You don't need "that" phone. You need to get any iPhone and you can debug it and get whatever access to it in general way that will apply to similar hardware/software, most likely just by changing single byte in machine code instructions. It would cost time/money though. Apple already has access to it though through their own personal backdoor,
No. The whole point is that "their own personal backdoor" does not exist.
Of course it exists. Changing software remotely without device owner permission is backdoor.
They are not changing anything remotely. The whole point is that the FBI physically has the phone.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with changing software by remote access. This is about breaking into a phone that they have in front of them and have opened up to directly get to via the physical access ports.
...
Again. Apple is not being asked to "provide data from the phone"; they're not even being asked to decrypt the phone. They are being commanded to write new software to the FBI's specification.
...Maybe, but public perception is different...
Exactly. That's the point I've been shouting about. Public perception is not in line with the actual facts.
The breitbart blog just links this blog: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/s... That blog has a transcript. The transcript gives the source of the predictions:
We are launching an interactive web game which puts participants in the future and asks them to report back about what it is like to live in this future world. The first stop is the year 2015. ...So the producers actually work with those people that send in their ideas into the website. And then we're just hoping that the goal is ultimately get these ideas very soon.
That's it: the "predictions" are whatever some random visitor to the "interactive web game" decides to write about the year 2015.
I remember this being said over and over again when I was in grade school decades ago.
Yep, the greenhouse effect has indeed been known and understood for decades.
Exactly how close is New York to being underwater today?
Back when you were in grade school, they were saying that if carbon dioxide emissions continued to rise, the streets of New York would be a meter or so under water sometime around the year 2100.
So how close is New York to being underwater? We are now two decades closer to the 2100s.
It's their emissions output that is on the rise, not the U.S.'s. Any climate agreement that doesn't include them is a bad agreement.
Yep-- that's why climate agreements are international.
If just one country could solve the problem by itself, it wouldn't be a hard problem.
Also, it's pretty amazing the output level of CO2 from airliners traveling to climate conferences. You'd think they'd use teleconferencing.
Airline emissions are a pretty tiny part of the total. Transportation produces about 34% of carbon emissions, and of that, aircraft are about 9%-- overall, just not the big driver. http://www.c2es.org/docUploads...
Canada and Siberia and Finland, get ready to be breadbaskets of the world!
Unlikely. The low angle of the sun means a lot less photosynthesis.
No, crops are mostly grown in the summer, when the sun is high in northern latitudes. The sun angle may be trivially lower than at a more temperate places, but it's still high enough, and the extended day length more than makes up for it.
All those people buying and living in coastal houses don't seem to believe in climate change I guess. The ocean is rising, yet prices remain sky high for anything near the coast...
It's a matter of time scale. That link in the article about the "Fastest sea rise in at least 2800 years" quotes a rate, since 1993, of 30 centimeters per century.
you know, most people buying beachfront property just aren't worried about the property value a hundred years from now.
Personally, I have been advocating phasing out coal in favor of nuclear for over 40 years. The vast majority of people who claim to be oh so very very concerned about CO2, on the other hand, have been among those obstructing nuclear for over 40 years. Warming is their chickens coming home to roost. Unfortunately, those chickens are crapping all over those of us who do not deny arithmetic, too.
"I am not so much pro-nuclear as I am pro-arithmetic." -- Stuart Brand
Repeating what I have posted previously when the topic has come up, many of the environmentalists worried about the climate do advocate nuclear power.
James Hansen, for example, is probably the most well known person warning about climate change. He is strongly in favor of nuclear power. He stated:..continued opposition to nuclear power threatens humanity’s ability to avoid dangerous climate change. We call on your organization to support the development and deployment of safer nuclear power systems as a practical means of addressing the climate change problem.... in the real world there is no credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power
I think you mean 14 thousand years ago, not four thousand. The graph you posted shows the sea level rise 4 thousand years ago was about 3 centimeters per century-- a same rate that is pretty much constant for several thousand years. The link in the summary ( http://www.realclimate.org/ind... ) says since 1993 the rate has been 30 centimeters per century.
Coastal land is lost. How much of the agricultural land of the Earth is coastal? Well, some of it is. But it's not clear that the total effect is large.
Areas heat up = less arable land of the already reduced land.
Not at all clear. Some northern areas that were formerly tundra and taiga may warm up enough to add to the arable land-- Canada and Siberia and Finland, get ready to be breadbaskets of the world! Some areas that were suitable for one type of crop will switch to a different, warmer climate crop. More notably, rainfall patterns may shift, and some farmlands will become deserts.
The net effect is very unclear.
Some areas heat up of the much smaller set of land and become arable.
Right. Except that it's only an assertion that this is "much smaller"
Without doing calculations it appears that yes, there would be less net arable land as much of what is settled and arable is along coasts with a few exceptions.
Without doing calculations, nothing of the sort is obvious, because you have to do the calculations.
In any case, the big wild card is the changes in rainfall patterns. This is much harder to model than the overall temperature. Overall temperature is easy: it's little more than just thermal accounting. Rainfall patterns-- these are hard.
the minute amount of extra energy won't really matter though, that's the point. The sea won't rise two feet in one day, and those "poor natives" on islands essentially at sea level were going to be under water anyway in 400 years if not the next 75. alarmist nonsense like the impossible scenarios Al Gore presented just hurt the cause of doing anything meaningful about pollution
Tell us - how much is that "minute amount of extra energy"? Whatever handy unit of measurements, and don't spare us the big words.
The best estimate for the current radiative forcing due to anthropogenic trace gasses, according to the IPCC AR4, is 1.6 Watts per square meter (with a range of uncertainty from 0.6 to 2.4). http://news.mit.edu/2010/expla...
Whether that is "tiny" or not depends on what you call "tiny". For comparison, the average solar insolation at the top of the Earth's atmosphere 340 Watts per square meter, so it's small compared to the solar radiative forcing. On the other hand, the Earth's surface area is half a quadrillion square meters, so if you want to call that "large", you can do that, too.
... melting ice from continental blocks pours into the sea... I would imagine such water, having recently changed state from ice, is colder than the sea, not warmer than it,
You might think so. But seawater freezes at a lower temperature than freshwater ice, so, no, the seawater can be liquid while the ice is solid despite the fact that they are both at the same temperature.
and so the net effect would be to reduce the temperature of the water it hits.
Almost right. Added cold water would cool down warmer seawater. On the other hand, the warmer seawater will heat up the added cold water. Since they are at almost the same temperature to start with, the net effect cancels out, and what you get is simply the added volume of the added water.
Not saying the seas aren't warming from other factors, but it seems counter-intuitive to assume that adding glacial / ice meltwater would be a factor for sea temperature increase.
The thermal expansion due to warming and the added glacial melt water are two different effects. The warming isn't due to the added glacial meltwater. The warming occurs globally, even at places thousands of miles away from glaciers. Even if glaciers didn't melt at all, warming would still cause thermal expansion.
Yes, the government can compel Apple to write code. The government can compel Ford to make a truck that gets 30MPG, compel a mining company to dig another shaft to let air into a mine, and make me pay for health insurance I do not want.
No, they can't; no, they can't; and no, they can't do that either.
They can enact regulations that include penalties if Ford's truck doesn't get 30 MPG, but if Ford says "no, we're not going to build that truck," a court writ can't force them to make trucks. They can enact safety regulations that mean mines have to have adequate ventilation, but if the company doesn't want to drill the draft, a court writ can't make them operate a mine. They can enact a tax to make you pay the costs incurred by your not having health insurance (even if they don't call it a tax), but, so far at least, they can't actually make you pay for health insurance.
They can, however, make you pay tax. That power turns out to be written in the constitution.
If you think the direction the country is going in is to have more freedom than the past, you are sorely wrong.
In some ways we are getting more freedom, in some ways less.
You don't need "that" phone. You need to get any iPhone and you can debug it and get whatever access to it in general way that will apply to similar hardware/software, most likely just by changing single byte in machine code instructions. It would cost time/money though. Apple already has access to it though through their own personal backdoor,
No. The whole point is that "their own personal backdoor" does not exist.
so why should they be immune to court orders? No business or person is immune to it. They can only (try to) refuse to provide general access software, but every time they will get court order to provide data from specific phone, they should be legally required to comply with court order.
Again. Apple is not being asked to "provide data from the phone"; they're not even being asked to decrypt the phone. They are being commanded to write new software to the FBI's specification.
The biggest problem is that people are reacting to the headline - not the back story.
1) This was the terrorist's WORK phone. He tried (and failed) to destroy his personal phone - and the FBI have all of the data from that. If he didn't destroy the work phone, there probably wasn't anything important on it.
The couple took pains to physically destroy two personally owned cellphones, crushing them beyond the FBI's ability to recover information from them. They also removed a hard drive from their computer; it has not been found despite investigators diving for days for potential electronic evidence in a nearby lake.
Farook was not carrying his work iPhone during the attack. It was discovered after a subsequent search.
So, the question is: given that they went to great lengths to destroy the phones and hard drives that they used in planning the attack, why in the world would anybody think that this phone they didn't think were worth bothering to destroy would have anything on it?
The point that you are missing is that the precedent to be set is that the government can make Apple write software.
This isn't about breaking into a phone, it's about exactly how much the court can compel them to do It's not "use your key to unlock this door". It's "write new software to this exact set of specifications that the FBI has written."
can the court compel Apple to write code? If they can, what else can they compel people to do?
He has very slightly backed off, claims that people have misinterpreted his position: (see the "update:" in this gizmodo article: http://gizmodo.com/bill-gates-... )
But here is Gates' actual quote from the Financial times article; what do you think-- was he misinterpreted? http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/3559...
“This is a specific case where the government is asking for access to information. They are not asking for some general thing, they are asking for a particular case,” Mr Gates told the Financial Times.
“It is no different than [the question of] should anybody ever have been able to tell the phone company to get information, should anybody be able to get at bank records. Let’s say the bank had tied a ribbon round the disk drive and said, ‘Don’t make me cut this ribbon because you’ll make me cut it many times’.”
"...some pretty strange bedfellows: John McAfee and Bill Gates on the pro-unlocking side..."
Actually, John McAfee is not on the side of forcing Apple to unlock the phone-- he's against that. He is on the side of don't force them to do it because he and his elite crew of hax0rz will do it for free with no need to bother Apple or use that all-writs thing.
And this solves the problem, doesn't it? Give it McAfee, he will screw up and erase all the data on the phone, problem solved.
Same mentality. Disagree with someone? Do whatever you can to suppress their speech.
Except it's the opposite: this is more like Disagree with someone? Stop taking their money.
Do keep in mind that the groups Exxon had been funding weren't doing climate science-- those groups, as it turns out, actually were agreeing with the consensus on global warming (until Exxon stopped funding them). The groups the geoscientists are complaining about Exxon spending a hundred million dollars to support were ones that were making political points by calling climate scientists "frauds", saying climate science is a "scam", the conclusions were "a hoax," and climate scientists "need to be sent to prison."
"Stop accepting money from an organization that pays people to denigrate your work" seems like a reasonable decision to me.
"The world could see as many as 20 additional hurricanes and tropical storms each year by the end of the century because of climate change, says a study out today.
Other studies suggested that it's more likely that hurricanes could be somewhat stronger, although not more numerous. https://www.climate.gov/news-f...
Wasn't the case of the Hubble a slightly less severe version of the same thing? If memory serves, it was substantially derived from the KH-11;
Partly. Perkin Elmer won the bid to make the mirror (in part) because they were able to emphasize their extensive experience in making mirrors of similar size for reconnaissance satellites. The telescope itself, however, and the satellite, weren't the same.
and its spook origins ended up being the reason that the PerkinElmer got the job to produce the mirror, having done so for the KH-9s; and ended up beating out Kodak's(actually correctly shaped) mirror.
And then, rather amazingly, after having presumably made the various KH-11 optics correctly, PerkinElmer somehow mysteriously did the main Hubble mirror optics wrong. I have always been suspicious of this...
No suspicion needed: the fact that their experience was in classified satellites was, to a large part, the cause of the problem: They had a null corrector tool for the Ritchey–Chrétien mirror, which, as it turns out, they did not have the right expertise to use. Since all their mirror experience was in classified projects, they had a strict corporate culture of "don't talk to anybody, ever, about anything." So, instead of asking questions, they basically experimented around with it until they thought they knew how it worked, and didn't talk with anybody about it in any way.
Ironically, if it actually had been a mirror for the reconnaissance satellite, instead of a different (and publicly available) design, they would have already had the tool.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't need "that" phone. You need to get any iPhone and you can debug it and get whatever access to it in general way that will apply to similar hardware/software, most likely just by changing single byte in machine code instructions. It would cost time/money though. Apple already has access to it though through their own personal backdoor,
No. The whole point is that "their own personal backdoor" does not exist.
Of course it exists. Changing software remotely without device owner permission is backdoor.
They are not changing anything remotely. The whole point is that the FBI physically has the phone.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with changing software by remote access. This is about breaking into a phone that they have in front of them and have opened up to directly get to via the physical access ports.
...
Again. Apple is not being asked to "provide data from the phone"; they're not even being asked to decrypt the phone. They are being commanded to write new software to the FBI's specification.
...Maybe, but public perception is different...
Exactly. That's the point I've been shouting about. Public perception is not in line with the actual facts.
The breitbart blog just links this blog: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/s...
That blog has a transcript. The transcript gives the source of the predictions:
We are launching an interactive web game which puts participants in the future and asks them to report back about what it is like to live in this future world. The first stop is the year 2015.
...So the producers actually work with those people that send in their ideas into the website. And then we're just hoping that the goal is ultimately get these ideas very soon.
That's it: the "predictions" are whatever some random visitor to the "interactive web game" decides to write about the year 2015.
That's not what I'd call "experts".
Just saying if we could all walk back the rhetoric it would be better. .6 to 2.4 is a ginormous range.
That's correct. And that is the consensus. The consensus includes large error bars.
Really, that's part of the way you know it's science: science has error bars.
At this point we are at around 1.8 watts per square meter of radiative forcing. Let's go with rounding and call it 1000 Terawatts.
Here's more recent data:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/a...
Nice link, thanks.
I remember this being said over and over again when I was in grade school decades ago.
Yep, the greenhouse effect has indeed been known and understood for decades.
Exactly how close is New York to being underwater today?
Back when you were in grade school, they were saying that if carbon dioxide emissions continued to rise, the streets of New York would be a meter or so under water sometime around the year 2100.
So how close is New York to being underwater? We are now two decades closer to the 2100s.
Of course they also said that the sea levels were going up to 100ft by now, and haven't seen that either.
Bullsh!t. No one in the world, not even the the very alarmist of alarmists, ever predicted "100 feet of sea level rise by now." Did not happen.
The IPCC predictions are for about 0.5 meters by 2100.
https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assess...
https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/unfccc...
It's their emissions output that is on the rise, not the U.S.'s. Any climate agreement that doesn't include them is a bad agreement.
Yep-- that's why climate agreements are international.
If just one country could solve the problem by itself, it wouldn't be a hard problem.
Also, it's pretty amazing the output level of CO2 from airliners traveling to climate conferences. You'd think they'd use teleconferencing.
Airline emissions are a pretty tiny part of the total. Transportation produces about 34% of carbon emissions, and of that, aircraft are about 9%-- overall, just not the big driver.
http://www.c2es.org/docUploads...
Canada and Siberia and Finland, get ready to be breadbaskets of the world!
Unlikely. The low angle of the sun means a lot less photosynthesis.
No, crops are mostly grown in the summer, when the sun is high in northern latitudes. The sun angle may be trivially lower than at a more temperate places, but it's still high enough, and the extended day length more than makes up for it.
Also, a lot of that land will turn into swamps.
Some will, some won't.
All those people buying and living in coastal houses don't seem to believe in climate change I guess. The ocean is rising, yet prices remain sky high for anything near the coast...
It's a matter of time scale. That link in the article about the "Fastest sea rise in at least 2800 years" quotes a rate, since 1993, of 30 centimeters per century.
you know, most people buying beachfront property just aren't worried about the property value a hundred years from now.
Personally, I have been advocating phasing out coal in favor of nuclear for over 40 years. The vast majority of people who claim to be oh so very very concerned about CO2, on the other hand, have been among those obstructing nuclear for over 40 years. Warming is their chickens coming home to roost. Unfortunately, those chickens are crapping all over those of us who do not deny arithmetic, too.
"I am not so much pro-nuclear as I am pro-arithmetic." -- Stuart Brand
Repeating what I have posted previously when the topic has come up, many of the environmentalists worried about the climate do advocate nuclear power.
James Hansen, for example, is probably the most well known person warning about climate change. He is strongly in favor of nuclear power. He stated: ..continued opposition to nuclear power threatens humanity’s ability to avoid dangerous climate change.
We call on your organization to support the development and deployment of safer nuclear power systems as a practical means of addressing the climate change problem.... in the real world there is no credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power
http://grist.org/news/more-nuk...
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes....
http://www.takepart.com/articl...
http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-...
it was rising faster than it is now.
I think you mean 14 thousand years ago, not four thousand. The graph you posted shows the sea level rise 4 thousand years ago was about 3 centimeters per century-- a same rate that is pretty much constant for several thousand years. The link in the summary ( http://www.realclimate.org/ind... ) says since 1993 the rate has been 30 centimeters per century.
Logically
Coastal land is lost. How much of the agricultural land of the Earth is coastal? Well, some of it is. But it's not clear that the total effect is large.
Areas heat up = less arable land of the already reduced land.
Not at all clear. Some northern areas that were formerly tundra and taiga may warm up enough to add to the arable land-- Canada and Siberia and Finland, get ready to be breadbaskets of the world! Some areas that were suitable for one type of crop will switch to a different, warmer climate crop. More notably, rainfall patterns may shift, and some farmlands will become deserts.
The net effect is very unclear.
Some areas heat up of the much smaller set of land and become arable.
Right. Except that it's only an assertion that this is "much smaller"
Without doing calculations it appears that yes, there would be less net arable land as much of what is settled and arable is along coasts with a few exceptions.
Without doing calculations, nothing of the sort is obvious, because you have to do the calculations.
In any case, the big wild card is the changes in rainfall patterns. This is much harder to model than the overall temperature. Overall temperature is easy: it's little more than just thermal accounting. Rainfall patterns-- these are hard.
the minute amount of extra energy won't really matter though, that's the point. The sea won't rise two feet in one day, and those "poor natives" on islands essentially at sea level were going to be under water anyway in 400 years if not the next 75. alarmist nonsense like the impossible scenarios Al Gore presented just hurt the cause of doing anything meaningful about pollution
Tell us - how much is that "minute amount of extra energy"? Whatever handy unit of measurements, and don't spare us the big words.
The best estimate for the current radiative forcing due to anthropogenic trace gasses, according to the IPCC AR4, is 1.6 Watts per square meter (with a range of uncertainty from 0.6 to 2.4). http://news.mit.edu/2010/expla...
Whether that is "tiny" or not depends on what you call "tiny". For comparison, the average solar insolation at the top of the Earth's atmosphere 340 Watts per square meter, so it's small compared to the solar radiative forcing. On the other hand, the Earth's surface area is half a quadrillion square meters, so if you want to call that "large", you can do that, too.
From TFS:
You might think so. But seawater freezes at a lower temperature than freshwater ice, so, no, the seawater can be liquid while the ice is solid despite the fact that they are both at the same temperature.
and so the net effect would be to reduce the temperature of the water it hits.
Almost right. Added cold water would cool down warmer seawater. On the other hand, the warmer seawater will heat up the added cold water. Since they are at almost the same temperature to start with, the net effect cancels out, and what you get is simply the added volume of the added water.
Not saying the seas aren't warming from other factors, but it seems counter-intuitive to assume that adding glacial / ice meltwater would be a factor for sea temperature increase.
The thermal expansion due to warming and the added glacial melt water are two different effects. The warming isn't due to the added glacial meltwater. The warming occurs globally, even at places thousands of miles away from glaciers. Even if glaciers didn't melt at all, warming would still cause thermal expansion.
Yes, the government can compel Apple to write code. The government can compel Ford to make a truck that gets 30MPG, compel a mining company to dig another shaft to let air into a mine, and make me pay for health insurance I do not want.
No, they can't; no, they can't; and no, they can't do that either.
They can enact regulations that include penalties if Ford's truck doesn't get 30 MPG, but if Ford says "no, we're not going to build that truck," a court writ can't force them to make trucks. They can enact safety regulations that mean mines have to have adequate ventilation, but if the company doesn't want to drill the draft, a court writ can't make them operate a mine. They can enact a tax to make you pay the costs incurred by your not having health insurance (even if they don't call it a tax), but, so far at least, they can't actually make you pay for health insurance.
They can, however, make you pay tax. That power turns out to be written in the constitution.
If you think the direction the country is going in is to have more freedom than the past, you are sorely wrong.
In some ways we are getting more freedom, in some ways less.
But that's always been the case.
You don't need "that" phone. You need to get any iPhone and you can debug it and get whatever access to it in general way that will apply to similar hardware/software, most likely just by changing single byte in machine code instructions. It would cost time/money though. Apple already has access to it though through their own personal backdoor,
No. The whole point is that "their own personal backdoor" does not exist.
so why should they be immune to court orders? No business or person is immune to it. They can only (try to) refuse to provide general access software, but every time they will get court order to provide data from specific phone, they should be legally required to comply with court order.
Again. Apple is not being asked to "provide data from the phone"; they're not even being asked to decrypt the phone. They are being commanded to write new software to the FBI's specification.
The biggest problem is that people are reacting to the headline - not the back story.
1) This was the terrorist's WORK phone. He tried (and failed) to destroy his personal phone - and the FBI have all of the data from that. If he didn't destroy the work phone, there probably wasn't anything important on it.
Close, but no.
He tried, and succeeded, in destroying his personal phones:
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016...
The couple took pains to physically destroy two personally owned cellphones, crushing them beyond the FBI's ability to recover information from them. They also removed a hard drive from their computer; it has not been found despite investigators diving for days for potential electronic evidence in a nearby lake.
Farook was not carrying his work iPhone during the attack. It was discovered after a subsequent search.
So, the question is: given that they went to great lengths to destroy the phones and hard drives that they used in planning the attack, why in the world would anybody think that this phone they didn't think were worth bothering to destroy would have anything on it?
The point that you are missing is that the precedent to be set is that the government can make Apple write software.
This isn't about breaking into a phone, it's about exactly how much the court can compel them to do It's not "use your key to unlock this door". It's "write new software to this exact set of specifications that the FBI has written."
can the court compel Apple to write code? If they can, what else can they compel people to do?
He's refuting he said that he supports the FBI.
He has very slightly backed off, claims that people have misinterpreted his position:
(see the "update:" in this gizmodo article: http://gizmodo.com/bill-gates-... )
But here is Gates' actual quote from the Financial times article; what do you think-- was he misinterpreted?
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/3559...
"...some pretty strange bedfellows: John McAfee and Bill Gates on the pro-unlocking side..."
Actually, John McAfee is not on the side of forcing Apple to unlock the phone-- he's against that. He is on the side of don't force them to do it because he and his elite crew of hax0rz will do it for free with no need to bother Apple or use that all-writs thing.
And this solves the problem, doesn't it? Give it McAfee, he will screw up and erase all the data on the phone, problem solved.
Yep.
Global warming is a long term effect, and any solution will be a long-term solution.
Same mentality. Disagree with someone? Do whatever you can to suppress their speech.
Except it's the opposite: this is more like Disagree with someone? Stop taking their money.
Do keep in mind that the groups Exxon had been funding weren't doing climate science-- those groups, as it turns out, actually were agreeing with the consensus on global warming (until Exxon stopped funding them). The groups the geoscientists are complaining about Exxon spending a hundred million dollars to support were ones that were making political points by calling climate scientists "frauds", saying climate science is a "scam", the conclusions were "a hoax," and climate scientists "need to be sent to prison."
"Stop accepting money from an organization that pays people to denigrate your work" seems like a reasonable decision to me.
Where exactly are these additional hurricanes, anyway? We were told there would be more hurricanes.
No, we weren't.
We were told by some scientists (but not at all a consensus) that by the end of the century-- that is, in a hundred years-- there might be more hurricanes. Here's the popular press version, from USA Today (www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2013/07/08/climate-change-global-warming-hurricanes/2498611/ ):
Other studies suggested that it's more likely that hurricanes could be somewhat stronger, although not more numerous. https://www.climate.gov/news-f...
Wasn't the case of the Hubble a slightly less severe version of the same thing? If memory serves, it was substantially derived from the KH-11;
Partly. Perkin Elmer won the bid to make the mirror (in part) because they were able to emphasize their extensive experience in making mirrors of similar size for reconnaissance satellites. The telescope itself, however, and the satellite, weren't the same.
and its spook origins ended up being the reason that the PerkinElmer got the job to produce the mirror, having done so for the KH-9s; and ended up beating out Kodak's(actually correctly shaped) mirror.
And then, rather amazingly, after having presumably made the various KH-11 optics correctly, PerkinElmer somehow mysteriously did the main Hubble mirror optics wrong. I have always been suspicious of this...
No suspicion needed: the fact that their experience was in classified satellites was, to a large part, the cause of the problem: They had a null corrector tool for the Ritchey–Chrétien mirror, which, as it turns out, they did not have the right expertise to use. Since all their mirror experience was in classified projects, they had a strict corporate culture of "don't talk to anybody, ever, about anything." So, instead of asking questions, they basically experimented around with it until they thought they knew how it worked, and didn't talk with anybody about it in any way.
Ironically, if it actually had been a mirror for the reconnaissance satellite, instead of a different (and publicly available) design, they would have already had the tool.
A lot of news and commentary on this one.
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
http://www.nbcnews.com/storyli...