Any anti-spyware, anti-spam, anti-bad-computer-thing that Congress codifies into law will be at best worthless and at worst disastrous for legitimate users. Why? I'm glad you asked. The reason is simple: there are people making money off spam and spyware. People who make money from something are always willing to give money to Congress to keep it coming, and Xrist knows Congressmen are always willing to take money in exchange for their legislative services. On the flip side, what've you got? Are you willing to send money to a Congresswhore to make the Net more usable for the good guys? Can you send enough to offset the DMA?
Good point. I should have been more clear about my limited experience, esp. that my negative reinforcement came from a single source. Multiple parties, mind you, but a single source. IRC channels tend to show a painful degree of self-selecting exclusivity.
During the brief time I had Debian on one of my machines, I experienced firsthand the arrogance of the Debian fanbase. When I asked in an IRC channel why an upgrade to mplayer felt that removing KDE entirely and most of X11 was a good thing to do, I was sneeringly told that if I had problems with that then Debian was Not For Me. And so I agreed, and so I returned to the RPM-based distros.
The point of the post is that I have a strong sense that if the Ubuntu folks had said "Hey, we've got some ideas and we'd like to make some changes to Debian" they'd've been told to go pound sand. The Debian developers and fanboys are so fixated on the One True Path that there's no stopping them.
Laws? Great googly-moogly, no. But I'll bet two dimes to a doughnut that pretty much everyone who travels to another world, whether on his own initiative or as a government employee, is going to have to come home post-haste or die. There's no air out there. No food, damn little water, too much radiation, the works.
Not sure how you leapt from my statement to "Lock 'em up if they leave the atmosphere." All I meant is that travel to other worlds will be nothing more than an opportunity to plant a flag and bring home some rocks. The science fiction notion of outposts and useful space stations and commuter ships between them all is just that -- fiction.
It is absurd. I'm sorry, but Earth is the only body in the solar system that can support human life. Any outposts will be just that, utterly dependent on the home world for food, water, air, and materiel.
Unless, of course, you believe in terraforming, in which case we've reached the same impasse one finds in discussions between the devout and the atheist.
I understand your point. Thing is, we're still at the baby-steps stage of space exploration. Before we drop tens or hundreds of billions of dollars developing the technology to send men to Mars for (optimistically) a few weeks to explore a tiny area around their landing site, I think we should spend a few ones of billions of lots of probes that we can drop all over the heavenly bodies to spend months finding the more promising candidates.
The scientific instrumentation and experiments are pre-determined here on Earth. Sure, men can fix things that just stay broken on a machine probe, but it's not like men take up a machine shop to fabricate a spectral mumbleizer in transit because they realize that mumbleizing would be good to do.
Also, I take objection to your opening sentences. I am a huge fan of exploring the universe we find ourselves in. I'm not so blindered as to think the only way we can do that is by sending people, though. We understand Mars better than we do the moon even though we've had a dozen guys stand on the latter. Going to other worlds isn't like loading up a sailing ship and traveling to the other side of the same planet you evolved for. We owe it to those who will go to know as much as possible about the places they'll visit. We're simply not to the point where it's time to talk seriously about sending people to faraway worlds.
I disagree with the idea that without manned spaceflight, the entire space program is doomed. NASA's webservers (OK, JPL's) have consistently collapsed under the load of people checking the initial data returns from the unmanned probes. The Mars rovers, Galileo, Cassini-Huygens have all been huge successes. I think you underestimate the people's willingness to pay for good science, as well as their ability to understand what makes good science.
There will always be those who cling to the absurd notion that humanity will spread to the other bodies in our solar system. There will also be those who denounce spending a penny on "frivolous" ventures like space probes as long as Just One Child Goes Hungry here on Earth. I'm a fan of spending money wisely. We could be littering the entire solar system with probes if we'd stop spending people up to film themselves drinking spheres of Tang or working hard raising spiders in microgravity in the experiment submitted by Mrs. Wachowski's third-grade class in Salina, KS. Bang for buck.
Sadly, the current administration policy is to strip the entire space program of money to pay for the absurd Moon-Mars Initiative. Fortunately, the current administration has only 3 years, 10 months, and 10 days remaining. If we're lucky NASA will survive that period with no significant losses beyond Hubble (which is a doozy of a loss).
If I quoted as much of Malor's parent post as I wanted to, I'd just repost the whole thing. Since that would be inappropriate, I'll just say "I love you, man. Woman. Kid. Whatever."
I don't know what was known about Lee's behavior prior to the first public airings. I do know that when his security clearance was pulled and he was banished to unclassified work, the investigating Feds expressly forbade notification of that, so he was able to engage in some "social engineering" and do more dirty deeds. That's right, the Department of Justice left a criminal in a sensitive position in the hope that he would do something even worse that they could nail him for.
As for my own knowledge of his conduct, I did not know he was coming in to his office in the middle of the night to download files. Many of us knew he was an underperforming employee with weak skills in the job he held. We did not know he was breaking the law. We found out at the same time the rest of America did -- although by virtue of working here and having clearances, we found out a bit more.
Disclaimer: I don't and can't speak for LANL. If you want the official word, call the Public Affairs Office and ask to speak to one of the mouthpieces there.
The primary reason Lee has the reputation as a wronged man is because Americans really, really liked "The X-Files". People _want_ to believe that the resources of the US government were brought to bear on an innocent man in an election year to promote or dissuade shadowy agendas hammered out by smoking men in darkened rooms. Even better that he was foreign-born of the inscrutable Chinese race, because now it means the shadowy government is racist, too, and didn't we always know THAT? OK, that's probably not the primary reason, but I do think it's a strong component. People pride themselves on "seeing through the lies". It means they're smarter than the evil government. It bolsters their self-esteem.
Another major component is that we are bound by the same rules Wen Ho was, only we actually do take them seriously. It's difficult to say much about what he did without violating classification rules. That puts Wen Ho and his defenders at an advantage in that they can say things like "Everyone at Los Alamos copies classified data onto unclassified media and takes it home"; we can't say "On this and this and this date, Wen Ho copied this and this and this computer file in violation of the Atomic Energy Act." We simply cannot talk about what he took and how he took it.
We have indeed seen many changes in policy and practice lab-wide since the summer of 2000. As fate would have it, this past summer's incident was a violation of procedures implemented in the Wen Ho fallout. Even more new rules and procedures have been piled on since the stand-down of operations. Some of those rules are subject to -- you got it -- classification and don't get talked about on the outside. Others are freely discussed. Suffice to say that after this summer, even getting one's hands on a piece of writeable media is a herculean challenge. Infrastructure is being upgraded and employee training has been augmented. We're better now than we were a year ago, and that was better than five years ago.
Sandia New Mexico is in Albuquerque, nearly two hours away from Los Alamos. Theat's hardly across the street. And while it is true that the LANL contract will be competed this year, Lockheed has already announced they will not be bidding.
Wen Ho Lee did not get a long prison sentence. He was held without bail for nine months while the prosecution built its case, then was sentenced to time served as part of a plea bargain. Frankly, he's lucky the feds overreached, because he could and should have received life in prison for a raft of offenses.
"Slightly sloppy" does not extend to copying data from a classified LAN to an unclassified LAN, then taking the media off-site. That is a violation of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954. Wen Ho Lee is a criminal. That "everybody does this" excuse he floated is a steaming load of horseshit.
You're wrong about Wen Ho Lee. I worked for 18 months across the hall from him and continue to work in X Division to this day. Wen Ho repeatedly failed to safeguard classified information, which is a felony. The FBI didn't go after Lee because of his Taiwanese birth but because of computer logs showing that he'd been a Very Bad Boy. He broke a laundry list of laws intended to keep our nuclear secrets secret and had the Clinton Administration not tried to paint him as the greatest threat to America since the Rosenbergs, he'd still be sitting in jail where he belongs.
It's simple: anytime someone casts Wen Ho Lee as a wronged man, that person is wrong. Period, end of story.
My post was intended to illustrate the national priorities. Canada likes not having bullets fly about willy-nilly, while the US likes its citizenry eating home-grown fruit. I never meant to imply that Canada's border guards are more jacked in their boots than the US's...that'd be just laughable.
One time I zipped up into Canada on a day trip. Going in, the Canadian border guards wanted to know if I had any firearms or ammunition. Coming back, the US border guards wanted to know if I had any fruits or vegetables. That says a lot (hey, two words!) about our two countries.
This space doesn't permit the degree of mockery your post deserves, alas.
The difference between evolution as a scientific theory and ID as a "We're a theory, too, really!" is that evolution derives from observation and application of the scientific method and will be changed as more data becomes available. ID, on the other hand, is derived from a book written with the advice of an invisible friend in the sky and will resist with all its might new data -- like observed evolution.
I used to think the blog wass little more than a packet-switched version of CB radio, destined to fade as rapidly as did that particular "gives the little man the same voice as the corporate man" phenomenon. However, I've come to realize that the internet generation has the power to engage in self-selection more than any of those that came before. Witness the rise and popularity of Fox News despite surveys demonstrating that the network frequently provides factually incorrect information. Not the interpretive stuff, but who said what when and where. Nonetheless, the network tells people what they want to hear, reinforcing prejudices and supporting ideologies. And yes, NPR does the same for those of a different political bent, though their fact-checking is a bit more robust. A bit.
My point is that once upon a time, in the before-time, in the long-long-ago, people's options were limited. If the town's newspaper editors weren't of the same stripe, tough. Subscribe or don't. But now we have a zillion newspapers and people can get their "news" from some guy using Moveable Type to explain how welfare queens and/or oil barons represent a threat to all that is decent, true, and American. Or Canadian, or Majorcan, or whatever. The rise of the blog is the rise of the finger in the ear, the shut eye, and the "nahnahnah I can't hear you".
Well, that and a few million people boring the shit out of us by writing about their trip to the Gap with a swing by Starbucks on the way home.
Everything has intangible costs associated with it. It's hard to quantify economic concepts like "utility" with a dollars-and-cents figure. For most of my purchases, the value to me of having the new goodie Now exceeds the cost of borrowing the money to pay for it (the interest on revolving debt). As a roommate of mine once said, "Yeah, I'm in debt, but I can afford to be."
Plus I'm hopeful that I'll die suddenly and prematurely and not have to pay those debts off. If I have kids by that time the evaporation of their college funds and subsequent decline into poverty will be a valuable lesson into the inherent unfairness of life...and there's really no better lesson a father can teach his children.
Minor nit but I never miss a chance to provide educational opportunity. The phrase is "free rein", meaning that you let your horse go wherever his will takes him, rather than guiding him yourself. The implication is that you can reassert control if and when you choose.
"[W]e've got that great big investment up there called the ISS. Shall we just abandon it? Didn't think so."
Think again. If I take a thousand dollars in cash and throw it down a sewer drain I don't call it an "investment". The ISS has been so scaled down that even if completed its science value will be negligible. This is a pig in a poke, the countries that have pulled out have done so wisely, and only our pig-headed obstinance (or steadfast resolve, if you're on that side of the aisle) keeps us throwing billions at that turkey.
"'Disasters' - We've had two. Fewer than the Apollo program. They suck. Really they do. And they have been attributed to the 'make it work anyway' group."
I am admittedly not a space fanatic but I remember the Apollo 13 cockup -- which didn't kill anyone but really, really should have given the circumstances -- and the Apollo 1 fire, which killed three. 13 had a hardware fault, which is going to happen occasionally despite the best intentions and zero-defect policies. 1 suffered from a combination of poor engineering design (an inward-opening hatch? Oy) and the schedule-pushers whose successors killed the two shuttles.
Both shuttle accidents could have been averted if the engineers had been listened to by the managers. The Columbia report revealed that NASA didn't learn a goddamned thing from the Challenger disaster and I bet a dollar to a doughnut the Endeavour report will reveal that NASA didn't learn a goddamned thing from the Columbia disaster. (Not to pick on Endeavour, the next killemall shuttle cockup could just as well be one of the other two.) NASA's management culture is not capable of changing.
"[W]e really need the shuttles flying, if only to develop the replacements!"
Why? Not being snarky, but why will the presence or absence of shuttle flights assist in the design, manufacture, and testing of a next-generation (yet equally superfluous) orbital vehicle? Obviously NASA will _use_ the shuttle, if only to justify its continuing existence, perhaps to fly parts up and let them undergo the shake, rattle, and roll of a launch, but what makes the shuttle a _necessary_ part of the design effort?
I have made and continue to make a relatively unpopular statement. I'm not trolling or baiting or trying to be funny, but I feel strongly about this: De-orbit the ISS. Ground the shuttle fleet. Put all that money into the unmanned program and flood the solar system with rovers and parachuting probes and orbiting instrument platforms. They don't have to sleep a third of the time, they don't need air, or food, or water, or as much radiation shielding.
We won't, though. The US as a whole has an enormous amount of national ego built into its status as a space-faring nation. It's like cities that don't feel "world class" without a professional sports franchise writ large. Never mind that we spend way too much, go nowhere, do little of value, and periodically kill everyone onboard.
Bring forth your ignorant, your undereducated and uneducated, your readers of dubious websites, and maybe, just maybe, one or two people who actually know what they're talking about.
Time for another nuclear waste disposal imbroglio!
Slashdot Mirror
Unless, of course, you can find a trained restorer, in which case Eumenides.
Any anti-spyware, anti-spam, anti-bad-computer-thing that Congress codifies into law will be at best worthless and at worst disastrous for legitimate users. Why? I'm glad you asked. The reason is simple: there are people making money off spam and spyware. People who make money from something are always willing to give money to Congress to keep it coming, and Xrist knows Congressmen are always willing to take money in exchange for their legislative services. On the flip side, what've you got? Are you willing to send money to a Congresswhore to make the Net more usable for the good guys? Can you send enough to offset the DMA?
I depress myself. Time for more hooch.
Good point. I should have been more clear about my limited experience, esp. that my negative reinforcement came from a single source. Multiple parties, mind you, but a single source. IRC channels tend to show a painful degree of self-selecting exclusivity.
During the brief time I had Debian on one of my machines, I experienced firsthand the arrogance of the Debian fanbase. When I asked in an IRC channel why an upgrade to mplayer felt that removing KDE entirely and most of X11 was a good thing to do, I was sneeringly told that if I had problems with that then Debian was Not For Me. And so I agreed, and so I returned to the RPM-based distros.
The point of the post is that I have a strong sense that if the Ubuntu folks had said "Hey, we've got some ideas and we'd like to make some changes to Debian" they'd've been told to go pound sand. The Debian developers and fanboys are so fixated on the One True Path that there's no stopping them.
Laws? Great googly-moogly, no. But I'll bet two dimes to a doughnut that pretty much everyone who travels to another world, whether on his own initiative or as a government employee, is going to have to come home post-haste or die. There's no air out there. No food, damn little water, too much radiation, the works.
Not sure how you leapt from my statement to "Lock 'em up if they leave the atmosphere." All I meant is that travel to other worlds will be nothing more than an opportunity to plant a flag and bring home some rocks. The science fiction notion of outposts and useful space stations and commuter ships between them all is just that -- fiction.
It is absurd. I'm sorry, but Earth is the only body in the solar system that can support human life. Any outposts will be just that, utterly dependent on the home world for food, water, air, and materiel.
Unless, of course, you believe in terraforming, in which case we've reached the same impasse one finds in discussions between the devout and the atheist.
I understand your point. Thing is, we're still at the baby-steps stage of space exploration. Before we drop tens or hundreds of billions of dollars developing the technology to send men to Mars for (optimistically) a few weeks to explore a tiny area around their landing site, I think we should spend a few ones of billions of lots of probes that we can drop all over the heavenly bodies to spend months finding the more promising candidates.
The scientific instrumentation and experiments are pre-determined here on Earth. Sure, men can fix things that just stay broken on a machine probe, but it's not like men take up a machine shop to fabricate a spectral mumbleizer in transit because they realize that mumbleizing would be good to do.
Also, I take objection to your opening sentences. I am a huge fan of exploring the universe we find ourselves in. I'm not so blindered as to think the only way we can do that is by sending people, though. We understand Mars better than we do the moon even though we've had a dozen guys stand on the latter. Going to other worlds isn't like loading up a sailing ship and traveling to the other side of the same planet you evolved for. We owe it to those who will go to know as much as possible about the places they'll visit. We're simply not to the point where it's time to talk seriously about sending people to faraway worlds.
I disagree with the idea that without manned spaceflight, the entire space program is doomed. NASA's webservers (OK, JPL's) have consistently collapsed under the load of people checking the initial data returns from the unmanned probes. The Mars rovers, Galileo, Cassini-Huygens have all been huge successes. I think you underestimate the people's willingness to pay for good science, as well as their ability to understand what makes good science.
There will always be those who cling to the absurd notion that humanity will spread to the other bodies in our solar system. There will also be those who denounce spending a penny on "frivolous" ventures like space probes as long as Just One Child Goes Hungry here on Earth. I'm a fan of spending money wisely. We could be littering the entire solar system with probes if we'd stop spending people up to film themselves drinking spheres of Tang or working hard raising spiders in microgravity in the experiment submitted by Mrs. Wachowski's third-grade class in Salina, KS. Bang for buck.
Sadly, the current administration policy is to strip the entire space program of money to pay for the absurd Moon-Mars Initiative. Fortunately, the current administration has only 3 years, 10 months, and 10 days remaining. If we're lucky NASA will survive that period with no significant losses beyond Hubble (which is a doozy of a loss).
If I quoted as much of Malor's parent post as I wanted to, I'd just repost the whole thing. Since that would be inappropriate, I'll just say "I love you, man. Woman. Kid. Whatever."
I don't know what was known about Lee's behavior prior to the first public airings. I do know that when his security clearance was pulled and he was banished to unclassified work, the investigating Feds expressly forbade notification of that, so he was able to engage in some "social engineering" and do more dirty deeds. That's right, the Department of Justice left a criminal in a sensitive position in the hope that he would do something even worse that they could nail him for.
As for my own knowledge of his conduct, I did not know he was coming in to his office in the middle of the night to download files. Many of us knew he was an underperforming employee with weak skills in the job he held. We did not know he was breaking the law. We found out at the same time the rest of America did -- although by virtue of working here and having clearances, we found out a bit more.
Disclaimer: I don't and can't speak for LANL. If you want the official word, call the Public Affairs Office and ask to speak to one of the mouthpieces there.
The primary reason Lee has the reputation as a wronged man is because Americans really, really liked "The X-Files". People _want_ to believe that the resources of the US government were brought to bear on an innocent man in an election year to promote or dissuade shadowy agendas hammered out by smoking men in darkened rooms. Even better that he was foreign-born of the inscrutable Chinese race, because now it means the shadowy government is racist, too, and didn't we always know THAT? OK, that's probably not the primary reason, but I do think it's a strong component. People pride themselves on "seeing through the lies". It means they're smarter than the evil government. It bolsters their self-esteem.
Another major component is that we are bound by the same rules Wen Ho was, only we actually do take them seriously. It's difficult to say much about what he did without violating classification rules. That puts Wen Ho and his defenders at an advantage in that they can say things like "Everyone at Los Alamos copies classified data onto unclassified media and takes it home"; we can't say "On this and this and this date, Wen Ho copied this and this and this computer file in violation of the Atomic Energy Act." We simply cannot talk about what he took and how he took it.
We have indeed seen many changes in policy and practice lab-wide since the summer of 2000. As fate would have it, this past summer's incident was a violation of procedures implemented in the Wen Ho fallout. Even more new rules and procedures have been piled on since the stand-down of operations. Some of those rules are subject to -- you got it -- classification and don't get talked about on the outside. Others are freely discussed. Suffice to say that after this summer, even getting one's hands on a piece of writeable media is a herculean challenge. Infrastructure is being upgraded and employee training has been augmented. We're better now than we were a year ago, and that was better than five years ago.
Sandia New Mexico is in Albuquerque, nearly two hours away from Los Alamos. Theat's hardly across the street. And while it is true that the LANL contract will be competed this year, Lockheed has already announced they will not be bidding.
Wen Ho Lee did not get a long prison sentence. He was held without bail for nine months while the prosecution built its case, then was sentenced to time served as part of a plea bargain. Frankly, he's lucky the feds overreached, because he could and should have received life in prison for a raft of offenses.
"Slightly sloppy" does not extend to copying data from a classified LAN to an unclassified LAN, then taking the media off-site. That is a violation of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954. Wen Ho Lee is a criminal. That "everybody does this" excuse he floated is a steaming load of horseshit.
You're wrong about Wen Ho Lee. I worked for 18 months across the hall from him and continue to work in X Division to this day. Wen Ho repeatedly failed to safeguard classified information, which is a felony. The FBI didn't go after Lee because of his Taiwanese birth but because of computer logs showing that he'd been a Very Bad Boy. He broke a laundry list of laws intended to keep our nuclear secrets secret and had the Clinton Administration not tried to paint him as the greatest threat to America since the Rosenbergs, he'd still be sitting in jail where he belongs.
It's simple: anytime someone casts Wen Ho Lee as a wronged man, that person is wrong. Period, end of story.
My post was intended to illustrate the national priorities. Canada likes not having bullets fly about willy-nilly, while the US likes its citizenry eating home-grown fruit. I never meant to imply that Canada's border guards are more jacked in their boots than the US's...that'd be just laughable.
One time I zipped up into Canada on a day trip. Going in, the Canadian border guards wanted to know if I had any firearms or ammunition. Coming back, the US border guards wanted to know if I had any fruits or vegetables. That says a lot (hey, two words!) about our two countries.
This space doesn't permit the degree of mockery your post deserves, alas.
The difference between evolution as a scientific theory and ID as a "We're a theory, too, really!" is that evolution derives from observation and application of the scientific method and will be changed as more data becomes available. ID, on the other hand, is derived from a book written with the advice of an invisible friend in the sky and will resist with all its might new data -- like observed evolution.
What, no mention of the day Canter & Siegel bombed Usenet with their drek?
I used to think the blog wass little more than a packet-switched version of CB radio, destined to fade as rapidly as did that particular "gives the little man the same voice as the corporate man" phenomenon. However, I've come to realize that the internet generation has the power to engage in self-selection more than any of those that came before. Witness the rise and popularity of Fox News despite surveys demonstrating that the network frequently provides factually incorrect information. Not the interpretive stuff, but who said what when and where. Nonetheless, the network tells people what they want to hear, reinforcing prejudices and supporting ideologies. And yes, NPR does the same for those of a different political bent, though their fact-checking is a bit more robust. A bit.
My point is that once upon a time, in the before-time, in the long-long-ago, people's options were limited. If the town's newspaper editors weren't of the same stripe, tough. Subscribe or don't. But now we have a zillion newspapers and people can get their "news" from some guy using Moveable Type to explain how welfare queens and/or oil barons represent a threat to all that is decent, true, and American. Or Canadian, or Majorcan, or whatever. The rise of the blog is the rise of the finger in the ear, the shut eye, and the "nahnahnah I can't hear you".
Well, that and a few million people boring the shit out of us by writing about their trip to the Gap with a swing by Starbucks on the way home.
Everything has intangible costs associated with it. It's hard to quantify economic concepts like "utility" with a dollars-and-cents figure. For most of my purchases, the value to me of having the new goodie Now exceeds the cost of borrowing the money to pay for it (the interest on revolving debt). As a roommate of mine once said, "Yeah, I'm in debt, but I can afford to be."
Plus I'm hopeful that I'll die suddenly and prematurely and not have to pay those debts off. If I have kids by that time the evaporation of their college funds and subsequent decline into poverty will be a valuable lesson into the inherent unfairness of life...and there's really no better lesson a father can teach his children.
That, I said, that was a joke, son.
I upgrade when (1) a new model is available and (2) there's headroom on my "use for tech purchases only" credit card.
Minor nit but I never miss a chance to provide educational opportunity. The phrase is "free rein", meaning that you let your horse go wherever his will takes him, rather than guiding him yourself. The implication is that you can reassert control if and when you choose.
"[W]e've got that great big investment up there called the ISS. Shall we just abandon it? Didn't think so."
Think again. If I take a thousand dollars in cash and throw it down a sewer drain I don't call it an "investment". The ISS has been so scaled down that even if completed its science value will be negligible. This is a pig in a poke, the countries that have pulled out have done so wisely, and only our pig-headed obstinance (or steadfast resolve, if you're on that side of the aisle) keeps us throwing billions at that turkey.
"'Disasters' - We've had two. Fewer than the Apollo program. They suck. Really they do. And they have been attributed to the 'make it work anyway' group."
I am admittedly not a space fanatic but I remember the Apollo 13 cockup -- which didn't kill anyone but really, really should have given the circumstances -- and the Apollo 1 fire, which killed three. 13 had a hardware fault, which is going to happen occasionally despite the best intentions and zero-defect policies. 1 suffered from a combination of poor engineering design (an inward-opening hatch? Oy) and the schedule-pushers whose successors killed the two shuttles.
Both shuttle accidents could have been averted if the engineers had been listened to by the managers. The Columbia report revealed that NASA didn't learn a goddamned thing from the Challenger disaster and I bet a dollar to a doughnut the Endeavour report will reveal that NASA didn't learn a goddamned thing from the Columbia disaster. (Not to pick on Endeavour, the next killemall shuttle cockup could just as well be one of the other two.) NASA's management culture is not capable of changing.
"[W]e really need the shuttles flying, if only to develop the replacements!"
Why? Not being snarky, but why will the presence or absence of shuttle flights assist in the design, manufacture, and testing of a next-generation (yet equally superfluous) orbital vehicle? Obviously NASA will _use_ the shuttle, if only to justify its continuing existence, perhaps to fly parts up and let them undergo the shake, rattle, and roll of a launch, but what makes the shuttle a _necessary_ part of the design effort?
I have made and continue to make a relatively unpopular statement. I'm not trolling or baiting or trying to be funny, but I feel strongly about this: De-orbit the ISS. Ground the shuttle fleet. Put all that money into the unmanned program and flood the solar system with rovers and parachuting probes and orbiting instrument platforms. They don't have to sleep a third of the time, they don't need air, or food, or water, or as much radiation shielding.
We won't, though. The US as a whole has an enormous amount of national ego built into its status as a space-faring nation. It's like cities that don't feel "world class" without a professional sports franchise writ large. Never mind that we spend way too much, go nowhere, do little of value, and periodically kill everyone onboard.
Perhaps things will change.
Bring forth your ignorant, your undereducated and uneducated, your readers of dubious websites, and maybe, just maybe, one or two people who actually know what they're talking about.
Time for another nuclear waste disposal imbroglio!