. In addition, notice how Cassandra was handled. Samantha mentions her, but she's never shown. I wonder if they even tried to get the actress who played her in for a brief cameo.
On a Pale Horse is a fantastic novel. Time leaves you a little confused, you need to reread it to understand it completely. War was OK. Fates and Green Mother were substandard at best. But Anthony wove a good tale with For Love of Evil.
If nothing else, that series takes on a storyline and a world that few would have, and overall he does a good job. I agree that some of the books did not measure up, I think mostly cause of the subject matter--he forced himself in a corner by one book for each incarnation.
Viruses
What is the plural of penis and other latin looking words
And to quote the above article: 'Guessing the plural of a Latin word is one of those things where a little learning is a dangerous thing (but that's still "not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance," to quote Terry Pratchett'
And if 'a little learning' isn't the definition of the /. crowd, I don't know what is.
That was a Beverly Hillbillies episode as well.
When I get manageable flulike symptoms my first activity is to get some rest and fluids. IF it gets worse, I see a doctor. Often, it's still just the flu (or one time Mono), and I rest some more, more fluids and treat the symptoms with the OTC stuff that he usually recommends.
In those cases it's not the flu, then it's usually a sinus infection. At that point it's not antibiotics, its something stronger than OTC, because a sinus infection (at least mine) just keep getting worse unless I get prescription strength.
After those, well then I may need antibiotics. Doesn't happen too often.
Yes, I experienced that partial vision loss three times over the course of a year. Countless doctor visits and tests (a dozen vials of blood one time--wait that was for something else) And in the end they chalked it up to migraines. All three times the loss was for about 30 minutes, no more. And one other time years before, a complete loss for about a second.
And when wearing the wrong pants/shorts & boxer combination, I have sat on my testicles entirely too many times. And usually it was for baggy clothing, not tight..Allowed them to go where they shouldn't have been.
ok, so foo.net applies first and gets foo. Foo.com being slow then chooses... foocom, and foo.org choose fooorg.
And you decide that it worked so well for your new internet, that you decide to get rid of folders on your computer. All files belong at the top level. All the confusion of which folder is it in goes away. and who needed all those readme files anyways. one is good enough. /sarcasm off
The domains make sense because they organize the internet somewhat. Those people who don't understand the difference between whitehouse.com and whitehouse.gov need to step away from their computer and RTFM, a FAQ or two, take a class, before they proceed any further.
In those rare times when I need to know the time and I am not near a time piece of some sort (car radio clock, work computer, home clock, vcr clock, microwave clock, the list goes on and on) I use other people wearing watches. I don't think much of watches as jewelry anyways, or jewelry for that matter. Much like the way the Dimaond Industry promoted diamonds became accepted as the must have thing when you got married, now Watchmakers promote designer watches as the thing to have.
Similarly, the French perfume makers promoted perfume as the must thing to have. Now just think if the water companies and bath tub manufacturers had stepped forward instead. The French would have be seen (and smelled) much differently by the American public. And people wouldn't pay exorbitant prices to smell like, well, whoever the current celebrity is. Wait that's the American marketing machine at work. Marketing. Only OJ's defense team and politicians spread the brown stuff deeper.
I use POPFile myself and love it. I have 7 categories and an overal 95.88% success rate (false positives and false negatives), but most of that is due to 3 somewhat overlapping categories. If I merged those three into one, I'd have about a 98% success rate. Since approximately 3/4 of the emails I get are spam, POPFile is a necessity.
I also had to tweak it a little bit, adding some entries to the ignored words in order to improve its success rate. I still have to check those declared spam, but when I do, I am just looking at who the emails are from, and I scan it quickly. And if my mother stopped forwarding junk, I would be be getting a much better success rate. Who else has a category called MOMJUNK? And POPFile has gotten pretty good at separating my mother junk forwards from her actual emails.
But having used it for quite some time now, there are going to be two types of emails that get through a POPFile user's spam filter. The first is the short email, particularly from a new email address. There's just not enough data to effectively filter it. The other is what Graham is talking about and it is somewhat unique to each user. My set of words will be different than the next person, depending on how I trained the filter. But there may be some words or group of words that will get a (short) spam message past many/most users spam filter. But as the spammers discover these words and use them against Bayesian filters, their effective will decrease. ANd the cycle will begin anew.
The contractors who build the houses want to make their money fast. The only way to do this is to have fast turnaround and build them fast. That means to build crap. Fancy looking crap, but still crap. A good solid brick apartment would take too long to get them the profit margins they want. Down here in (Central) Florida (the part where seniors (old folk) congregate-think human equivalent of elephant graveyard.)the old folk (northerners, including Canadians) buy sight unseen en masse. Before long, Florida's going to be one big retirement home/golf course community (at least Central Florida). South Florida of course will be north Puerto Rico/Cuba.
You know, all the comments about Darl got me to thinking. What needs to be done is to get that Joe Isuzu guy. (The guy who did the Isuzu commercials and they kept putting "He's lying" type words on the screen.) Just have Joe Isuzu speak the major comments that Darl has been saying, with the added on screen words similar to the Isuzu commercials.
The key is the perception. It just means that the best Open source coders think that many people could match their production if they just tried. Whereas many of the closed source programmers BELIEVE their product is outside the norm and don't want it proven to be just average.
My comments were specifically about if they had noticed the foam hit before they entered orbit. Then NASA has several abort modes available to them. Re-entry is a different problem. They do have some leeway to move stress around some... but orbital speeds are very high. And the Shuttle depends on drag to reduce that speed. So as long as it is still orbital, the drag is going to be high on re-entry. Perhaps a skip re-entry might be possible, but that might put even higher stresses on the vehicle, particularly the wings--you probably would not want to attempt it with a bad wing. NASA may or may not have considered it in the past. Hopefully they have, and determined if it was feasible or not.
There are several abort modes. First is an RTB (Return to Base). Shuttle drops the SRBs (if not already dropped) and the ET and attempts to fly back to KSC. In fact, one of the callouts is when the Shuttle can no longer return to KSC and must continue on. I used to know the approximate time for that but can not remember at this time. They also have some water ditch options I believe.
Next is land in Europe at one of the TAL (Transoceanic Abort Landing) sites. How they get the Shuttle back at that point is a good question. Probably become a museum piece over there (the normal aircraft that brings it from the west coast can't make it) or one long boat trip.
Finally is the AOA (Abort Once Around) where they have enough energy to make orbit or at least into California and they head for an Edwards AFB landing where the initial missions landed.
At 81 seconds (I am fairly sure) they still could have returned to KSC. However, first you have to recognize the damage, realize the problem (can no longer do a normal reentry), and take action (command an abort, if necessary). Whenever the damage is unclear as it was in this case (remember, no one even knew there was a foam strike till the next day) there was no possibility to make the call to RTB.
The history of this (and other problems) is in the official report but it was also in the Challenger report. Both stated the the erosion of a safety culture--Safety had voiced concerns--in fact, there thousands of waivers. The foam problem happened repeatedly. Since NASA had escaped critical damage, now managers required safety personnel to prove it was a deadly problem rather than a maintenance issue. Safety personnel were silent at meetings, having either bought into the culture or been beat down by it.
Think if your newly licensed 16 your old child began running red lights, but "only those that had just turned red Dad" After a couple times, the child will believe that it is safe to do so. It pretty much takes an accident at that point to convince them otherwise. NASA's history of safety convinced them that they were safe. In fact, NASA pretty much discounted the Challenger accident, because of all the changes they made. Except for the most important one, the management culture, which never really changed, and probably still exists as it ever was.
The lack of communication is discussed in full detail in the offical report. The main report is in chapter I (hundreds of pages) with supporting details in Chapters II thru IV (at least 1000 pages) The supporting details include the report after the fact on how they determined how much foam struck the wing and where it hit. Surprising how good the initial estimates were.
When I read that document and the supporting ones, I just wanted to wring the NASA managers' necks. They may not have been able to save the astronauts, but they ruined any chances. Definitely PHB's and should have been let go (fired), not transferred.
And not only that, if the Shuttle on launch were to take a left turn towards Titusville or a right turn towards Cocoa Beach or Cape Canaveral, the Flight Control Officers (FCO) might have to initiate the flight destruct units on the SRBs. The odds of that happening are much slimmer than the type of accident that befell Columbia, but it is still nonzero. Plus, the astronauts may have the chance to separate the SRBs or regain control and allow the FCO's (and especially the astronauts) a chance to breathe again. Situations abound and fortunately none have happened. NASA exercises the different possibilities regularly. And the FCO's would take action if necessary, potentially killing the astronauts onboard, to save the lives of thousands. Just one more thing of which the astronauts are fully aware.
Don't forget they are under power constraints (already mentioned) and also very serious, weight constraints. It had to be launched in the first place. Start throwing 10-time redundancy on basic equipment and you're tossing the science equipment overboard. Before long you have a highly redundant brick for all it is useful for. Or, you have a humongous, heavily redundant, HEAVY piece of scientific equipment that requires two Saturn V strapped together to get it into low Earth orbit. These trade-offs are a necessity of life in designing a space mission.
However, I will also say that NASA has an extreme history of misplaced optimism. Their risk analyses are often extensive, however they either have probabilities that are an order of magnitude or more off (NASA estimated early shuttle launches probability of catastrophic failure somewhere between 400 to 1 and 10000 to 1--current estimates should be between 50 to 1 and 100 to 1. However NASA will likely evaluate it closer to 200 to 1). The other common NASA problem is to ignore problems are negligible danger, foam strikes anyone?
So when planning this mission, I would guess that NASA did realize the potential problems with the memory and either went "the chance of it happening is 100,000 to 1" or "We have built-in redundancy, no problem" or even "If those first two statements fail us, we can fix it in less than an hour and be back on mission."
I still love Brewster's Millions with Richard Pryor and John Candy. Great example of when a Binding NOTA should be used. Remember, the best way to change politics is with humor, not rational thought. The other way is with a great tragedy, but it also does not depend on rational thought and the results are more likely to backfire (9/11 and Patriot Act anyone?)
My vote is never on the ballot, public execution of the incumbent. I've been denied my right to vote!
We can't get it right, because (1) we can't eliminate people based on intelligence/ability to fill in a a simple ballot (not because of the morality, but because just think who would be in charge of making the tests--that's a sure fire fiasco) (2) You will therefore find some set of people who will screw up their ballot NO MATTER what form the ballot takes (paper, see Florida or computer, see Florida--but any state would satisfy this.) (3) More importantly, that even if they do know how to vote and vote properly, they still vote for the same crooked parties every time (Republican/Democratic)
So it really matters little which one wins, all that matters is how we get punished after the election
PS. I do vote and I vote anti-Dem, anti-Rep. If I must, it's write-in votes.
Here at Cape Canaveral, for the Safety systems, it is taking ages to replace the old systems. But soon (the same thing said for the past ten years) we should be able to get rid of our 50s-70s technology and upgrade to mid 80s technology.