Not all the pictures are 11 years old. The Microsoft campus pictures look pretty current. Building 33 and its new behemoth neighbor, the new offramp at 40th, and even the transit center off 156th. I'd say the pictures of Microsoft aren't more than a few years old at most. Still can't find building 7 though.
And all of this in the face of ZERO evidence that it will save oil.
I remember watching David Brinkley many years ago saying that the last change in DST was driven by the barbecue industry. They figured that if they could extend "effective" daylight then more people would BBQ after work. Anyone checked up on the BBQ lobby recently to see how they feel about this change?
I bought two Deskstar SATA drives and then a friend of mine told me that they were unreliable. Sure enough, four months later, and I've got a drive reporting errors. I've been a happy Seagate/Western Digital customer, and with Seagate's five year warranty then it's hard to go wrong. Sure it's a couple more bucks, but what is your time worth? (Not to mention shipping costs to return faulty equipment)
I wouldn't take one of these drives if you gave it to me.
Why not both? There's plenty to see out there in the cosmos. These programs are usually relatively cheap compared to anything spaced-based. As long as we're getting good science then I say spend the cash.
Although I haven't seen enough evidence to say that global warming is really going to have a significant, long-term impact, I'm not ready to say that anyone who claims that the sky is falling is a loonie. My trouble with the whole debate is that it's been backwards of normal scientific discovery. The way that most science works, you postulate, then do your research, and then announce your results. In the global warming debate, there was postulation, then announcement, and finally the research. The reason that this troubles me is that the science now has to support the conclusions or there are jobs and reputations at stake. There's really no going back once you've jumped on board.
I really hate the "study stuff to death" approach, but I'm afraid that the scientific community dug their own grave on this. No matter what results are presented, they'll always be suspect in some people's minds. I have to admit that I'm not sure what it would take for me to totally buy off on the results, especially since there is a huge body of scientific evidence that says that global temperature fluctuation is natural. Maybe when the Pacific Ocean is lapping at my back door (currently 475 feet above sea level) then I'll believe it.
... an entirely different product in a non-competing market
My understanding is that "a different market" means where there is no confusion on the part of a consumer or that there is no damage to the brand. I think that Vista could easily make the case that their brand will be damaged. Imagine calling a prospective client and introducing yourself as a software company called "Vista". If the prospective client knows about Windows Vista, what will be their reaction? Whether it's positive, neutral, or negative, there's clearly brand confusion. This isn't like Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Money where you're prefixing a common word with the company name to create a new brand. If Vista is a trademarked name for any type of software, I think Microsoft has a long uphill battle.
I'd also guess that 80% of people follow too closely for emergency situations.
On behalf of the 80% of the people who follow too closely, let me say that it's the 20% of the people who get in the way who are the real danger. If you must drive slow, move to the right, just as the law prescribes. If you have to drive slow on city streets, stay off the road until the people who have to get somewhere have actually done so. You may have time to sightsee, but those with jobs and families and responsibilities don't.
And while I'm bitching, when you get to a 4 way stop sign, TAKE YOUR TURN!. Don't be polite and wave other people through. Don't think about whether it's "really" your turn or not. The system works well when everyone keeps the system moving. Politeness only slows everyone down.
Ok, I really can't believe that I'm defending a cable TV company, but here I go...
Do you really blame them? They pay for bandwidth too, and if you put up a server that everyone wants to hit then that adds to their bandwidth load. They assume that you're not downloading 24x7, but a popular web server can easily be active all the time. So the upload limit makes sense from a pure business/profitability perspective.
My understanding is that they can, but only if they pay you for the time that you're on the bench, otherwise the contract is unenforceable. I'm not a lawyer though...
This is one of the worst non-answers that I've ever seen to a query, as bad as the original post is. Let me recap your answer:
I don't know what I'm talking about here
It's a Microsoft product, so it has to work like Unix
Perl is my language of choice when interfacing with IMAP
Here's some unintelligible pseudo-code that I recommend based on my lack of knowledge
All good scripts are no more than 5 lines in length
This section is called "Ask Slashdot", not "Make a Wild-Ass Guess to Confuse the Poor Guy Even Futher". If you're going to give an answer, give something that makes a little sense.
Of course this post should have never made it here in the first place. No offense to the poster, but it's like asking "Should I have Pop-Tarts or cereal for breakfast?" It really isn't that interesting to most folks.
Has anyone ever thought about selling the lack of maturity as a positive for business? After all, Linux has a lot of rock-solid apps that business want without all the "extras" - adware/spyware, media players (keeps your employees from screwing around on the job) and viruses. I think that the only argument that I hear used widely is that Linux runs well on older hardware.
I was wondering how I was going to get rid of those old tree stumps:-) Interestingly enough, Operation Plowshare did research into using A-bombs to dig ditches. They even did a proof-of-concept blast.
Well, there are tons a great things that came out of the program to create nuclear weapons:
Nuclear power - The nuclear power industry has benefited greatly from the development of nuclear weapons. Much of the research was directly applicable, because keeping N-plants from exploding is a key start to building safe and affordable power.
Conventional weapons systems - Nuclear powered aircraft carriers and subs grew from bomb research. The first polar crossing under the ice was accomplished by the nuclear powered sub Nautilus.
Nuclear pulse propulsion - Although never built, there are designs for spacecraft driven by atomic bombs capable of lifting upwards of 8 million tons (or about 2,300 fully loaded, fully fueled Space Shuttles.) This isn't sci-fi, but real systems that could not receive political approval. Imaging getting material into orbit at 32 cents per pound. (Shipping costs to orbit for the entire ISS would be about $320,000, or the cost of a moderate one-family home.) My hope is that some day we lose our fear of nuclear power and build devices like this.
Deep space research - Deep space would be unreachable without RTGs. (Ok, you could get there, but couldn't do anything useful.) Like the other forms of nuclear power, research include nuclear weapons helped initiate peaceful uses of nuclear energy like RTGs.
Numerous lives saved - Estimates are that 1,000,000 or more men and women would have been killed in a Japanese invasion. Tragically, somewhere around 250,000 people died directly and indirectly in the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The net result, however, was around 3/4 million people who didn't die if conventional methods had been pursued to end the war. Personally, I would have loved to have seen a peaceful, negotiated end to the War in the Pacific, but the Japanese military would never have let that happen.
World stability - I saved this one for last because it's probably the most controversial, but I'd argue that since the development of the atomic bomb, the world has been a more stable place. At age 42, I clearly remember the concerns of the 60's, 70's, and much of the 80's when we were worried about a Soviet nuclear attack. (I didn't include the 50's in my list above because I wasn't alive then.) Regardless of the fact that we worried a lot about a nuclear exchange, the real fact of the matter is that nuclear war never came about. This wasn't accidental, but rather because world leaders (or in some cases, those around them) realized that a widescale nuclear exchange would have been disastrous not only for the defender but also the offender.
Not only did nuclear weapons keep a cap on nuclear warfare, but on conventional warfare as well. The Soviet Union was on a mission to spread Communism throughout the world, and with a foothold in Eastern Europe it wouldn't have taken much to use those ambitions to move westward throughout post-War Western Europe. Without the threat of another widescale world war (often referred to as "World War III"), the Soviets may have been tempted to use their large conventional forces to completely change the political landscape throughout the European continent.
I hope that I've answered your question on how nuclear weapons research can be used for good. Whether or not the scientists were thinking about this when they built their weapons doesn't really matter. If it did, then everyone who ever created a technology that is used in any way for an evil purpose must be held directly accountable for its use.
I hate replying to my own post, but I really hosed some names here. It's Chris Kraft and Gene Kranz. I knew they looked wrong and forgot to fix them prior to posting. Sorry for the errors folks. I still hope that you read the books.
This comment is beyond poor taste and is simply cruel.
I didn't say this. Chris Craft, Gene Krantz, and several others did in their autobiographies. Try reading them sometime.
You know nothing about these people.
Not personally, but I see their handiwork. I'm sure that they're really nice folks, but I'm not willing to turn over the keys to the bank vault without some demonstration that they can manage the pot of money.
What other system could have launched and recovered it?
At 11 tons, there were expendable systems large enough to launch it in two pieces. Recovery would have been possible by deorbiting smaller pieces with built-in heat shields and recovering them by parachute, much like a capsule. If we hadn't abandoned heavy lift systems and spent all our money on the Shuttle, we'd have lifters capable of putting up 100 tons. Putting all our eggs in one basket was a huge mistake, one that we're still paying for today.
if you do the energy calculation
Ok, but I hope that you agree that manned missions to deep space require more than just applying energy and delta-V budgets. We are talking about manned missions, right? Otherwise there would be no need to talk about the Shuttle or ISS, and we could be talking about rail guns instead.:-)
I attribute this to the fact that Stargate is virtually the only sci-fi show ever created that has a realistic, meaningful story line. I'm not a big fan of Star Trek because the people who "boldly [went] where no man has gone before" seemed to spend a lot of time sitting in a room pushing buttons. Stargate, especially in its early years, spend a ton of time off the stage and in the woods. These folks felt like real explorers, even though we really know that they're always somewhere in British Columbia. (In one episode with the Aschen you can actually make out Mt. Baker in the background.)
I recommend picking up a copy of SMAD and reading section 11.4 starting on page 407. Pay real close attention to table 11-33 which compares current power technologies. Also check out section 10.3 on design budgets, including the power budget. You'll see that the power budget is where all the "heavy lifting" is done when it comes to power management. Building a slightly larger set of solar panels doesn't help you at all on deep space missions. It all depends on the power budget, and the Shuttle and ISS have done nothing to help us understand how to better manage power budgets. In fact, with 36KW (Shuttle) and 110KW (ISS) systems, there's even less need to manage a power budget as tightly as they did in Apollo at levels as low as 43 amps, or about 2800 watts (more than 40 times less than IIS).
Because the current team has done little to build confidence, and I'm not willing to throw good money after bad. If you think that the current NASA management team doesn't suck, just compare the response of the guys on Apollo 1 to those responses of the guys overseeing Columbia. Read any book from an Apollo-era flight controller and they'll tell you that they played a hand in killing their crew. After Columbia, it was a mad scramble for everyone to cover their ass and point the finger at someone else, presumably so that they could keep their job. There are continuing reports of cultural problems at NASA that have yet to be fixed. These people inspire no confidence.
Robotics --... Building autonomous systems for manned mission support is a nascent field.
The discussion here was about how the expense of the Shuttle has contributed to deep space exploration. So what advancements have been made in the Shuttle program?
Systems engineering --... It's just not the same problem -- it is vastly more complex
Same argument as above. Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo were all delivered on time, unlike the Shuttle or ISS.
Moreover, anyone that thinks that Apollo life support systems show us how to design modern, long term, reliable, supportable systems is simply not getting it.
Really? Then why are 40 year old technologies currently keeping the astronauts alive on ISS? I'll take a tank of oxygen over an oxygen generator any day. Maybe the oxygen generators will be improved some day, but I'm not betting the farm that either the Shuttle or ISS will ultimately prove them out.
Finally, remember that if you are in LEO, you are 80-90% of the way to just about anywhere else in the Solar System.
Are you really that naive to believe this? If so, then I can see why you think that the Shuttle's a good deal. As far as I'm concerned, however, getting to LEO is kind of like driving from New York to Key West, FL. You'd like to think that when you hit the Florida state line that you're almost there, but it's a very long drive from the Florida/Georgia border all the way to Key West.
ISS and the Shuttle have taught us very, very little about how to manage radiation bursts from CMEs because we're still within the influence of the Earth's magnetic field for protection. We still know little about managing food/water resources at long distances or how to keep astronauts from going crazy on a long distance trip to Mars. Astronauts on missions to the Moon describe experiences of loneliness, and that was only 3 days and 250K miles away.
LDEF was critically dependent on the Shuttle
Could you elaborate please? Are you saying that it would have been impossible to launch and recover the system without the Shuttle? Or was it dependent on the Shuttle because it was designed that way?
... but that flight at Kitty Hawk had to happen first.
Hmm, interesting analogy. I would have used Mercury and Gemini for non-Earth operations.:-)
So let's take your list and see what we get:
long-term human physiology - done on Mir and Skylab. I believe that the current record is still held by a resident of Mir after his country disappeared while he was on orbit.
assembly of large components in orbit - Mir, and to some extent Skylab, ASTP, Apollo, Gemini and Hubble (admittedly with the help of the Shuttle). In my book, the single most important mission ever in the assembly of large scale systems was Gemini 9 where Gene Cernan learned what Newton knew all along - that for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction.
life support system design - done on Apollo, Skylab, and Mir. You should really read Sy Liebergot's book Apollo EECOM where he talks about helping to improve Shuttle environmental systems using feedback from Apollo designs and operation. (I should also note that he doesn't have much good to say about the current crop of NASA flight operators or directors.)
systems engineering - Initiated in Gemini, proven in Apollo, Skylab, and Mir.
robotics and autonomous systems - done on Mars going back to Viking, and of course my all-time favorite, the Voyager probes. Also Deep Space 1. Russia has also done a lot in this area with their automated Progress cargo ships and space probes to Venus, Mars, and the Moon. NASA's most recent successes were unmanned - Cassini, Mars Rovers, and Deep Impact.
orbital power systems - proven out countless times by hundreds of government and commercial satellites. I'd argue that we'd taken a big step backward in this area since we no longer regularly fly RTGs.
micrometeorite environment - Skylab, Mir. LDEF was arguably the most important experiment in this area, and while it was deployed and retrieved using the Shuttle, there were other options available for its flight.
Maybe I'm just nitpicking, but when we're spending billions on a system then I expect something more than small, incremental gains. I'm not sure that you'd call them gains anyway since the systems are no more reliable today then in previous years. (How many times have the oxygen generators failed on ISS this year? Sure, you can blame the Russians, but NASA approved them for manned spaceflight.)
NASA's current funding requests would be like Christopher Columbus coming back from the new world and telling the queen that he needed ten times the number of ships to get 150 miles out into the Atlantic. Magellan circumnavigated the globe with only 60% more resource than Columbus and traveled a lot further distance-wise. Shouldn't we be demanding more for our money than the systems that we currently have?
The Shuttle and ISS are our current and best ways of doing this.
Not really. A Saturn V/CSM stack are still the best technology that we have for the job. It isn't sexy, but it is a proven workhorse with eight successful missions (not including Apollo 13) and zero in-flight astronaut deaths across all 11 manned flights. I'm sure that you already know this, but it goes without saying that only Hollywood can send a Shuttle to the Moon.
I lost most of my interest in LEO after the deorbit of Mir. She was a great ship and the Russians should be proud of her, even though she had lived long beyond her service life.
Can you tell me one thing that we've learned about LEO that we didn't know before the advent of the Shuttle or ISS that would help us do anything really useful beyond LEO? I'll grant you that we've learned how to launch and recover aerodynamic vehicles and there might be some value there, but other than that the Shuttle and ISS programs have been a huge waste of good money.
I'd never advocate the slaughter of "innocent civilians" as a means of retribution. I'd like to think that we didn't bomb Nagasaki and Hiroshima because of Japanese atrocities against the Chinese people. History tells us that we nuked Japan to prevent larger numbers of deaths in a conventional conflict.
I've thought long and hard about whether using nuclear weapons in WWII was the right thing to do. After all, if we had wanted to prove that we had a mighty weapon then why didn't we drop the bombs off the coast of Japan near Tokyo so that Japanese citizens could see the bomb in action without killing anyone? I wish the answer was just that easy, but the more I learn about the second World War, the more I see that there were no easy answers. Risking the use of two nuclear weapons in a limited arsenal could have had the reverse effect of balkanizing the Japanese population and drawing out the war even further. It was really a judgment call. What I can say that we should be proud of is our response to Japan after the war. Rather than following in the same path as most victors ("the spoils go to the victors"), we chose instead to punish the true criminals and help the Japanese build a strong economy. I think that it's a real blessing that instead of living in a shattered world like we did after World War I, we instead live in a world where our former enemies like Japan and Germany are now our allies. A little grace can go a long way in helping nations heal old wounds.
I guess what I'm saying is that we shouldn't have a cavalier attitude when it comes to the use of lethal force. We really need to feel that our backs are against the wall, and then when we use it there should only be enough force to accomplish the task. Of course the terms "backs against the wall" and "enough force to accomplish the task" will be interpreted differently by different people. Collectively we decide when the time has come to use force, and collectively we bear responsibility for its use.
Oh, I totally agree with your point. I *did* lose a job by telling a boss that I wouldn't do something illegal.
So the scientist in this case didn't think that he was doing anything illegal or immoral. I would agree. He was doing science. Blaming a nuclear scientist for creating a bomb would be like blaming Phil Zimmerman for creating PGP which was used by terrorists in the 9/11 attacks. Phil was under tremendous pressure for a while, both from outside groups as well as his own conscience. But Phil also recognizes that PGP can be used for good, and this letter demonstrates that it can even be used to save lives.
We can't blame technology or those who create it for the bad stuff that goes on in our lives. We have to accept responsibility for own actions. Remember that "guns don't kill people, people kill people".
Hmm, guess I'll have to modify it then. I was looking for a solution just like this, but you're right that blocking the entire IP address is just stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Not all the pictures are 11 years old. The Microsoft campus pictures look pretty current. Building 33 and its new behemoth neighbor, the new offramp at 40th, and even the transit center off 156th. I'd say the pictures of Microsoft aren't more than a few years old at most. Still can't find building 7 though.
I remember watching David Brinkley many years ago saying that the last change in DST was driven by the barbecue industry. They figured that if they could extend "effective" daylight then more people would BBQ after work. Anyone checked up on the BBQ lobby recently to see how they feel about this change?
I wouldn't take one of these drives if you gave it to me.
Why not both? There's plenty to see out there in the cosmos. These programs are usually relatively cheap compared to anything spaced-based. As long as we're getting good science then I say spend the cash.
Although I haven't seen enough evidence to say that global warming is really going to have a significant, long-term impact, I'm not ready to say that anyone who claims that the sky is falling is a loonie. My trouble with the whole debate is that it's been backwards of normal scientific discovery. The way that most science works, you postulate, then do your research, and then announce your results. In the global warming debate, there was postulation, then announcement, and finally the research. The reason that this troubles me is that the science now has to support the conclusions or there are jobs and reputations at stake. There's really no going back once you've jumped on board.
I really hate the "study stuff to death" approach, but I'm afraid that the scientific community dug their own grave on this. No matter what results are presented, they'll always be suspect in some people's minds. I have to admit that I'm not sure what it would take for me to totally buy off on the results, especially since there is a huge body of scientific evidence that says that global temperature fluctuation is natural. Maybe when the Pacific Ocean is lapping at my back door (currently 475 feet above sea level) then I'll believe it.
My understanding is that "a different market" means where there is no confusion on the part of a consumer or that there is no damage to the brand. I think that Vista could easily make the case that their brand will be damaged. Imagine calling a prospective client and introducing yourself as a software company called "Vista". If the prospective client knows about Windows Vista, what will be their reaction? Whether it's positive, neutral, or negative, there's clearly brand confusion. This isn't like Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Money where you're prefixing a common word with the company name to create a new brand. If Vista is a trademarked name for any type of software, I think Microsoft has a long uphill battle.
On behalf of the 80% of the people who follow too closely, let me say that it's the 20% of the people who get in the way who are the real danger. If you must drive slow, move to the right, just as the law prescribes. If you have to drive slow on city streets, stay off the road until the people who have to get somewhere have actually done so. You may have time to sightsee, but those with jobs and families and responsibilities don't.
And while I'm bitching, when you get to a 4 way stop sign, TAKE YOUR TURN!. Don't be polite and wave other people through. Don't think about whether it's "really" your turn or not. The system works well when everyone keeps the system moving. Politeness only slows everyone down.
The problem is that the story hasn't been duped on /. several times over. It makes it really hard to find a story when it's only been posted once.
Semi-
Independent
Nuclear
Kinetically
Energetic
Mass
Do you really blame them? They pay for bandwidth too, and if you put up a server that everyone wants to hit then that adds to their bandwidth load. They assume that you're not downloading 24x7, but a popular web server can easily be active all the time. So the upload limit makes sense from a pure business/profitability perspective.
My understanding is that they can, but only if they pay you for the time that you're on the bench, otherwise the contract is unenforceable. I'm not a lawyer though...
Oh, you got it wrong. This is so totally news. Just like when Microsoft hired 1/2 of Borland's developers in the mid-90s.
This section is called "Ask Slashdot", not "Make a Wild-Ass Guess to Confuse the Poor Guy Even Futher". If you're going to give an answer, give something that makes a little sense.
Of course this post should have never made it here in the first place. No offense to the poster, but it's like asking "Should I have Pop-Tarts or cereal for breakfast?" It really isn't that interesting to most folks.
Has anyone ever thought about selling the lack of maturity as a positive for business? After all, Linux has a lot of rock-solid apps that business want without all the "extras" - adware/spyware, media players (keeps your employees from screwing around on the job) and viruses. I think that the only argument that I hear used widely is that Linux runs well on older hardware.
Well, there are tons a great things that came out of the program to create nuclear weapons:
Not only did nuclear weapons keep a cap on nuclear warfare, but on conventional warfare as well. The Soviet Union was on a mission to spread Communism throughout the world, and with a foothold in Eastern Europe it wouldn't have taken much to use those ambitions to move westward throughout post-War Western Europe. Without the threat of another widescale world war (often referred to as "World War III"), the Soviets may have been tempted to use their large conventional forces to completely change the political landscape throughout the European continent.
I hope that I've answered your question on how nuclear weapons research can be used for good. Whether or not the scientists were thinking about this when they built their weapons doesn't really matter. If it did, then everyone who ever created a technology that is used in any way for an evil purpose must be held directly accountable for its use.
I hate replying to my own post, but I really hosed some names here. It's Chris Kraft and Gene Kranz. I knew they looked wrong and forgot to fix them prior to posting. Sorry for the errors folks. I still hope that you read the books.
I didn't say this. Chris Craft, Gene Krantz, and several others did in their autobiographies. Try reading them sometime.
You know nothing about these people.
Not personally, but I see their handiwork. I'm sure that they're really nice folks, but I'm not willing to turn over the keys to the bank vault without some demonstration that they can manage the pot of money.
What other system could have launched and recovered it?
At 11 tons, there were expendable systems large enough to launch it in two pieces. Recovery would have been possible by deorbiting smaller pieces with built-in heat shields and recovering them by parachute, much like a capsule. If we hadn't abandoned heavy lift systems and spent all our money on the Shuttle, we'd have lifters capable of putting up 100 tons. Putting all our eggs in one basket was a huge mistake, one that we're still paying for today.
if you do the energy calculation
Ok, but I hope that you agree that manned missions to deep space require more than just applying energy and delta-V budgets. We are talking about manned missions, right? Otherwise there would be no need to talk about the Shuttle or ISS, and we could be talking about rail guns instead. :-)
I attribute this to the fact that Stargate is virtually the only sci-fi show ever created that has a realistic, meaningful story line. I'm not a big fan of Star Trek because the people who "boldly [went] where no man has gone before" seemed to spend a lot of time sitting in a room pushing buttons. Stargate, especially in its early years, spend a ton of time off the stage and in the woods. These folks felt like real explorers, even though we really know that they're always somewhere in British Columbia. (In one episode with the Aschen you can actually make out Mt. Baker in the background.)
I recommend picking up a copy of SMAD and reading section 11.4 starting on page 407. Pay real close attention to table 11-33 which compares current power technologies. Also check out section 10.3 on design budgets, including the power budget. You'll see that the power budget is where all the "heavy lifting" is done when it comes to power management. Building a slightly larger set of solar panels doesn't help you at all on deep space missions. It all depends on the power budget, and the Shuttle and ISS have done nothing to help us understand how to better manage power budgets. In fact, with 36KW (Shuttle) and 110KW (ISS) systems, there's even less need to manage a power budget as tightly as they did in Apollo at levels as low as 43 amps, or about 2800 watts (more than 40 times less than IIS).
Because the current team has done little to build confidence, and I'm not willing to throw good money after bad. If you think that the current NASA management team doesn't suck, just compare the response of the guys on Apollo 1 to those responses of the guys overseeing Columbia. Read any book from an Apollo-era flight controller and they'll tell you that they played a hand in killing their crew. After Columbia, it was a mad scramble for everyone to cover their ass and point the finger at someone else, presumably so that they could keep their job. There are continuing reports of cultural problems at NASA that have yet to be fixed. These people inspire no confidence.
Robotics -- ... Building autonomous systems for manned mission support is a nascent field.
The discussion here was about how the expense of the Shuttle has contributed to deep space exploration. So what advancements have been made in the Shuttle program?
Systems engineering -- ... It's just not the same problem -- it is vastly more complex
Same argument as above. Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo were all delivered on time, unlike the Shuttle or ISS.
Moreover, anyone that thinks that Apollo life support systems show us how to design modern, long term, reliable, supportable systems is simply not getting it.
Really? Then why are 40 year old technologies currently keeping the astronauts alive on ISS? I'll take a tank of oxygen over an oxygen generator any day. Maybe the oxygen generators will be improved some day, but I'm not betting the farm that either the Shuttle or ISS will ultimately prove them out.
Finally, remember that if you are in LEO, you are 80-90% of the way to just about anywhere else in the Solar System.
Are you really that naive to believe this? If so, then I can see why you think that the Shuttle's a good deal. As far as I'm concerned, however, getting to LEO is kind of like driving from New York to Key West, FL. You'd like to think that when you hit the Florida state line that you're almost there, but it's a very long drive from the Florida/Georgia border all the way to Key West.
ISS and the Shuttle have taught us very, very little about how to manage radiation bursts from CMEs because we're still within the influence of the Earth's magnetic field for protection. We still know little about managing food/water resources at long distances or how to keep astronauts from going crazy on a long distance trip to Mars. Astronauts on missions to the Moon describe experiences of loneliness, and that was only 3 days and 250K miles away.
LDEF was critically dependent on the Shuttle
Could you elaborate please? Are you saying that it would have been impossible to launch and recover the system without the Shuttle? Or was it dependent on the Shuttle because it was designed that way?
Hmm, interesting analogy. I would have used Mercury and Gemini for non-Earth operations. :-)
So let's take your list and see what we get:
Maybe I'm just nitpicking, but when we're spending billions on a system then I expect something more than small, incremental gains. I'm not sure that you'd call them gains anyway since the systems are no more reliable today then in previous years. (How many times have the oxygen generators failed on ISS this year? Sure, you can blame the Russians, but NASA approved them for manned spaceflight.)
NASA's current funding requests would be like Christopher Columbus coming back from the new world and telling the queen that he needed ten times the number of ships to get 150 miles out into the Atlantic. Magellan circumnavigated the globe with only 60% more resource than Columbus and traveled a lot further distance-wise. Shouldn't we be demanding more for our money than the systems that we currently have?
Not really. A Saturn V/CSM stack are still the best technology that we have for the job. It isn't sexy, but it is a proven workhorse with eight successful missions (not including Apollo 13) and zero in-flight astronaut deaths across all 11 manned flights. I'm sure that you already know this, but it goes without saying that only Hollywood can send a Shuttle to the Moon.
I lost most of my interest in LEO after the deorbit of Mir. She was a great ship and the Russians should be proud of her, even though she had lived long beyond her service life.
Can you tell me one thing that we've learned about LEO that we didn't know before the advent of the Shuttle or ISS that would help us do anything really useful beyond LEO? I'll grant you that we've learned how to launch and recover aerodynamic vehicles and there might be some value there, but other than that the Shuttle and ISS programs have been a huge waste of good money.
I've thought long and hard about whether using nuclear weapons in WWII was the right thing to do. After all, if we had wanted to prove that we had a mighty weapon then why didn't we drop the bombs off the coast of Japan near Tokyo so that Japanese citizens could see the bomb in action without killing anyone? I wish the answer was just that easy, but the more I learn about the second World War, the more I see that there were no easy answers. Risking the use of two nuclear weapons in a limited arsenal could have had the reverse effect of balkanizing the Japanese population and drawing out the war even further. It was really a judgment call. What I can say that we should be proud of is our response to Japan after the war. Rather than following in the same path as most victors ("the spoils go to the victors"), we chose instead to punish the true criminals and help the Japanese build a strong economy. I think that it's a real blessing that instead of living in a shattered world like we did after World War I, we instead live in a world where our former enemies like Japan and Germany are now our allies. A little grace can go a long way in helping nations heal old wounds.
I guess what I'm saying is that we shouldn't have a cavalier attitude when it comes to the use of lethal force. We really need to feel that our backs are against the wall, and then when we use it there should only be enough force to accomplish the task. Of course the terms "backs against the wall" and "enough force to accomplish the task" will be interpreted differently by different people. Collectively we decide when the time has come to use force, and collectively we bear responsibility for its use.
So the scientist in this case didn't think that he was doing anything illegal or immoral. I would agree. He was doing science. Blaming a nuclear scientist for creating a bomb would be like blaming Phil Zimmerman for creating PGP which was used by terrorists in the 9/11 attacks. Phil was under tremendous pressure for a while, both from outside groups as well as his own conscience. But Phil also recognizes that PGP can be used for good, and this letter demonstrates that it can even be used to save lives.
We can't blame technology or those who create it for the bad stuff that goes on in our lives. We have to accept responsibility for own actions. Remember that "guns don't kill people, people kill people".
Hmm, guess I'll have to modify it then. I was looking for a solution just like this, but you're right that blocking the entire IP address is just stupid.