Eh, I know, and thanks for the addition. But maybe it's not apples to oranges so much as Fuji apples to red delicious apples.
I debated whether to cite the cost of the Apollo booster alone, or the CM, to the CEV, because the CEV isn't just a new crew module, but on the other hand it's going to make considerable use of existing booster tech (e.g. the SRBs). Then I thought about the fact that I dunno if the cost cited by Wikipedia includes operating costs on the ground or not, some of which in the 1970s were borne by the military and didn't appear on NASA's budget, and then I thought about the fact that NASA estimates the CEV budget at $15 billion, and who knows what it will in fact cost and then...I gave up and pushed "Submit" 'cause I just meant to give a rough clue.
Right. That's why I said thrust to weight ratio, i.e. thrust divided by weight. For the SRBs, it's enormous. Not so for the other engines. The fact that the SRBs don't squeeze as much energy out of their fuel seems rather beside the point. Fuel efficiency isn't the name of the game when you lift off, raw acceleration is -- yes?
That's why I suggested the comparison to the Dodge Viper vs the Toyota Prius. The Viper gets crappy gas mileage compared to the Prius, of course. But it has a much higher power-to-inertia ratio, so it can accelerate much harder (e.g. blast from 0 to 60 in far less time).
Surely if the use is initial liftoff the important statistic is thrust to weight ratio. The question of efficiency -- which is what specific impulse measures -- seems rather secondary, unless I'm missing something. An ion engine, for example, would have a far greater specific impulse than either chemical engine, but since its thrust is so pathetic it couldn't get itself off the ground.
To put it in plebian terms, if you need to outrun the cops (i.e. achieve escape velocity), surely it's better to be driving this instead of this.
I don't want to live in a world where companies can conclude that a particular individual is "probably guilty anyway" because "everyone knows it"
I don't mean to be overly cynical, but I find it hard to believe anyone over the age of 30 can imagine we don't already live in that world. Have you never been or known someone who's been stopped by the police for DWB ("Driving While Black")? Are you not aware that women are almost always given far lighter sentences for crimes of violence than men? (The perception is that women are more often "driven to" violence, while for men it's more of a choice.) Is it not clear that attractive people are routinely treated with more trust in business deals than ugly fat people? That is, they get mortgages easier, are promoted more often, et cetera?
I mean, relying on Constitutional protections to protect us from human nature seems a bit...well, unrealistic.
Er, it doesn't? Do you figure that as soon as you step out your front door and into the "public thoroughfare" your Fourth Amendment rights vanish? Or, they vanish because you travel on a bicycle, automobile, motorcyle, public bus, or rented donkey instead of on foot?
Geez, that point of view is far more restrictive of civil liberties than the wildest dreams of H.R. Haldeman.
They key distinctions here have nothing to do with the mode of travel or whether you're on public or private land. You have the same FthA rights in your car as you do on foot, or on a public bus, and the same rights on your own land as in a National Park or someone else's house. What's different is (1) what your "reasonable expectation of privacy" is, and (2) what public interest is served by inspecting you, with or without a warrant. That's because the FthA is not an absolute statement; the restrictions it puts on government are to be balanced by the competing public interests of order, justice, and national security.
In the case of crossing the international border, there is a very strong public interest in making sure the border is secure, and a reduced reasonable expectation of privacy. Exiting and entering the country is an unusual and public action, and potentially puts your fellow citizens at great risk (should you, say, import dangerous and illegal substances, devices, or persons). You should therefore reasonably expect to be subject to a more than ordinary level of scrutiny. (And, of course, if you object to that scrutiny, you always have the option of not crossing the border. Crossing the border is almost never a necessity of life.)
So the government has very broad rights to inspect people crossing the border. Some people don't get this, and that's why the case I cited exists -- some times it's necessary for the Supreme Court to affirm the simple fact that crossing the border is special, and you should have considerably diminished expectations from the FthA when doing so.
Should this diminished expectation of privacy extend to "crossing the border" electronically, via phone or e-mail? Stay tuned, the Supreme Court will enlighten us on this topic any day now.
Absolutely right on. That individuals can escape the consequences of their actions by inventing a fictitious artificial person (the corporation) and letting "him" take the fall when they f*ck up is obscene.
Makes you wonder why clever criminals don't invent a corporation and "work" for it, so that granny can only sue Crime, Inc. for compensatory and punitive damages after she gets out of the hospital, instead of being able to see the particular individual who thwocked her with a baseball bat put away in jail for 10 years. Sheesh.
It's likely the people suing would be required to show that they have been directly harmed.
The EFF found a few subscribers of AT&T to allege violation of their First and Fourth Amendment rights, and have asked every similarly-situated subscriber to be joined to make it a class-action suit. The EFF is not in fact suing the government itself, the named plaintiffs (and potentially the millions of unnamed members of the class) are. The EFF is just providing the lawyers.
The standard would likely be lower for suing AT&T, which could be as simple as breach of a privacy contract.
No, AT&T is obligated to give up information on their subscribers in response to any lawful government order, private privacy agreements notwithstanding. That's why they can comply with ordinary secret wiretap orders without telling you, and you can't sue them for breach of contract.
The complaint alleges, first, that AT&T acting as an agent of the government violated the plaintiffs First and Fourth Amendment rights by not securing a warrant for a wiretap and mining AT&T's "Daytona" database. Obviously, the Court could not find for the plaintiffs without finding that the President has no constitutional or statutory authority to order wiretaps of this nature without a warrant. Additionally, it would need to find that AT&T was acting as the government's agent, and not merely complying with an order it thought, or had good reason to think, was legal.
This is a tall order, especially with regard to finding AT&T an agent of the government. I suspect it's the equivalent of the following: you work at the DMV, and a policeman comes in, shows you his badge, and asks you to run the plates of a certain car and tell you the owner's address, because he's investigating a certain crime. He's asked you to do this many times before, you know for a fact he works for the PD, and you know for a fact the crime he mentions exists, because you saw it on the news. But -- alas -- it turns out the cop was not acting officially. He was merely sneakily finding out where his ex-girlfriend was living. So the ex-GF sues you for violating her Fourth Amendment rights. Is the Court going to back her up? Mmm, sounds unlikely. Sounds like you were just doing your job and responded to what any reasonable person would think was a legal order from law enforcement. The ex-GF has a case against the cop, sure. But not against you. Similarly, I 'spect a Federal judge is going to tell the EFF the plaintiffs might have a case against the United States, but not against AT&T.
The complaint alleges, second, that AT&T violated FISA because they knew, or should have known, that the government order to wiretap without a FISA warrant was illegal, notwithstanding that it was signed by the Attorney General of the United States or his representative. Um, sure. Good luck with that one, boys.
The remaining counts are a couple of Hail Marys alleging violation of the usual wiretap laws -- which relies on AT&T's defense that it was obeying a legal (or apparently legal or legal at the time) order not holding up -- and for violating California's business code because AT&T deceived subscribers into thinking their communications would not be monitored illegally by the NSA.
I would be shocked if the EFF expects to prevail on this at any level, except maybe barely possibly at the trial court level if they do get venue in San Francisco and can seat a load of ACT-UP activists on the jury. But, mmmm, any way it turns out, it's very good publicity. Look how long this comment thread is...
A brilliant post. May I add one comment, in re this:
In fact, if the EFF loses this case, it will establish a precedent that what AT&T did is not illegal.
Only if SCOTUS wants to set a precedent. They can easily settle any specific case without setting a precedent, if they feel like it.
I only mention this because of one interesting fact: have you noticed that, despite all the huffing and puffing by Congress and the President in the last five decades or so, over precisely who has what authority over what when it comes to war, neither side has actually filed suit in a way guaranteed to get the issue settled once and for all? The Supreme Court has never really settled this issue in part because neither the Executive nor Legislative branch has seriously asked them to.
And why not? Let us wax a trifle cynical, and suggest that perhaps the present ambiguity serves the interests of both branches. With the water muddied, so to speak, each can hope to angle for more turf, e.g. get away with stuff because of popular opinion that doesn't quite pass Constitutional muster. After all, both the White House and Capitol are inhabited by political animals, who are probably more confident of their ability to win the backing of popular opinion than of their ability to dispute arcane legal principles with nine gimlet-eyed humorless old sticks.
Once the Supreme Court rules firmly on the issue, there will be far fewer ambigous dark corners where one side or the other can exercise some squatter's rights. Maybe, like spouses battling loudly in divorce Court, neither President nor Congress really wants the Court to make a final and complete ruling.
Dude, the point is simply that when Constitutional law professors at big law schools can make the argument either way, then the legal issues can't possible be as settled as the OP said.
I didn't endorse any point of view. I just said that when the guys with JD's don't agree on what the Supreme Court will say, then ipso facto the final word on the issue -- the clear opinion of the Supreme Court -- doesn't yet exist.
Ooookay...I go to www.google.com...enter a few search terms...press enter...presto!
Elapsed time, 20 seconds.
To quote from the opening paragraph of the link:
Washington, D.C.-- U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Robert C. Bonner today hailed the Supreme Court ruling upholding CBP officers and agents authority to disassemble and thereby search a vehicle's gas tank for terrorist weapons, drugs, and other contraband, without the need to obtain a warrant or probable cause.
Well, I understand your position, too, I think. I don't agree entirely, but as I said, this is an area where reasonable men have differed for centuries. Consensus is not likely any time soon...
First, I believe the Supreme Court has held that all sorts of searches can be considered "reasonable" under the Fourth Amendment without involving the issuance of a warrant. The text you quote certainly establishes two things: that searches may not be unreasonable, and that warrants may not be issued without probable cause and a narrow specification of what precisely is to be searched. But this text does not explicitly connect the two, and state clearly that a search is a priori unreasonable if it is not authorized by a warrant.
What exactly the text of the Fourth Amendment means, what the precise connection between "reasonable" and the presence of a warrant is, is therefore up to the Supreme Court to say. (Congress, of course, has no say in the matter.) Certainly what the Supreme Court has in fact held has been a welter of horribly complex reasoning that has kept fleets of Constitutional lawyers busy from the founding of the Republic to the present day. Myself, I do wish Madison had been a tad more explicit. But we have what we have.
One might argue -- as perhaps you are here -- that even if a search is not in fact authorized by a Court warrant, the Fourth Amendment requires that it be authorizable in principle by a warrant. That is, the same legal standards must be met. But I think the Supreme Court has rejected this reasoning. I believe they have held that different standards apply in different circumstances. For example, what is "reasonable" when a policeman decides the issue in a split-second can be different than what is "reasonable" when a learned judge with days to ponder decides the issue. And (more to the point) what is reasonable when the nation is in danger of armed sneak attack is not necessarily the same as what is reasonable when it is not.
I believe there are also all kinds of complex issues about what constitutes a "search" that depend on when one has a "reasonable expectation of privacy." An example is that, while it is blatantly illegal for the police to tap your home phone without a Court order, it is perfectly legal for a plainclothesman to listen to your conversation (and take notes that can be used against you in Court) if you and he are sitting in a cafe and you're jabbering on your cell phone loud enough for him to overhear. The circumstances mean he doesn't need a warrant or "probable cause" to listen in.
So, what kind of "reasonable expectation of privacy" do you have when talking internationally, versus domestically? When talking over a cell phone (on which anyone with a radio receiver can eavesdrop) versus on a landline? When talking to friends and family, or your lawyer or your doctor -- or to people you know or should know are enemies of the United States? These are complex questions, and reasonable men may certainly differ on the exact answers. But the exact answers matter, to determine how the Fourth Amendment applies.
What I consider indisputable, though, is that he would require congressional approval to do so.
Well, other people -- indeed, all Presidents -- dispute this. In the context of fighting the foreign enemies of the United States, the President draws his power directly from the Constitution. That's why there didn't need to be a law authorizing the CIA to spy on the Soviets during the Cold War, and that's why Eisenhower, for better or worse, was able to secretly order -- without Congressional knowledge or approval -- spy planes to fly over Moscow and photograph Chairman Brezhnev taking a leak behind Lenin's Tomb, if they could.
If the President were ordering the NSA to wiretap conversations between Americans and, say, German industrialists, for the purpose of industrial espionage, surely that would not fall under Article II. But it's difficult to see why, for example, FDR shoul
The issues of law, however, are not so tenuous as you seem to think.
Erm, real lawyers and law professors disagree with you and Al Gore on that point. Try here and here, for example. I'm not saying either post is right on the money, but these are real fancy-pants lawyers throwing around real F. Ctr. Op. fnord. Cit. (3) legal citations. And when the professionals disagree so heatedly among themselves I'd say the legal issues are indeed unsettled, at least until such time as the Supreme Court weighs in on the issue.
This is hardly surprising: the exact point where the Executive Branch's Article II war-fighting powers trump the Legislature's power to make law has been argued for centuries. Did Lincoln have the authority to free the slaves by decree in the absence of any law whatsoever giving him that power? Could Truman seize steel mills hit by a strike during the Korean War to prevent disastrous steel shortages? Scholars still debate. Let us not even get into the delicate question of the famous War Powers Act, which every President, Democrat or Republican, has claimed to be unconstitutional since the day it passed.
In terms of spying on Americans, however, there must be a warrant. Article 4 of the constitution asserts this.
Nooo, the Fourth Amendment (not Article IV) just says there can be no "unreasonable" searches. That may or may not mean a warrant -- the definition of "unreasonable" is up to the Courts, ultimately the Supreme Court. For example, if a policeman sees you stuffing something that looks like a body in a trash bag or 50 pounds of marijuana into your woodshed, does he need a warrant to order you to unlock the woodshed and let him search it? Nope. In a case like that, the Courts have held that the value to justice of allowing the policeman to exercise his reasonable judgment on the spot, and collect evidence that you might otherwise hide, if given time, outweighs any danger to your civil liberties.
Furthermore, the Courts have generally held that the Executive Branch (that's the President, or his designees, like the NSA) has broad authority to search the effects, persons, and, yes, communications of US citizens when they enter or exit the country. You'll have noticed, I hope, that the Customs and Immigration people don't need a warrant or your permission to search your bags, papers, person or car when you enter or exit the country. They can even stop you within the US to search your bags or car for, say, illegal aliens or drugs, if you're near enough to the border. And the postal service can open up packages sent by you to international destinations, or from international destinations to you, to inspect them. They don't need your permission, a warrant or even a specific reason to do so. (The generic reason of making sure the Customs and Immigration laws are being followed is considered good enough.)
We can think of border control and inspection as something like a sobriety checkpoint. As long as the "borderline" over which, if you step, you get inspected, is clear, and as long as there is some reasonable law-enforcement goal served by the inspection, and as long as the inspection does not overly intrude in your daily life, then the procedure has been held to be Constitutional, even in the absence of probable cause or a warrant.
Modern communication, with the binging of messages back and forth across international borders, has made a bit of a mess of our expectations. Fifty years ago, the government read every international cable or telegram as a matter of course. But people expected that. It was an unusual thing to communicate internationally. Nowadays, and especially with the Internet, we tend to think of international communications as pretty much the same as intranational communications. But they're not. We expect the same privacy and legal rights as when we talk to our neighbors. But we shouldn'
I think the problem with reaching geostationary orbit with a cell phone is good old 1/r^2, which is the rate at which power transmitted falls off with distance r from the antenna, roughly speaking. How far can your tiny 1 or 2 watt radio transmitter send its signal and be picked up by a reasonable-sized antenna? Not far. 22,000 miles is asking for a very sensitive (i.e. big) antenna in orbit, or boosting the size of the transmitter on Earth, or both.
The popular reason to care about binary frequencies is to determine the frequency with which planetary systems could occur.
And this is probably because it impacts the probability of intelligent life elsewhere, yes?
But the thing is, I have my doubts about the formation of habitable planets being the rate-limiting step, the key term in the Drake Equation, so to speak. I'm thinking the rate of spontaneous creation of life could be the really tough step. Maybe the rate of habitable planet formation isn't awfully important to SETI.
You're right. The longer I live, the less confident I am that science provides the answers human beans wielding it say it does, too.
Problem is, the longer I live, the even less confident I am that { religion | philosophy | technology | love | sex | games | sailboats | witty dialogue | et cetera } provides any reliable answers, either. I'm almost beginning to suspect the problem is not with the tools but with the tool-users...
But anyway, it's a question of relative rates. I think if you live long enough, you find you get disillusioned with science slower than any other branch of human endeavor. So...science wins!
Yeah I know. But I wonder how that happened? It's hard to believe DEC managers were always fools. How could DEC attract such stellar engineering talent if management was populated by fools? Engineers don't work for idiots, at least not when they can do better, and the people who worked for DEC had their choice of jobs. Did something change? I don't pretend to know the answer at all, but I find the question interesting.
You think? Well, thanks for the opinion. I've read the CAIB report, both when it came out and a few times since. I'm not familiar with it on a word-by-word basis, but I did not come to the same conclusion as you, that they were able to confidently rule out age-related changes in composite material properties. I understand they inspected the RCC panels, but I don't believe they generally replaced them except when they were damaged. I believe the panel implicated in the Columbia crash was original to the orbiter. Furthermore, my point is that we don't know very well what to look for when you inspect some of these composite parts, in order to detect incipient failure. (Note the quote below about "little to no warning" of failures. Also you can try Googling the phenomenon of BVID in composite materials.)
You're right that the honeycomb was identified as the culprit in the 2003 F-15 crash, but I am not so confident as you that the interaction of honeycomb and composite outer layer is unimportant. In any event, the point was general, not specifically tied to the facts of this crash. Let me quote from the article:
"Many of the problems with aging material have emerged with little or no warning," said Raymond A. Pyles of Rand, who testified on the subject before a House panel.
"Major problems may result from corrosion, insulation cracking, composite delamination....for which there are no scientific aging models or relevant historical experience," said Pyles.
Well, I dunno. Like I said, I lived through this period as a young adult, and it wasn't much like the way you paint it.
For example, the primary focus of Reagan's economic policy was the defeat of "stagflation," the combination of poor economic growth and high inflation. I remember when the prime rate was nearly 20%. Imagine a mortgage with a rate of 22%, huh? That's one hell of a discouragement to investment and growth. His solution to the anemic growth rate was a tax cut, which was bitterly debated at the time because of the (for the time) large deficits that resulted. He blithely assured us the growth in the economy would take care of that problem, and that the growth in Federal tax receipts during a booming economy would just soak up that horrible projected deficit without any pain. He was, of course, right, since that's exactly what happened in the late 80s and early 90s. And the legions of Chicken Littles who said the Reagan deficits would force "the children" of tomorrow (which includes most of the/. crowd I expect) would be forced into tax slavery to pay the burden off were laughably wrong.
Inflation was broken by Paul Volcker's brutal squeezing of the money supply, with the result that unemployment in '82 or '83 reached dismaying levels, maybe 12% or so as I recall. Reagan was bitterly criticized for those unemployment levels (although I believe Volcker was appointed by Carter, ironically), but unemployment had subsided by the time he was re-elected, and inflation had been broken. You can have no idea how gratifying that success was unless you live through 10-12% inflation year after year, which just grinds you down and impoverishes you.
Finally, Jimmy Carter certainly did not campaign on the promise of legalizing marijuana, whether or not that was some minor out of the way part of the Democratic platform. He campaigned on a platform of transparency and integrity in government. He contrasted himself with Nixon, who had resigned two years earlier, as I recall, and with Ford, who was considered harmless in himself, but heir to the Nixon legacy of shifty assistants, Haldeman and company, although flattop himself wasn't around. In any event, as I recall, people were in no mood to tolerate liberal drug policies, inasmuch as crack was then bursting on the scene with hideous results.
The energy "crisis" was laid at the feet of Carter unjustly, yes, but that was partly his own doing. He responded to the oil shocks by more or less telling us we just had to accept it, that things would probably get harder no matter what we did, and that belt-tightening and practising a Zen acceptance of our limits was the order of the day. Then, when all of that turned out not to be true, that is, when oil prices dropped and the belt-tightening turned out to be unnecessary (or at least premature), he was roundly condemned as a scaredy-cat do-nothing, and the feeling grew that it was not that no one could do anything about the energy crisis, but that Carter couldn't. Whether that's true or not is not the point; the point is he was seen as having "cried wolf" when the anticipated end of the world as we knew it failed to occur on schedule, in 1985 or so.
I thought Carter was a good man, but he was never a strong leader -- he was terrible at inspiring people to follow him. And his almost Catholic levels of pessimism made people almost enjoy making him the scapegoat when things turned out not as grimly as he'd predicted.
I appreciate your willingness to point me towards theoretical work on polymer aging, but it's probably not necessary. I've written some of those papers myself, in the early 90s.
I understand that testing can establish the behaviour of materials in the here and now. The problem is extrapolating the results of those tests deep into the future. If a composite responds to impact x with microstructural change y now, what will happen when x occurs 25 years from now? y again? Or something else? This is the problem. We know that any glassy polymer based system undergoes very slow relaxation processes, and that these change its material properties significantly. Furthermore, there would have been chemical changes that would have occurred on exposure to ionizing radiation. And what are the long-term effects of the several hundred cycles of severe vibration on launch, followed by cold soak in orbit, followed by blazing heat on re-entry? Each of these things can alter the material properties profoundly over decades of use. There's a reason old plastics are harder to rely on than, say, old wrought iron.
You can always verify the properties of your materials as you go along, of course, and in 20/20 hindsight we can see NASA should have done this with the RSS panels, that is, that they should have been testing the panels for impact resistance all along, as the Shuttle aged.
But the problem is that there are millions of possible tests you could do on the damn thing to make sure it's totally airworthy, and it already costs $500 million per launch. If you want to certify everything in the beast at the same level you do when you put it in service, every time you fly, then you are looking at astronomical, completely prohibitive costs. The goal is not to guarantee safety period -- that can always be done with an infinite amount of money and time. The idea is to guarantee as much safety as you can with the budget you can spend.
So, obviously, they decided they didn't need to do continuous impact testing of the RSS panels. I don't know why. They had to allocate their resources for testing and monitoring, and they decided that one was priority #366, and the money only went down to priority #300. Probably they spent money and time testing something that, in retrospect, they didn't need to. That's the way it goes in any large engineering project. I think calling them complete numbskulls is a bit arrogant, unless one has been a leader in a big engineering project and has had the chance to observe firsthand how often the best laid plans of mice and men (and engineers) go awry.
Well, if you're saying Diebold's source code should be open to be considered by government, you can stop arguing, 'cause I would agree with that from square one, even square zero, so obvious is the intelligence of the thought.
It's an interesting question, though, how to persuade the general populace that open source code is more secure than closed, secret code. I don't say it can't be done, but it will be a long and continuing struggle.
After all, we still have trouble persuading people that the best economic system for distributing wealth "fairly" (i.e. with the least amount of injustice and strife) is a free market, where the transactions are open an uncontrolled. Folks still think it would work better if some central authority made the decisions. How can people be persuaded that the best election system is also open?
Take a deep breath. First of all, in some respects, I was a materials scientist too, at one point in my career. Did my post-doc in the Department of Mat Sci at Urbana, which is a damn fine department. I was a theoretician working on the theory of polymers, including polymer composites, so I'm not completely clueless.
And remember, I'm not talking about an inability to understand composites per se, or in the present day after tests. No, what I'm talking about is the ability to predict how they are going to age 20, 30 years down the line, and be able to predict the eventual failure modes, and what subtle warnings signs might pop up to tell you a given piece was at its lifetime.
I'm willing to be wrong about this -- there are plenty of professors of MS who know more about this than me -- and maybe you're one of them -- but my impression a few years ago was that the very long-time behaviour of the polymer resin parts of composites was just exceedingly hard to predict, at least compared to alloys and stuff, in part because even the theoretical model of very slow large-scale movement in polymers was iffy. Not to mention the fact that polymers in general have oddball non-Newtonian stress-strain relationships, so it's even harder to even understand what stress a very low frequency, very long duration strain cycle is going to impose.
Anyway, I doubt the Rockwell engineers were complete doofi who refused to even listen to any material scientists. Designing and building a Shuttle in the early 70s was a very good job, and Rockwell had very good people on board. They may well have made mistakes, but I kinda doubt they were the obvious kind of mistake someone who paid no attention in undergraduate classes would make.
In fact, they did. They used a panel that was as old as Columbia herself. They used a modern mock-up first to test the set-up, then used the old panel. That's why I mentioned it.
Slashdot Mirror
Eh, I know, and thanks for the addition. But maybe it's not apples to oranges so much as Fuji apples to red delicious apples.
I debated whether to cite the cost of the Apollo booster alone, or the CM, to the CEV, because the CEV isn't just a new crew module, but on the other hand it's going to make considerable use of existing booster tech (e.g. the SRBs). Then I thought about the fact that I dunno if the cost cited by Wikipedia includes operating costs on the ground or not, some of which in the 1970s were borne by the military and didn't appear on NASA's budget, and then I thought about the fact that NASA estimates the CEV budget at $15 billion, and who knows what it will in fact cost and then...I gave up and pushed "Submit" 'cause I just meant to give a rough clue.
But you have to carry the fuel as well.
Right. That's why I said thrust to weight ratio, i.e. thrust divided by weight. For the SRBs, it's enormous. Not so for the other engines. The fact that the SRBs don't squeeze as much energy out of their fuel seems rather beside the point. Fuel efficiency isn't the name of the game when you lift off, raw acceleration is -- yes?
That's why I suggested the comparison to the Dodge Viper vs the Toyota Prius. The Viper gets crappy gas mileage compared to the Prius, of course. But it has a much higher power-to-inertia ratio, so it can accelerate much harder (e.g. blast from 0 to 60 in far less time).
Apollo cost about $135 billion in 2005 dollars, and the CEV is expected to cost $15 billion.
Surely if the use is initial liftoff the important statistic is thrust to weight ratio. The question of efficiency -- which is what specific impulse measures -- seems rather secondary, unless I'm missing something. An ion engine, for example, would have a far greater specific impulse than either chemical engine, but since its thrust is so pathetic it couldn't get itself off the ground.
To put it in plebian terms, if you need to outrun the cops (i.e. achieve escape velocity), surely it's better to be driving this instead of this.
I don't want to live in a world where companies can conclude that a particular individual is "probably guilty anyway" because "everyone knows it"
I don't mean to be overly cynical, but I find it hard to believe anyone over the age of 30 can imagine we don't already live in that world. Have you never been or known someone who's been stopped by the police for DWB ("Driving While Black")? Are you not aware that women are almost always given far lighter sentences for crimes of violence than men? (The perception is that women are more often "driven to" violence, while for men it's more of a choice.) Is it not clear that attractive people are routinely treated with more trust in business deals than ugly fat people? That is, they get mortgages easier, are promoted more often, et cetera?
I mean, relying on Constitutional protections to protect us from human nature seems a bit...well, unrealistic.
Er, it doesn't? Do you figure that as soon as you step out your front door and into the "public thoroughfare" your Fourth Amendment rights vanish? Or, they vanish because you travel on a bicycle, automobile, motorcyle, public bus, or rented donkey instead of on foot?
Geez, that point of view is far more restrictive of civil liberties than the wildest dreams of H.R. Haldeman.
They key distinctions here have nothing to do with the mode of travel or whether you're on public or private land. You have the same FthA rights in your car as you do on foot, or on a public bus, and the same rights on your own land as in a National Park or someone else's house. What's different is (1) what your "reasonable expectation of privacy" is, and (2) what public interest is served by inspecting you, with or without a warrant. That's because the FthA is not an absolute statement; the restrictions it puts on government are to be balanced by the competing public interests of order, justice, and national security.
In the case of crossing the international border, there is a very strong public interest in making sure the border is secure, and a reduced reasonable expectation of privacy. Exiting and entering the country is an unusual and public action, and potentially puts your fellow citizens at great risk (should you, say, import dangerous and illegal substances, devices, or persons). You should therefore reasonably expect to be subject to a more than ordinary level of scrutiny. (And, of course, if you object to that scrutiny, you always have the option of not crossing the border. Crossing the border is almost never a necessity of life.)
So the government has very broad rights to inspect people crossing the border. Some people don't get this, and that's why the case I cited exists -- some times it's necessary for the Supreme Court to affirm the simple fact that crossing the border is special, and you should have considerably diminished expectations from the FthA when doing so.
Should this diminished expectation of privacy extend to "crossing the border" electronically, via phone or e-mail? Stay tuned, the Supreme Court will enlighten us on this topic any day now.
Absolutely right on. That individuals can escape the consequences of their actions by inventing a fictitious artificial person (the corporation) and letting "him" take the fall when they f*ck up is obscene.
Makes you wonder why clever criminals don't invent a corporation and "work" for it, so that granny can only sue Crime, Inc. for compensatory and punitive damages after she gets out of the hospital, instead of being able to see the particular individual who thwocked her with a baseball bat put away in jail for 10 years. Sheesh.
It's likely the people suing would be required to show that they have been directly harmed.
The EFF found a few subscribers of AT&T to allege violation of their First and Fourth Amendment rights, and have asked every similarly-situated subscriber to be joined to make it a class-action suit. The EFF is not in fact suing the government itself, the named plaintiffs (and potentially the millions of unnamed members of the class) are. The EFF is just providing the lawyers.
The standard would likely be lower for suing AT&T, which could be as simple as breach of a privacy contract.
No, AT&T is obligated to give up information on their subscribers in response to any lawful government order, private privacy agreements notwithstanding. That's why they can comply with ordinary secret wiretap orders without telling you, and you can't sue them for breach of contract.
The complaint alleges, first, that AT&T acting as an agent of the government violated the plaintiffs First and Fourth Amendment rights by not securing a warrant for a wiretap and mining AT&T's "Daytona" database. Obviously, the Court could not find for the plaintiffs without finding that the President has no constitutional or statutory authority to order wiretaps of this nature without a warrant. Additionally, it would need to find that AT&T was acting as the government's agent, and not merely complying with an order it thought, or had good reason to think, was legal.
This is a tall order, especially with regard to finding AT&T an agent of the government. I suspect it's the equivalent of the following: you work at the DMV, and a policeman comes in, shows you his badge, and asks you to run the plates of a certain car and tell you the owner's address, because he's investigating a certain crime. He's asked you to do this many times before, you know for a fact he works for the PD, and you know for a fact the crime he mentions exists, because you saw it on the news. But -- alas -- it turns out the cop was not acting officially. He was merely sneakily finding out where his ex-girlfriend was living. So the ex-GF sues you for violating her Fourth Amendment rights. Is the Court going to back her up? Mmm, sounds unlikely. Sounds like you were just doing your job and responded to what any reasonable person would think was a legal order from law enforcement. The ex-GF has a case against the cop, sure. But not against you. Similarly, I 'spect a Federal judge is going to tell the EFF the plaintiffs might have a case against the United States, but not against AT&T.
The complaint alleges, second, that AT&T violated FISA because they knew, or should have known, that the government order to wiretap without a FISA warrant was illegal, notwithstanding that it was signed by the Attorney General of the United States or his representative. Um, sure. Good luck with that one, boys.
The remaining counts are a couple of Hail Marys alleging violation of the usual wiretap laws -- which relies on AT&T's defense that it was obeying a legal (or apparently legal or legal at the time) order not holding up -- and for violating California's business code because AT&T deceived subscribers into thinking their communications would not be monitored illegally by the NSA.
I would be shocked if the EFF expects to prevail on this at any level, except maybe barely possibly at the trial court level if they do get venue in San Francisco and can seat a load of ACT-UP activists on the jury. But, mmmm, any way it turns out, it's very good publicity. Look how long this comment thread is...
A brilliant post. May I add one comment, in re this:
In fact, if the EFF loses this case, it will establish a precedent that what AT&T did is not illegal.
Only if SCOTUS wants to set a precedent. They can easily settle any specific case without setting a precedent, if they feel like it.
I only mention this because of one interesting fact: have you noticed that, despite all the huffing and puffing by Congress and the President in the last five decades or so, over precisely who has what authority over what when it comes to war, neither side has actually filed suit in a way guaranteed to get the issue settled once and for all? The Supreme Court has never really settled this issue in part because neither the Executive nor Legislative branch has seriously asked them to.
And why not? Let us wax a trifle cynical, and suggest that perhaps the present ambiguity serves the interests of both branches. With the water muddied, so to speak, each can hope to angle for more turf, e.g. get away with stuff because of popular opinion that doesn't quite pass Constitutional muster. After all, both the White House and Capitol are inhabited by political animals, who are probably more confident of their ability to win the backing of popular opinion than of their ability to dispute arcane legal principles with nine gimlet-eyed humorless old sticks.
Once the Supreme Court rules firmly on the issue, there will be far fewer ambigous dark corners where one side or the other can exercise some squatter's rights. Maybe, like spouses battling loudly in divorce Court, neither President nor Congress really wants the Court to make a final and complete ruling.
Dude, the point is simply that when Constitutional law professors at big law schools can make the argument either way, then the legal issues can't possible be as settled as the OP said.
I didn't endorse any point of view. I just said that when the guys with JD's don't agree on what the Supreme Court will say, then ipso facto the final word on the issue -- the clear opinion of the Supreme Court -- doesn't yet exist.
Ooookay...I go to www.google.com...enter a few search terms...press enter...presto!
Elapsed time, 20 seconds.
To quote from the opening paragraph of the link:
Washington, D.C.-- U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Robert C. Bonner today hailed the Supreme Court ruling upholding CBP officers and agents authority to disassemble and thereby search a vehicle's gas tank for terrorist weapons, drugs, and other contraband, without the need to obtain a warrant or probable cause.
Well, I understand your position, too, I think. I don't agree entirely, but as I said, this is an area where reasonable men have differed for centuries. Consensus is not likely any time soon...
First, I believe the Supreme Court has held that all sorts of searches can be considered "reasonable" under the Fourth Amendment without involving the issuance of a warrant. The text you quote certainly establishes two things: that searches may not be unreasonable, and that warrants may not be issued without probable cause and a narrow specification of what precisely is to be searched. But this text does not explicitly connect the two, and state clearly that a search is a priori unreasonable if it is not authorized by a warrant.
What exactly the text of the Fourth Amendment means, what the precise connection between "reasonable" and the presence of a warrant is, is therefore up to the Supreme Court to say. (Congress, of course, has no say in the matter.) Certainly what the Supreme Court has in fact held has been a welter of horribly complex reasoning that has kept fleets of Constitutional lawyers busy from the founding of the Republic to the present day. Myself, I do wish Madison had been a tad more explicit. But we have what we have.
One might argue -- as perhaps you are here -- that even if a search is not in fact authorized by a Court warrant, the Fourth Amendment requires that it be authorizable in principle by a warrant. That is, the same legal standards must be met. But I think the Supreme Court has rejected this reasoning. I believe they have held that different standards apply in different circumstances. For example, what is "reasonable" when a policeman decides the issue in a split-second can be different than what is "reasonable" when a learned judge with days to ponder decides the issue. And (more to the point) what is reasonable when the nation is in danger of armed sneak attack is not necessarily the same as what is reasonable when it is not.
I believe there are also all kinds of complex issues about what constitutes a "search" that depend on when one has a "reasonable expectation of privacy." An example is that, while it is blatantly illegal for the police to tap your home phone without a Court order, it is perfectly legal for a plainclothesman to listen to your conversation (and take notes that can be used against you in Court) if you and he are sitting in a cafe and you're jabbering on your cell phone loud enough for him to overhear. The circumstances mean he doesn't need a warrant or "probable cause" to listen in.
So, what kind of "reasonable expectation of privacy" do you have when talking internationally, versus domestically? When talking over a cell phone (on which anyone with a radio receiver can eavesdrop) versus on a landline? When talking to friends and family, or your lawyer or your doctor -- or to people you know or should know are enemies of the United States? These are complex questions, and reasonable men may certainly differ on the exact answers. But the exact answers matter, to determine how the Fourth Amendment applies.
What I consider indisputable, though, is that he would require congressional approval to do so.
Well, other people -- indeed, all Presidents -- dispute this. In the context of fighting the foreign enemies of the United States, the President draws his power directly from the Constitution. That's why there didn't need to be a law authorizing the CIA to spy on the Soviets during the Cold War, and that's why Eisenhower, for better or worse, was able to secretly order -- without Congressional knowledge or approval -- spy planes to fly over Moscow and photograph Chairman Brezhnev taking a leak behind Lenin's Tomb, if they could.
If the President were ordering the NSA to wiretap conversations between Americans and, say, German industrialists, for the purpose of industrial espionage, surely that would not fall under Article II. But it's difficult to see why, for example, FDR shoul
The issues of law, however, are not so tenuous as you seem to think.
Erm, real lawyers and law professors disagree with you and Al Gore on that point. Try here and here, for example. I'm not saying either post is right on the money, but these are real fancy-pants lawyers throwing around real F. Ctr. Op. fnord. Cit. (3) legal citations. And when the professionals disagree so heatedly among themselves I'd say the legal issues are indeed unsettled, at least until such time as the Supreme Court weighs in on the issue.
This is hardly surprising: the exact point where the Executive Branch's Article II war-fighting powers trump the Legislature's power to make law has been argued for centuries. Did Lincoln have the authority to free the slaves by decree in the absence of any law whatsoever giving him that power? Could Truman seize steel mills hit by a strike during the Korean War to prevent disastrous steel shortages? Scholars still debate. Let us not even get into the delicate question of the famous War Powers Act, which every President, Democrat or Republican, has claimed to be unconstitutional since the day it passed.
In terms of spying on Americans, however, there must be a warrant. Article 4 of the constitution asserts this.
Nooo, the Fourth Amendment (not Article IV) just says there can be no "unreasonable" searches. That may or may not mean a warrant -- the definition of "unreasonable" is up to the Courts, ultimately the Supreme Court. For example, if a policeman sees you stuffing something that looks like a body in a trash bag or 50 pounds of marijuana into your woodshed, does he need a warrant to order you to unlock the woodshed and let him search it? Nope. In a case like that, the Courts have held that the value to justice of allowing the policeman to exercise his reasonable judgment on the spot, and collect evidence that you might otherwise hide, if given time, outweighs any danger to your civil liberties.
Furthermore, the Courts have generally held that the Executive Branch (that's the President, or his designees, like the NSA) has broad authority to search the effects, persons, and, yes, communications of US citizens when they enter or exit the country. You'll have noticed, I hope, that the Customs and Immigration people don't need a warrant or your permission to search your bags, papers, person or car when you enter or exit the country. They can even stop you within the US to search your bags or car for, say, illegal aliens or drugs, if you're near enough to the border. And the postal service can open up packages sent by you to international destinations, or from international destinations to you, to inspect them. They don't need your permission, a warrant or even a specific reason to do so. (The generic reason of making sure the Customs and Immigration laws are being followed is considered good enough.)
We can think of border control and inspection as something like a sobriety checkpoint. As long as the "borderline" over which, if you step, you get inspected, is clear, and as long as there is some reasonable law-enforcement goal served by the inspection, and as long as the inspection does not overly intrude in your daily life, then the procedure has been held to be Constitutional, even in the absence of probable cause or a warrant.
Modern communication, with the binging of messages back and forth across international borders, has made a bit of a mess of our expectations. Fifty years ago, the government read every international cable or telegram as a matter of course. But people expected that. It was an unusual thing to communicate internationally. Nowadays, and especially with the Internet, we tend to think of international communications as pretty much the same as intranational communications. But they're not. We expect the same privacy and legal rights as when we talk to our neighbors. But we shouldn'
I think the problem with reaching geostationary orbit with a cell phone is good old 1/r^2, which is the rate at which power transmitted falls off with distance r from the antenna, roughly speaking. How far can your tiny 1 or 2 watt radio transmitter send its signal and be picked up by a reasonable-sized antenna? Not far. 22,000 miles is asking for a very sensitive (i.e. big) antenna in orbit, or boosting the size of the transmitter on Earth, or both.
The popular reason to care about binary frequencies is to determine the frequency with which planetary systems could occur.
And this is probably because it impacts the probability of intelligent life elsewhere, yes?
But the thing is, I have my doubts about the formation of habitable planets being the rate-limiting step, the key term in the Drake Equation, so to speak. I'm thinking the rate of spontaneous creation of life could be the really tough step. Maybe the rate of habitable planet formation isn't awfully important to SETI.
Not to we Natural Neural Networks, no. We find your kind of work threatening. Fortunately, the economics still favors us...
You're right. The longer I live, the less confident I am that science provides the answers human beans wielding it say it does, too.
Problem is, the longer I live, the even less confident I am that { religion | philosophy | technology | love | sex | games | sailboats | witty dialogue | et cetera } provides any reliable answers, either. I'm almost beginning to suspect the problem is not with the tools but with the tool-users...
But anyway, it's a question of relative rates. I think if you live long enough, you find you get disillusioned with science slower than any other branch of human endeavor. So...science wins!
Right you are. Thanks!
Yeah I know. But I wonder how that happened? It's hard to believe DEC managers were always fools. How could DEC attract such stellar engineering talent if management was populated by fools? Engineers don't work for idiots, at least not when they can do better, and the people who worked for DEC had their choice of jobs. Did something change? I don't pretend to know the answer at all, but I find the question interesting.
That's an easy one: None, zip, nada, zero.
You think? Well, thanks for the opinion. I've read the CAIB report, both when it came out and a few times since. I'm not familiar with it on a word-by-word basis, but I did not come to the same conclusion as you, that they were able to confidently rule out age-related changes in composite material properties. I understand they inspected the RCC panels, but I don't believe they generally replaced them except when they were damaged. I believe the panel implicated in the Columbia crash was original to the orbiter. Furthermore, my point is that we don't know very well what to look for when you inspect some of these composite parts, in order to detect incipient failure. (Note the quote below about "little to no warning" of failures. Also you can try Googling the phenomenon of BVID in composite materials.)
You're right that the honeycomb was identified as the culprit in the 2003 F-15 crash, but I am not so confident as you that the interaction of honeycomb and composite outer layer is unimportant. In any event, the point was general, not specifically tied to the facts of this crash. Let me quote from the article:
"Many of the problems with aging material have emerged with little or no warning," said Raymond A. Pyles of Rand, who testified on the subject before a House panel.
"Major problems may result from corrosion, insulation cracking, composite delamination....for which there are no scientific aging models or relevant historical experience," said Pyles.
Well, I dunno. Like I said, I lived through this period as a young adult, and it wasn't much like the way you paint it.
/. crowd I expect) would be forced into tax slavery to pay the burden off were laughably wrong.
For example, the primary focus of Reagan's economic policy was the defeat of "stagflation," the combination of poor economic growth and high inflation. I remember when the prime rate was nearly 20%. Imagine a mortgage with a rate of 22%, huh? That's one hell of a discouragement to investment and growth. His solution to the anemic growth rate was a tax cut, which was bitterly debated at the time because of the (for the time) large deficits that resulted. He blithely assured us the growth in the economy would take care of that problem, and that the growth in Federal tax receipts during a booming economy would just soak up that horrible projected deficit without any pain. He was, of course, right, since that's exactly what happened in the late 80s and early 90s. And the legions of Chicken Littles who said the Reagan deficits would force "the children" of tomorrow (which includes most of the
Inflation was broken by Paul Volcker's brutal squeezing of the money supply, with the result that unemployment in '82 or '83 reached dismaying levels, maybe 12% or so as I recall. Reagan was bitterly criticized for those unemployment levels (although I believe Volcker was appointed by Carter, ironically), but unemployment had subsided by the time he was re-elected, and inflation had been broken. You can have no idea how gratifying that success was unless you live through 10-12% inflation year after year, which just grinds you down and impoverishes you.
Finally, Jimmy Carter certainly did not campaign on the promise of legalizing marijuana, whether or not that was some minor out of the way part of the Democratic platform. He campaigned on a platform of transparency and integrity in government. He contrasted himself with Nixon, who had resigned two years earlier, as I recall, and with Ford, who was considered harmless in himself, but heir to the Nixon legacy of shifty assistants, Haldeman and company, although flattop himself wasn't around. In any event, as I recall, people were in no mood to tolerate liberal drug policies, inasmuch as crack was then bursting on the scene with hideous results.
The energy "crisis" was laid at the feet of Carter unjustly, yes, but that was partly his own doing. He responded to the oil shocks by more or less telling us we just had to accept it, that things would probably get harder no matter what we did, and that belt-tightening and practising a Zen acceptance of our limits was the order of the day. Then, when all of that turned out not to be true, that is, when oil prices dropped and the belt-tightening turned out to be unnecessary (or at least premature), he was roundly condemned as a scaredy-cat do-nothing, and the feeling grew that it was not that no one could do anything about the energy crisis, but that Carter couldn't. Whether that's true or not is not the point; the point is he was seen as having "cried wolf" when the anticipated end of the world as we knew it failed to occur on schedule, in 1985 or so.
I thought Carter was a good man, but he was never a strong leader -- he was terrible at inspiring people to follow him. And his almost Catholic levels of pessimism made people almost enjoy making him the scapegoat when things turned out not as grimly as he'd predicted.
I appreciate your willingness to point me towards theoretical work on polymer aging, but it's probably not necessary. I've written some of those papers myself, in the early 90s.
I understand that testing can establish the behaviour of materials in the here and now. The problem is extrapolating the results of those tests deep into the future. If a composite responds to impact x with microstructural change y now, what will happen when x occurs 25 years from now? y again? Or something else? This is the problem. We know that any glassy polymer based system undergoes very slow relaxation processes, and that these change its material properties significantly. Furthermore, there would have been chemical changes that would have occurred on exposure to ionizing radiation. And what are the long-term effects of the several hundred cycles of severe vibration on launch, followed by cold soak in orbit, followed by blazing heat on re-entry? Each of these things can alter the material properties profoundly over decades of use. There's a reason old plastics are harder to rely on than, say, old wrought iron.
You can always verify the properties of your materials as you go along, of course, and in 20/20 hindsight we can see NASA should have done this with the RSS panels, that is, that they should have been testing the panels for impact resistance all along, as the Shuttle aged.
But the problem is that there are millions of possible tests you could do on the damn thing to make sure it's totally airworthy, and it already costs $500 million per launch. If you want to certify everything in the beast at the same level you do when you put it in service, every time you fly, then you are looking at astronomical, completely prohibitive costs. The goal is not to guarantee safety period -- that can always be done with an infinite amount of money and time. The idea is to guarantee as much safety as you can with the budget you can spend.
So, obviously, they decided they didn't need to do continuous impact testing of the RSS panels. I don't know why. They had to allocate their resources for testing and monitoring, and they decided that one was priority #366, and the money only went down to priority #300. Probably they spent money and time testing something that, in retrospect, they didn't need to. That's the way it goes in any large engineering project. I think calling them complete numbskulls is a bit arrogant, unless one has been a leader in a big engineering project and has had the chance to observe firsthand how often the best laid plans of mice and men (and engineers) go awry.
Well, if you're saying Diebold's source code should be open to be considered by government, you can stop arguing, 'cause I would agree with that from square one, even square zero, so obvious is the intelligence of the thought.
It's an interesting question, though, how to persuade the general populace that open source code is more secure than closed, secret code. I don't say it can't be done, but it will be a long and continuing struggle.
After all, we still have trouble persuading people that the best economic system for distributing wealth "fairly" (i.e. with the least amount of injustice and strife) is a free market, where the transactions are open an uncontrolled. Folks still think it would work better if some central authority made the decisions. How can people be persuaded that the best election system is also open?
Take a deep breath. First of all, in some respects, I was a materials scientist too, at one point in my career. Did my post-doc in the Department of Mat Sci at Urbana, which is a damn fine department. I was a theoretician working on the theory of polymers, including polymer composites, so I'm not completely clueless.
And remember, I'm not talking about an inability to understand composites per se, or in the present day after tests. No, what I'm talking about is the ability to predict how they are going to age 20, 30 years down the line, and be able to predict the eventual failure modes, and what subtle warnings signs might pop up to tell you a given piece was at its lifetime.
I'm willing to be wrong about this -- there are plenty of professors of MS who know more about this than me -- and maybe you're one of them -- but my impression a few years ago was that the very long-time behaviour of the polymer resin parts of composites was just exceedingly hard to predict, at least compared to alloys and stuff, in part because even the theoretical model of very slow large-scale movement in polymers was iffy. Not to mention the fact that polymers in general have oddball non-Newtonian stress-strain relationships, so it's even harder to even understand what stress a very low frequency, very long duration strain cycle is going to impose.
Anyway, I doubt the Rockwell engineers were complete doofi who refused to even listen to any material scientists. Designing and building a Shuttle in the early 70s was a very good job, and Rockwell had very good people on board. They may well have made mistakes, but I kinda doubt they were the obvious kind of mistake someone who paid no attention in undergraduate classes would make.
In fact, they did. They used a panel that was as old as Columbia herself. They used a modern mock-up first to test the set-up, then used the old panel. That's why I mentioned it.