"Because the license plate number on the back of the vehicle can't provide them with that information."
Ah, but now the conspiracy begins to get bigger.
As I understand it, the only people who can turn a tag number into a name and address are the police and the DMV. Thus, said "bureaucrat" either needs to be in one of those two organizations or know someone in one of those two organizations.
Remember, the more people you in have to involve in your activities, the harder it is to keep those activities secret.
So we've made it easier to "gather intelligence." One guy can get all this information.
"Why don't you want to say? As has been pointed out many a time before, so much could be resolved if people would just bother to communicate."
Because the cop who is questioning me happens to be my wife's brother and I really don't want to tell him that I am cheating on his sister. Nor do I want to tell another officer because it will get back to him.
"Because RFID is the cause of all racism."
I'll admit, I went out a limb with that one.
"You see, you don't matter. The spy ware companies don't care whether you're a quadrapalegic or you like fucking animals or you sit naked while surfing slashdot except insofar as it's information they can sell. But they don't care about you as a person. You are nothing and if you died tomorrow, they wouldn't care."
Hey now! My Mom (and, of course, Jesus) loves me. That's what's important!:^)
Seriously, the example of "nobody cares about me" is debatable.
For example, I'll drive through the parking lot and get the addresses of all those people who are driving "luxury" cars. They might be good people to rob. Or, perhaps, I'll get the addresses of all those people driving ricers--they seem to be willing to spend money on their cars. I'll sell that to the local ricer accessory place so that they can do targeted mailings.
Park in a mall? Get junk mail.
I mean, putting the tag number into a transmitter doesn't bother me all that much. It's the fact that the article explicitly said, "And other information." What other information is not disclosed.
If it's information I would prefer that the rest of the world not have broadcasted to them, such as my address, social security number, date of birth, etc., I don't like it.
First, is the obvious answer: "Those who sacrifice their liberty for their security deserve neither."
Your examples are the obvious scare tactics. Imagine if we could track people. "Suppose something bad happens to you! Wouldn't it be great if we could just punch a button and know where you are and send help?" Let's just LoJack everybody--for their own safety, of course...
No, I can't imagine a single "bureaucrat" who cares where I was at 2:00AM. But I can imagine a "bureaucrat" who might be interested in those cars sitting outside the headquarters for anti-way rally. Who owns them? Where do they live? They must be anti-American scum who don't believe in our president.
Or better yet--gee, your car was a block away while this brutal murder happened. What were you doing in that neighborhood? What, you don't want to tell us? Could you have been doing something you shouldn't? Perhaps we should investigate you more.
Better yet--you're black and your car was parked close to this robbery! Well, that makes you a chief suspect right there. After all, what was a black man doing parked in this predominantly white neighborhood. He must have been up to no good.
(From the article: "The British government is preparing to test new high-tech license plates containing microchips capable of transmitting unique vehicle identification numbers and other data to readers more than 300 feet away.")
In this case, I'll use your own words against you. Suppose that sicko sees your daughter driving in traffic, reads your address from the RFID tags that are on your daughter's car, shows up at your house one night and attacks your daughter? Or that guy who feels you cut him off in traffic decides to get a little bit of revenge?
No one is saying what this "other data" is.
"[...] there are several HUNDRED MILLION cars on the road and no one is going to randomly just decide to find out where your car was unless they had a reason to look for it."
Good point. That's why I don't worry about spyware on my computer. After all, I'm only one of several hundred million people on line. Why would anybody target me?
"Doesn't matter how it faired, the shuttle has been a waste of money and space. Keep It Simple Stupid policy should be for rockets too, and the shuttle is hardly the simplest solution."
Well, frankly, the Shuttle is the solution to a number of problems. It is one vehicle that can act as a laboratory in space (especially with the SpaceLab module), it can service satellites in orbit (try to maintain the Hubble Space Telescope without a shuttle), it can retrieve thousands of pounds from space and return it to Earth.
I assume your solution is to build different spacecraft for each mission? How much money is that going to take, duplicating the same solutions to the same problems over and over and over again?
Take a few examples:
The Space Tether Experiment -- I assume your solution would have been to build a spacecraft to handle this. Consider, also, that the tether broke on the mission. How would you have returned the unbroken end to Earth in order to determine what had happened?
There's a neat article here on some of the experiments done on the Columbia mission. How would you duplicate those experiments without the Shuttle?
And those are just two relatively recent examples.
This is where I get crabby about people who bash the Shuttle. The Shuttle had no clear mission and was set up to be a jack-of-all-trades. Unlike NASA missions before it, where most of the equipment was designed for a series of experiments or to perform straighforward tasks, the Shuttle is a platform for doing many different things.
Consider Gemini, as an example. Basically, Gemini was designed to test docking in space. Once it had been shown that docking could be done and the skills and procedures needed to carry it out, Gemini was thrown out.
But which is better? It's a tricky question. Obviously, the advantage to having the Shuttle is that various experiments can be designed without having to engineer in the whole launch/re-entry system. This actually makes experiments in orbit cheaper--when there are a sufficient number of experiments--in that the whole get up to orbit and get back down thing has been taken care of.
Conversely, running such a flexible vehicle as the Shuttle is more expensive than launching a rocket. The Shuttle, for example, is a waste of money for launching a satellite. The ISS will, hopefully, obsolete the Shuttle for doing space-based experimentation. And using the Shuttle as a "space taxi" for bringing people and experiments back-and-forth to ISS is a pretty expensive way to do it.
So, no, I don't bash the Shuttle. It certainly has not been a waste of money or space. Having semi-regular access to space and the ability to send up lots of different things and do lots of different things has been very useful. I think the Shuttle has accomplished more in the last twenty years than we would have accomplished by having to spend the money on individual missions into orbit in Apollo-class orbiters.
But, that said, I do think the days of the Shuttle are at an end. Once the ISS is established and properly manned, about the only benefit to the Shuttle will be it's ability to repair/maintain orbiting satellites. Which brings up a neat question: What to do with the Shuttles?
Personally, I'd take two of the Shuttles and give them one last re-engineering. I'd set them up so that they could permanently be operated, refueled and maintained in orbit. I'd launch them up there and use them for maintaining orbiting satellites (such as space telescopes). They'd never come home again.
"Would you turn in a friend if he stole a 50 cent candy bar? A 500,000 check in an insurance scam? No then yes? At what point would you turn him in? At what monetary amount?"
Reminds me of the old saw:
A man asks a woman, "Would you sleep with me for one million dollars?" The woman thinks about it for a moment, smiles, and says, "Yes." The man then asks, "Then, would you sleep with me for one dollar?!" The woman immediately replies, "Absolutely not! What kind of a girl do you think I am?!?" The man says, "I've already established what kind of girl you are. Now we're haggling over the price."
I've commented on this in other posts, but I'll bring it up here.
As I understand it, the CRV would cost something like 3 billion dollars to develop. I would imagine that, for less money, we could redesign the docking adapters to support two Soyuz capsules. Let's say that costs a billion dollars. Two Soyuz will hold six people, so that's what we limit the space station crew to.
Buy six Soyuz capsules at 100 million dollars each. Send them up and attach them to the new docking capsules. Presto! Lifeboats for half the cost. You also have more redundancy, which is always good in lifeboats. For that matter, you have some advantages. Suppose one of your crew gets injured. Toss him in a Soyuz capsule with a buddy and send them down. You still have 5 capsules left for everybody else.
Another idea is to do a competitive bid. The "space lifeboat" must have the following capabilities:
It must be able to survive exposure to space for 1 year -- For budgeting purposes, it must be at least one year (so "replacing lifeboats" can be conveniently budgeted). Obviously, more years is better.
It must be able to support a crew of 7 for 6 hours -- Again, the number of hours is arbitrary.
It must be able to land anywhere -- Water or ground, it shouldn't matter. When you're trying to get away from a dangerous situation, the last thing you want to do is to have to wait for a "return window." If it lands in water, it should be able to float for at least ten minutes. Ideally, longer, but if one person can't open a self-inflating lifeboat and dump 6 unconscious colleagues into the raft in under ten minutes, they've got bigger problems.
There are somewhat more mundane things (strength of chairs etc.) that would have to be specced. But, again, it's a freaking lifeboat! It should cost nowhere near 3 billion dollars. Put it out to a world-wide competitive bid (after all, it is the International Space Station) and see what people come back with. Sit down with a calculator and figure out which bid will be cheapest over five years (Cost of each lifeboat times number of lifeboats times years). Give bonus points to craft which exceed specifications (eg, can support a crew of 7 for 12 hours, can float for two hours, etc.). Pick the best one. Give them the contract for five years. In four years, start the process all over again.
The Apollo capsule was designed to keep three people alive on a trip to the moon. That's it. The Shuttle was designed to do a hell of a lot more than Apollo could ever dream of.
The Shuttle can launch satellites. Okay, that's a rediculously expensive way to launch a satellite. The Shuttle can retrieve satellites and return them to Earth. This might have been useful 24 years ago, but nowadays it's usually cheaper to send up another one than to retrieve and relaunch the original. However, how would you do that with an Apollo mission? Maybe if the satellite was really small. The shuttle was designed as a "platform" for repairing satellites in space. Think you could do that with an Apollo capsule? I don't think so.
Heck, compare the size of the Shuttle's crew area with the available crew area of an Apollo capsule and tell me again how Apollo is "more capable."
Yes, Boosters can haul more "cargo" into orbit. But, then, how do we connect all that "cargo" together? You need a place for the people who are putting that cargo together to work from. I agree that if all you want to do is stick "cargo" into orbit, the Shuttle is a complete waste. But if you want to do something with the "cargo" once it's up there, the Shuttle shines.
I was reading an editorial in the LA Times the other day where someone was griping about how the Shuttle was supposed to make flights into space "routine" and how it didn't succeed in it's mission. I would argue, instead, that it's people like the commentator that show how "routine" the Shuttle has made spaceflight. It's so routine that we take the capabilities of the Shuttle for granted.
By the way, in regards to the ISS, the ISS--to me--is a stepping stone kind of thing. I've seen lots of comments on Slashdot and such about how we can build interplanetary ships in orbit. Of course, we've never actually done this before. The ISS provides us the opportunity to learn how to assemble things in space. It may eventually take the Shuttle's place as a "platform" for doing big things in space.
Your argument sounds like you're saying that the Mercury, Gemini, and all Apollo missions short of Apollo 11 were a complete waste of time. We should have just built the thing and gone. Imagine how much money we'd have saved!
One of the arguments against smoking is the "social cost" of smoking. Namely that those evil smokers cost more for health benefits than non-smokers because they get heart disease, cancer, and strokes from smoking.
The theory being that if they didn't smoke, they would live to the ripe old age of 80 and die without racking up a single medical bill.
Of course, this is debatable. A life-time smoker might live to 65 and rack up the same amount of medical bills as a non-smoker who lives to 80. It's just that their expense is being seen now, whereas the expenses for the non-smokers have yet to be seen.
This was one of the arguments that the states used in their suits against the tobacco companies--that smokers cost them more money.
"At least when I toss a few franks onto the Weber, I *choose* to do so."
But what about your neighbors who are forced to deal with it? We have one of those neighbors who firmly believes that the best barbecues are the ones that put out lots of smoke--adds to the flavor. During the summer, we pretty much have to close up all the doors and windows when he starts barbecuing.
I'm sure, while you're barbecuing, you also have the kids come on over and watch Daddy. Sounds like child abuse to me.
"Living within 20 miles of a coal-fired power plant may expose you to as much mercury over the course of a year as eating 20 cans of tuna over the same period, but only an idiot would argue the fact that it's *okay* for said plant to emit mercury."
Agreed. So what you're saying is that the poisons present in both tobacco and charcoal are equally bad and, therefore, that both are not *okay*.
"what, you gonna quit grilling burgers?"
Well, if you're expelling the equivalent of 160 cigarettes worth of poisons into the air, affecting the neighbors' health and all (after all, they're forced to breathe it), you're going to have to.
As I've said before, solve people problems with people. Solve technology problem with technology.
If you have squatters, ask them to either buy something or leave. "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" means that. And, frankly, if they're not buying something, they're not customers. And, if they get huffy and don't come back, you haven't lost a whole lot.
At the very least, if the person has been sitting there without ordering anything for the last hour, have your wait-person come up every five minutes to say, "Can I get you anything else?" If nothing else, it will be so annoying that the customer will leave on their own.
Actually, my favorite is watching the current administration try to explain away Karl Rove.
"Well, the law says that it is illegal to disclose a CIA agent's name. But he never said 'Valerie Plame.' He said, 'Joe Wilson's wife.' So he didn't do anything wrong..."
Remember this, if you ever want to 'out' a CIA agent. "See that woman over there? No, the blonde one. Right. She's a CIA agent."
I mean, Clinton trying to dance around whether he got a blow-job from an intern was funny. But what makes this truly classic is the Bush administration's "We're Straight Talkers--None of that weaselly Clinton crap" suddenly turning into the same weasels.
Back in 1966, I and a group of friends were arrested for littering in Stockbridge, MA. The prosecution showed up with 27 eight-by-ten color glossy pictures of the "scene of crime," with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one to be used as evidence against us.
Fortunately for us, the Judge was blind and couldn't look at the 27 eight-by-ten glossy picture with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one.
So we got charged $50 and had to clean up the garbage in the snow.
I have a friend who is a bit of a conspiracy nut. It's entertaining to listen to some of it. He told me a couple of "fake moon-landing" conspiracies that are variations of this.
(I know, I'll probably burn in Karma hell...)
If you will, the theory is that we never sent men to the moon because space-suit technology was just not up to the task, but we did send equipment. Thus, you will find lunar modules on the moon. But they were all remote controlled. It was quite obvious that we had the capability to land things on the moon--the Surveyor missions showed us that. But there were never any people in them.
Signals were sent to the moon from the fake landing site via lasers and sent back to Earth via radio. Thus, most of NASA didn't know, either--they were sending signals to the moon and receiving replies (yes, the astronauts were hearing mission control in real-time so the delay worked).
My favorite variation, though, is that we did land on the moon--just not in 1969. So all the missions to the moon weren't faked--just the early ones in order to hit Kennedy's "by the end of this decade" time-frame.
Essentially, the politicans, the military, and it's contractors knew that if they didn't hit the end of the decade deadline, there'd be a real public malaise and people might just give up on the project, especially after we had tried so hard. Consider that the Soviet Union gave up on being the second nation on the moon.
Remember the Vietnam war was going on and the popularity of the US Government was at an all-time low. So Apollos 11 and 12 were staged. Again, the same idea as above (ie, we landed equipment but no people).
They started up the PR campaign to let everyone know that 11 would be landing on the moon so that when you saw the grainy black-and-white blobs coming down the ladder with "Live from the Moon" emblazoned underneath, you'd believe it.
Apollo 12's camera "conveniently" got fried shortly after landing--sorry, no TV images. Apollo 13 didn't land. So it was one of the later missions--perhaps Apollo 14--that actually put men on the moon.
Personally, I think this is the "conspiracy nuts" trying back-pedal in the face of overwhelming evidence. But it is an entertaining concept...
Re:Seeing the remains of the lunar missions.
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Other people have commented, but I figure I'll add one from the tinfoil-hat crowd.
Who decides what's bad for a child's health?
Back during the first Gulf War, a friend of mine with a 12-year-old son protested. Needless to say, the kid was thoroughly embarrassed by his Mom. While he understood his Mom's reasoning, his peers did pick on him a little bit.
Should the child have been removed from his mother because of her outlandish political views?
Apple is a company that sees the forest through the trees. Apple is not about hardware or about software but, as you put it, the experience. And, to me, that means both. Because the experience is the sum of the two.
Put crappy software on great hardware and you have a crappy experience (eg, run Windows on a Dual 3.6Ghz Xeon or high-end AMD). Put great software on crappy hardware and you have a crappy experience (eg, run some awesome game on one of those Dell $299 PCs).
So Apple does care about the hardware under the hood, insofar as it affects the experience. And if they have to build the hardware, they'll do it. But you're right in that if they can, they'll buy it elsewhere (USB is the best example of this).
"Jobs knows the only growth area for Apple is DRM laden media devices. He'd love to jettison the whole OS X/Mac hardware stuff today if he could get away with it."
Now you see, you just don't get it.
Apple is about providing the "complete widget." With the digital-hub concept, that means Macintoshes. The whole "Apple wants to become a consumer electronics company" thing is totally ridiculous. What Apple wants you to do is buy Macintoshes, iPods, and Airports. Apple will link them all together with software so that the sum is greater than the parts.
What makes me laugh is when Apple releases one piece of the puzzle and everyone decides that is Apple's new aim--they're dropping the Mac and going after such-and-such. Again, the Mac continues to be an important part of Apple because it is the platform that they can control.
"The first full quarter of Mac sales after the WWDC announcement of being forced to turn to Intel is going to be ugly, real ugly. Only an idiot would wasted money on obsolete hardware."
Welcome to the exciting world of FUD!
Well, supposedly Intel is coming out with a whole bunch of really rockin' CPUs. Does this mean that no-one is going to buy an Intel-based PC because it will obviously be obsolete? Do you really expect to get decent performance out of Longhorn on your 3.6 GHz Pentium IV? Only an idiot to buy any kind of Intel-based PC in the next year or so!
And yet, people are doing so.
(Oh, and to you AMD fans, why would you buy an AMD machine when Intel's CPUs are going to be so much better? You'd have to be an idiot to buy an AMD-based PC because when Intel comes out with their stuff, your machine will be obsolete.)
So there's some FUD back-atcha. See how it works?
Now, to refute the FUD. First, those who need machines buy now. That's true even in the PC world. If you need a machine now, you buy it now. "Oh, I'm not going to buy my kid that iBook for college because Apple will have new iBooks in January which use Intel CPUs." I don't hear that one very often.
And, actually, I've met a few people who want to buy now! They want to get the best PowerPC machine before Apple switches them to Intel and Macs end up sucking like PCs do. (These are people who do lots of floating-point calculations)
Second, some of those people will wait and Apple may see a drop in sales. Fair enough. But, from a corporate standpoint, Apple has $7.5 Billion dollars sitting in the bank. I think they'll be able to hold on for a year of declining sales if people decide to wait. And keep in mind that those people are waiting--once Apple does release an Intel-based machine, people will snap them up. And, with Intel providing the CPUs, Apple will finally have a supplier that can keep up with demand. Which means Apple will end up making that money back anyway.
In short, only an idiot would believe the FUD you're trolling.
Slashdot Mirror
"Because the license plate number on the back of the vehicle can't provide them with that information."
:^)
Ah, but now the conspiracy begins to get bigger.
As I understand it, the only people who can turn a tag number into a name and address are the police and the DMV. Thus, said "bureaucrat" either needs to be in one of those two organizations or know someone in one of those two organizations.
Remember, the more people you in have to involve in your activities, the harder it is to keep those activities secret.
So we've made it easier to "gather intelligence." One guy can get all this information.
"Why don't you want to say? As has been pointed out many a time before, so much could be resolved if people would just bother to communicate."
Because the cop who is questioning me happens to be my wife's brother and I really don't want to tell him that I am cheating on his sister. Nor do I want to tell another officer because it will get back to him.
"Because RFID is the cause of all racism."
I'll admit, I went out a limb with that one.
"You see, you don't matter. The spy ware companies don't care whether you're a quadrapalegic or you like fucking animals or you sit naked while surfing slashdot except insofar as it's information they can sell. But they don't care about you as a person. You are nothing and if you died tomorrow, they wouldn't care."
Hey now! My Mom (and, of course, Jesus) loves me. That's what's important!
Seriously, the example of "nobody cares about me" is debatable.
For example, I'll drive through the parking lot and get the addresses of all those people who are driving "luxury" cars. They might be good people to rob. Or, perhaps, I'll get the addresses of all those people driving ricers--they seem to be willing to spend money on their cars. I'll sell that to the local ricer accessory place so that they can do targeted mailings.
Park in a mall? Get junk mail.
I mean, putting the tag number into a transmitter doesn't bother me all that much. It's the fact that the article explicitly said, "And other information." What other information is not disclosed.
If it's information I would prefer that the rest of the world not have broadcasted to them, such as my address, social security number, date of birth, etc., I don't like it.
The phrase you're looking for is, "Garbage expands to fill the space allotted."
First, is the obvious answer: "Those who sacrifice their liberty for their security deserve neither."
Your examples are the obvious scare tactics. Imagine if we could track people. "Suppose something bad happens to you! Wouldn't it be great if we could just punch a button and know where you are and send help?" Let's just LoJack everybody--for their own safety, of course...
No, I can't imagine a single "bureaucrat" who cares where I was at 2:00AM. But I can imagine a "bureaucrat" who might be interested in those cars sitting outside the headquarters for anti-way rally. Who owns them? Where do they live? They must be anti-American scum who don't believe in our president.
Or better yet--gee, your car was a block away while this brutal murder happened. What were you doing in that neighborhood? What, you don't want to tell us? Could you have been doing something you shouldn't? Perhaps we should investigate you more.
Better yet--you're black and your car was parked close to this robbery! Well, that makes you a chief suspect right there. After all, what was a black man doing parked in this predominantly white neighborhood. He must have been up to no good.
(From the article: "The British government is preparing to test new high-tech license plates containing microchips capable of transmitting unique vehicle identification numbers and other data to readers more than 300 feet away.")
In this case, I'll use your own words against you. Suppose that sicko sees your daughter driving in traffic, reads your address from the RFID tags that are on your daughter's car, shows up at your house one night and attacks your daughter? Or that guy who feels you cut him off in traffic decides to get a little bit of revenge?
No one is saying what this "other data" is.
"[...] there are several HUNDRED MILLION cars on the road and no one is going to randomly just decide to find out where your car was unless they had a reason to look for it."
Good point. That's why I don't worry about spyware on my computer. After all, I'm only one of several hundred million people on line. Why would anybody target me?
Well, frankly, the Shuttle is the solution to a number of problems. It is one vehicle that can act as a laboratory in space (especially with the SpaceLab module), it can service satellites in orbit (try to maintain the Hubble Space Telescope without a shuttle), it can retrieve thousands of pounds from space and return it to Earth.
I assume your solution is to build different spacecraft for each mission? How much money is that going to take, duplicating the same solutions to the same problems over and over and over again?
Take a few examples:
- The Space Tether Experiment -- I assume your solution would have been to build a spacecraft to handle this. Consider, also, that the tether broke on the mission. How would you have returned the unbroken end to Earth in order to determine what had happened?
- There's a neat article here on some of the experiments done on the Columbia mission. How would you duplicate those experiments without the Shuttle?
And those are just two relatively recent examples.This is where I get crabby about people who bash the Shuttle. The Shuttle had no clear mission and was set up to be a jack-of-all-trades. Unlike NASA missions before it, where most of the equipment was designed for a series of experiments or to perform straighforward tasks, the Shuttle is a platform for doing many different things.
Consider Gemini, as an example. Basically, Gemini was designed to test docking in space. Once it had been shown that docking could be done and the skills and procedures needed to carry it out, Gemini was thrown out.
But which is better? It's a tricky question. Obviously, the advantage to having the Shuttle is that various experiments can be designed without having to engineer in the whole launch/re-entry system. This actually makes experiments in orbit cheaper--when there are a sufficient number of experiments--in that the whole get up to orbit and get back down thing has been taken care of.
Conversely, running such a flexible vehicle as the Shuttle is more expensive than launching a rocket. The Shuttle, for example, is a waste of money for launching a satellite. The ISS will, hopefully, obsolete the Shuttle for doing space-based experimentation. And using the Shuttle as a "space taxi" for bringing people and experiments back-and-forth to ISS is a pretty expensive way to do it.
So, no, I don't bash the Shuttle. It certainly has not been a waste of money or space. Having semi-regular access to space and the ability to send up lots of different things and do lots of different things has been very useful. I think the Shuttle has accomplished more in the last twenty years than we would have accomplished by having to spend the money on individual missions into orbit in Apollo-class orbiters.
But, that said, I do think the days of the Shuttle are at an end. Once the ISS is established and properly manned, about the only benefit to the Shuttle will be it's ability to repair/maintain orbiting satellites. Which brings up a neat question: What to do with the Shuttles?
Personally, I'd take two of the Shuttles and give them one last re-engineering. I'd set them up so that they could permanently be operated, refueled and maintained in orbit. I'd launch them up there and use them for maintaining orbiting satellites (such as space telescopes). They'd never come home again.
Whoa...I had to look that one up. Never saw "Quark," but I heard it was pretty funny.
Actually, I was thinking that you were setting up an episode of "The Surreal Life".
"Tonight, old TV and movie stars fly the Space Shuttle and have to pick up garbage on...'The Surreal Life'."
"'Code Orange Smog Alert: Please limit driving and fireplace-using...'"
Actually, this has happened in Colorado. Also certain places in California and Nevada have either regulated wood burning stoves or are considering it.
"Would you turn in a friend if he stole a 50 cent candy bar? A 500,000 check in an insurance scam? No then yes? At what point would you turn him in? At what monetary amount?"
Reminds me of the old saw:
A man asks a woman, "Would you sleep with me for one million dollars?" The woman thinks about it for a moment, smiles, and says, "Yes." The man then asks, "Then, would you sleep with me for one dollar?!" The woman immediately replies, "Absolutely not! What kind of a girl do you think I am?!?" The man says, "I've already established what kind of girl you are. Now we're haggling over the price."
An oldie but a goodie...
As I understand it, the CRV would cost something like 3 billion dollars to develop. I would imagine that, for less money, we could redesign the docking adapters to support two Soyuz capsules. Let's say that costs a billion dollars. Two Soyuz will hold six people, so that's what we limit the space station crew to.
Buy six Soyuz capsules at 100 million dollars each. Send them up and attach them to the new docking capsules. Presto! Lifeboats for half the cost. You also have more redundancy, which is always good in lifeboats. For that matter, you have some advantages. Suppose one of your crew gets injured. Toss him in a Soyuz capsule with a buddy and send them down. You still have 5 capsules left for everybody else.
Another idea is to do a competitive bid. The "space lifeboat" must have the following capabilities:
- It must be able to survive exposure to space for 1 year -- For budgeting purposes, it must be at least one year (so "replacing lifeboats" can be conveniently budgeted). Obviously, more years is better.
- It must be able to support a crew of 7 for 6 hours -- Again, the number of hours is arbitrary.
- It must be able to land anywhere -- Water or ground, it shouldn't matter. When you're trying to get away from a dangerous situation, the last thing you want to do is to have to wait for a "return window." If it lands in water, it should be able to float for at least ten minutes. Ideally, longer, but if one person can't open a self-inflating lifeboat and dump 6 unconscious colleagues into the raft in under ten minutes, they've got bigger problems.
There are somewhat more mundane things (strength of chairs etc.) that would have to be specced. But, again, it's a freaking lifeboat! It should cost nowhere near 3 billion dollars. Put it out to a world-wide competitive bid (after all, it is the International Space Station) and see what people come back with. Sit down with a calculator and figure out which bid will be cheapest over five years (Cost of each lifeboat times number of lifeboats times years). Give bonus points to craft which exceed specifications (eg, can support a crew of 7 for 12 hours, can float for two hours, etc.). Pick the best one. Give them the contract for five years. In four years, start the process all over again.I mean, this isn't rocket science...
Y'know, I'm start to get a little sick of this.
The Apollo capsule was designed to keep three people alive on a trip to the moon. That's it. The Shuttle was designed to do a hell of a lot more than Apollo could ever dream of.
The Shuttle can launch satellites. Okay, that's a rediculously expensive way to launch a satellite. The Shuttle can retrieve satellites and return them to Earth. This might have been useful 24 years ago, but nowadays it's usually cheaper to send up another one than to retrieve and relaunch the original. However, how would you do that with an Apollo mission? Maybe if the satellite was really small. The shuttle was designed as a "platform" for repairing satellites in space. Think you could do that with an Apollo capsule? I don't think so.
Heck, compare the size of the Shuttle's crew area with the available crew area of an Apollo capsule and tell me again how Apollo is "more capable."
Yes, Boosters can haul more "cargo" into orbit. But, then, how do we connect all that "cargo" together? You need a place for the people who are putting that cargo together to work from. I agree that if all you want to do is stick "cargo" into orbit, the Shuttle is a complete waste. But if you want to do something with the "cargo" once it's up there, the Shuttle shines.
I was reading an editorial in the LA Times the other day where someone was griping about how the Shuttle was supposed to make flights into space "routine" and how it didn't succeed in it's mission. I would argue, instead, that it's people like the commentator that show how "routine" the Shuttle has made spaceflight. It's so routine that we take the capabilities of the Shuttle for granted.
By the way, in regards to the ISS, the ISS--to me--is a stepping stone kind of thing. I've seen lots of comments on Slashdot and such about how we can build interplanetary ships in orbit. Of course, we've never actually done this before. The ISS provides us the opportunity to learn how to assemble things in space. It may eventually take the Shuttle's place as a "platform" for doing big things in space.
Your argument sounds like you're saying that the Mercury, Gemini, and all Apollo missions short of Apollo 11 were a complete waste of time. We should have just built the thing and gone. Imagine how much money we'd have saved!
One of the arguments against smoking is the "social cost" of smoking. Namely that those evil smokers cost more for health benefits than non-smokers because they get heart disease, cancer, and strokes from smoking.
The theory being that if they didn't smoke, they would live to the ripe old age of 80 and die without racking up a single medical bill.
Of course, this is debatable. A life-time smoker might live to 65 and rack up the same amount of medical bills as a non-smoker who lives to 80. It's just that their expense is being seen now, whereas the expenses for the non-smokers have yet to be seen.
This was one of the arguments that the states used in their suits against the tobacco companies--that smokers cost them more money.
"At least when I toss a few franks onto the Weber, I *choose* to do so."
But what about your neighbors who are forced to deal with it? We have one of those neighbors who firmly believes that the best barbecues are the ones that put out lots of smoke--adds to the flavor. During the summer, we pretty much have to close up all the doors and windows when he starts barbecuing.
I'm sure, while you're barbecuing, you also have the kids come on over and watch Daddy. Sounds like child abuse to me.
"Living within 20 miles of a coal-fired power plant may expose you to as much mercury over the course of a year as eating 20 cans of tuna over the same period, but only an idiot would argue the fact that it's *okay* for said plant to emit mercury."
Agreed. So what you're saying is that the poisons present in both tobacco and charcoal are equally bad and, therefore, that both are not *okay*.
"what, you gonna quit grilling burgers?"
Well, if you're expelling the equivalent of 160 cigarettes worth of poisons into the air, affecting the neighbors' health and all (after all, they're forced to breathe it), you're going to have to.
"Femputer sentences them to death... by snu-snu!"
Amazon Women in the Mood
"If I must walk through the same guy's Marlboro cloud to get in/out of the building, he *is* harming me."
Rubbish.
I would tend to agree and I like your solution.
As I've said before, solve people problems with people. Solve technology problem with technology.
If you have squatters, ask them to either buy something or leave. "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" means that. And, frankly, if they're not buying something, they're not customers. And, if they get huffy and don't come back, you haven't lost a whole lot.
At the very least, if the person has been sitting there without ordering anything for the last hour, have your wait-person come up every five minutes to say, "Can I get you anything else?" If nothing else, it will be so annoying that the customer will leave on their own.
Well, it's official. You don't get to name anything. Ever.
"I'm a small man with a giant big - shit!"
Actually, my favorite is watching the current administration try to explain away Karl Rove.
"Well, the law says that it is illegal to disclose a CIA agent's name. But he never said 'Valerie Plame.' He said, 'Joe Wilson's wife.' So he didn't do anything wrong..."
Remember this, if you ever want to 'out' a CIA agent. "See that woman over there? No, the blonde one. Right. She's a CIA agent."
I mean, Clinton trying to dance around whether he got a blow-job from an intern was funny. But what makes this truly classic is the Bush administration's "We're Straight Talkers--None of that weaselly Clinton crap" suddenly turning into the same weasels.
Back in 1966, I and a group of friends were arrested for littering in Stockbridge, MA. The prosecution showed up with 27 eight-by-ten color glossy pictures of the "scene of crime," with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one to be used as evidence against us.
Fortunately for us, the Judge was blind and couldn't look at the 27 eight-by-ten glossy picture with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one.
So we got charged $50 and had to clean up the garbage in the snow.
Oh wait! That was Arlo Guthrie. My mistake...
Now let me tell you about the draft...
I have a friend who is a bit of a conspiracy nut. It's entertaining to listen to some of it. He told me a couple of "fake moon-landing" conspiracies that are variations of this.
(I know, I'll probably burn in Karma hell...)
If you will, the theory is that we never sent men to the moon because space-suit technology was just not up to the task, but we did send equipment. Thus, you will find lunar modules on the moon. But they were all remote controlled. It was quite obvious that we had the capability to land things on the moon--the Surveyor missions showed us that. But there were never any people in them.
Signals were sent to the moon from the fake landing site via lasers and sent back to Earth via radio. Thus, most of NASA didn't know, either--they were sending signals to the moon and receiving replies (yes, the astronauts were hearing mission control in real-time so the delay worked).
My favorite variation, though, is that we did land on the moon--just not in 1969. So all the missions to the moon weren't faked--just the early ones in order to hit Kennedy's "by the end of this decade" time-frame.
Essentially, the politicans, the military, and it's contractors knew that if they didn't hit the end of the decade deadline, there'd be a real public malaise and people might just give up on the project, especially after we had tried so hard. Consider that the Soviet Union gave up on being the second nation on the moon.
Remember the Vietnam war was going on and the popularity of the US Government was at an all-time low. So Apollos 11 and 12 were staged. Again, the same idea as above (ie, we landed equipment but no people).
They started up the PR campaign to let everyone know that 11 would be landing on the moon so that when you saw the grainy black-and-white blobs coming down the ladder with "Live from the Moon" emblazoned underneath, you'd believe it.
Apollo 12's camera "conveniently" got fried shortly after landing--sorry, no TV images. Apollo 13 didn't land. So it was one of the later missions--perhaps Apollo 14--that actually put men on the moon.
Personally, I think this is the "conspiracy nuts" trying back-pedal in the face of overwhelming evidence. But it is an entertaining concept...
There is one planned for 2008 which should be able to do this.
You can also vaguely see the Apollo 15 landing site from the Clementine photos.
Other people have commented, but I figure I'll add one from the tinfoil-hat crowd.
Who decides what's bad for a child's health?
Back during the first Gulf War, a friend of mine with a 12-year-old son protested. Needless to say, the kid was thoroughly embarrassed by his Mom. While he understood his Mom's reasoning, his peers did pick on him a little bit.
Should the child have been removed from his mother because of her outlandish political views?
*Whew*! I'm glad I don't drink pop.
Soda, on the other hand, I down by the bucketful. But at least it's not that evil "pop" stuff...
(Sorry. Couldn't resist. Guess where I live...)
Luxury! Back in my day, we had to wear roller skates to get around our computer.
But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe you...
I'm not 100% convinced of this.
Apple is a company that sees the forest through the trees. Apple is not about hardware or about software but, as you put it, the experience. And, to me, that means both. Because the experience is the sum of the two.
Put crappy software on great hardware and you have a crappy experience (eg, run Windows on a Dual 3.6Ghz Xeon or high-end AMD). Put great software on crappy hardware and you have a crappy experience (eg, run some awesome game on one of those Dell $299 PCs).
So Apple does care about the hardware under the hood, insofar as it affects the experience. And if they have to build the hardware, they'll do it. But you're right in that if they can, they'll buy it elsewhere (USB is the best example of this).
Oh lord, where to begin...
"Jobs knows the only growth area for Apple is DRM laden media devices. He'd love to jettison the whole OS X/Mac hardware stuff today if he could get away with it."
Now you see, you just don't get it.
Apple is about providing the "complete widget." With the digital-hub concept, that means Macintoshes. The whole "Apple wants to become a consumer electronics company" thing is totally ridiculous. What Apple wants you to do is buy Macintoshes, iPods, and Airports. Apple will link them all together with software so that the sum is greater than the parts.
What makes me laugh is when Apple releases one piece of the puzzle and everyone decides that is Apple's new aim--they're dropping the Mac and going after such-and-such. Again, the Mac continues to be an important part of Apple because it is the platform that they can control.
"The first full quarter of Mac sales after the WWDC announcement of being forced to turn to Intel is going to be ugly, real ugly. Only an idiot would wasted money on obsolete hardware."
Welcome to the exciting world of FUD!
Well, supposedly Intel is coming out with a whole bunch of really rockin' CPUs. Does this mean that no-one is going to buy an Intel-based PC because it will obviously be obsolete? Do you really expect to get decent performance out of Longhorn on your 3.6 GHz Pentium IV? Only an idiot to buy any kind of Intel-based PC in the next year or so!
And yet, people are doing so.
(Oh, and to you AMD fans, why would you buy an AMD machine when Intel's CPUs are going to be so much better? You'd have to be an idiot to buy an AMD-based PC because when Intel comes out with their stuff, your machine will be obsolete.)
So there's some FUD back-atcha. See how it works?
Now, to refute the FUD. First, those who need machines buy now. That's true even in the PC world. If you need a machine now, you buy it now. "Oh, I'm not going to buy my kid that iBook for college because Apple will have new iBooks in January which use Intel CPUs." I don't hear that one very often.
And, actually, I've met a few people who want to buy now! They want to get the best PowerPC machine before Apple switches them to Intel and Macs end up sucking like PCs do. (These are people who do lots of floating-point calculations)
Second, some of those people will wait and Apple may see a drop in sales. Fair enough. But, from a corporate standpoint, Apple has $7.5 Billion dollars sitting in the bank. I think they'll be able to hold on for a year of declining sales if people decide to wait. And keep in mind that those people are waiting--once Apple does release an Intel-based machine, people will snap them up. And, with Intel providing the CPUs, Apple will finally have a supplier that can keep up with demand. Which means Apple will end up making that money back anyway.
In short, only an idiot would believe the FUD you're trolling.