Was the marriage broken up because of the prankster, or was it broken up become one of the parties was a cheating scumbag and got discovered by the spouse? There is a very significant difference.
I am glad you never taught any of my college courses.
Launching a payload into orbit is not an easy task. Yes, SpaceX has a lot of other peoples' experience to draw upon, but that still leaves a lot of R&D to be done.
Also keep in mind that the technology used to launch a payload to orbit is remarkably similar to the technology used to lob a nuclear warhead from one continent to another. I would not be surprised if a lot of the "other peoples' failures" is still classified.
SpaceX are infinitely more likely to reach orbit than Scaled Composites.
HEY!!! You are dissing one of my heroes!
In all seriousness, I would be very curious to find out why you think so. I would expect the opposite, in fact. Burt Rutan is very definitely an engineer with decades of aerospace experience under his belt. Elon Musk is neither an engineer nor experienced, at least in aerospace. Reading a recent article on the development of the Tesla Roadster, I found myself shaking my head at some of the design constraints Musk demanded. If he runs SpaceX the same way the article alleged Musk ran Tesla, I am not surprised they are having difficulties.
No, his analogies are not completely senseless. Putting a payload into orbit is an extremely difficult task. NASA, ESA, the Russian space program and the Chinese space program have all spent a very, very long time getting to the point they are at today. Each of them has had numerous failures along the way -- some of those failures were more catastrophic than others, but even NASA has lost spacecraft in recent history. I won't dispute that three out of three catastrophic failures is indeed "an extremely bad track record" but keep in mind that SpaceX is using commercial launches as their R&D. The companies buying space on SpaceX's launch vehicles knows the risks and are buying anyway. In a sense, they are investing in SpaceX's future.
After enough failures, they will figure out where it's really cheaper to do things, well, cheaper and where it's actually *more expensive* to do things cheaper. How many payloads do you have to lose before it becomes cheaper to add some of the redundancy back in?
Anyway, it is called rocket science for a reason? Hypothesize, test, analyze results, repeat as required, right?
If it is dark, and you have already subdued one attacker/intruder, do you *know* if guy #2 is coming at you or going the other way? If not, to which side do err?
And if there are three (or even only one) intruders in your house, the only correct reaction is to make a shit-load of noise and call the cops.
That's wishful thinking. If they are *already in your house* where exactly are you going to go while you are waiting for the cops to arrive? I lost all faith in LEO as protectors about fifteen years ago when a group of gang members threatened a friend of mine at his work place. He was a manager at a storage facility. They wanted their stuff back, but owed quite a bit of rent. My friend told them they could have it back when they paid the rent that was due. They said they'd be back with some friends to take it back. My friend called the cops, and was essentially told "call us when there is blood or a body."
So here's the way I see it: LEO says defend yourself; we'll come by after a crime has been committed. However, if you defend yourself, you'll likely get arrested. Do you see the catch-22 there? Given that choice, I will defend myself and my family, err on the side of keeping my family safe, and if that puts me in jail, so be it.
Second case: there's some wiggle room here, but if someone is trespassing in the middle of the night, then as far as I am concerned, I have a reason to be afraid for the well-being of myself and my family, and consequently, I *will* take action to defend myself.
Third case: Nineteen times? Sounds like the homeowner was (justifiably, IMHO) concerned for his and his family's well-being (assuming he has family), and was simply reacting in response to the "fight-or-flight" mechanism that all of us possess. Have you ever been the victim of violent crime? Do you *know* how you would react in a similar situation? 'Kay, then...don't judge him. Remember, he took on three intruders at night -- I'd be chock full of adrenaline in such a situation, and would react accordingly, I suspect.
After living in Alaska for nearly 20 years, I have found that if the road surface is so slick that braking is essentially nil, I can almost always stop the car and avoid an accident by gently nudging the curb with my tires. Unless you've already screwed up so badly that you are spinning out of control, there is almost always enough traction to change your direction of travel by a few degrees, and by rubbing your front tires against the curb, you can get enough traction to stop just about every time. I've only had to do this a couple of times when road conditions at an intersection were much worse than the conditions on the rest of the road, but it has always worked.
Assuming you are referring to a piston engine, then you are mistaken; you are flying in an airplane that is powered by a controlled burn. An explosion in a piston engine is called detonation, and it will destroy the engine if you allow it to continue. (see http://www.streetrodstuff.com/Articles/Engine/Detonation/ for more information).
The wikipedia article on detonation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_knocking) states that pretty much all diesel engines do experience detonation to some extent, but goes on to state that even in a diesel engine, the engine designer takes care to minimize the detonation as much as possible, so as to extend the life of the engine.
Sigh...I'm quite familiar with experimental aircraft. My airplane uses one of the two-cylinder Rotax engines you mentioned and you are correct that it only takes a 40 hour test period to get the restrictions removed from your experimental airplane (actually, I think in some cases, it can be as little as 20 hours). Having said that, experimental airplanes a peculiar niche in aviation. From the context, it sounded like the parent post was referring to commercial (i.e. airline) flights, in which case my response was entirely accurate: it is not merely thousands of parts produced by the lowest bidder flying together in formation.
As for whether or not you can do pretty much
what you want, that's true as long as you can get the FAA inspector who reviews your airplane to sign off on it. So while you might feel perfectly safe using a couple of pieces of clothesline to tie you into the seat instead of a $50 restraint from Aircraft Spruce (or whoever), unless the FAA inspector signs off on it, you aren't legal (not to say someone probably hasn't tried it or that someone isn't flying without being signed off, but...). You could almost certainly get by with a seatbelt from the local junkyard, but like I said earlier, experimentals are a niche within aviation in general. You *won't* find junkyard seat belts in a Cessna, and if you do, it won't be legal. You for sure won't see them in an airliner.
Thousands of people fly every day, miles above the Earth, propelled by a controlled explosion
No, it is produced by a controlled burn. There is a significant difference. In most cases, the burning (not exploding) fuel expands, gets squeezed out a nozzle, and then turns a turbine which in turn (no pun intended) rotates a ducted fan on the forward end of the engine. Very little of the exhaust gasses directly drive the aircraft, thus the name "high-bypass ratio turbofan engine".
In a machine with a whole lot of moving parts supplied by the lowest bidder.
...manufactured to tolerances specified by the designer, and approved by the FAA, then tested in multiple tests before receiving certification to ensure that the design is sufficiently strong and durable to see service in an airline.
Most people in that situation get a $5, single-strap safety restraint.
B.S. Even the "non-certified" restraints used in the so-called "amateur built experimental" category *start* at about $50 and go up from there. Certified restraints used to retrofit small general aviation airplanes like the single engine Cessna and Piper airplanes you see buzzing around the sky start at about three times that cost. The restraint in a 737 is going to be somewhere near the cost of a restraint in a Cessna or Piper, I'd bet. The pilot and crew? I'd estimate $200-300, but not being a Boeing/Airbus employee, I couldn't tell you for sure.
...in real life there's usually some reasonable compromise between "the most safety we can provide at any cost" and "the most safety we can provide at a reasonable cost, considering the inherent risk of this situation"
The Riverbed units will only help if your upstream bandwidth is greater than the bandwidth you are trying to provide. We tried to replace our Sky-X Mentat boxes with Riverbed last fall, but found that the Riverbed didn't perform even as well as the Mentats in our network.
In a nutshell, we have 6MB from our upstream via fiber or copper (not sure which) and we provide 6MB Internet service to our service area (500 miles away) via satellite. After hooking up the Riverbed, we had no perceptible difference between accelerated/unaccelerated traffic. After doing some testing, we figured out why: the far side Riverbed would send the request to the near side Riverbed. The near side would request the web page (or whatever) from the Net, then would calculate some kind of hash or checksum, which it would send back to the far side. Meanwhile, the far side unit would check for a cached page, and if it found a cached page, it would calculate a checksum as well. If the checksums matched, the near side would serve the cached page; if not, it would download and cache the new version.
Unfortunately, if your upstream bandwidth is the same as your service bandwidth, you get no acceleration, since the near side unit can't download the requested data any faster than the far side.
In fact, the protocol acceleration that the Riverbed devices provide isn't quite as good as the protocol acceleration that the Mentat boxes provided, so the Sky-X Mentats actually performed slightly better for us than the Riverbeds did, even though the Mentats don't do any caching.
And when you have no other choice, you use satellite, even for business.
Also, your backbone doesn't have to be built on cable (copper or fiber). In extremely remote -- or ecologically sensitive -- areas, laying copper or fiber may not be an option. The company I work for built a smokin' Metro-E ring using terrestrial microwave. We would have had to lay about 600 miles of copper or fiber across the Alaskan permafrost if we were to go wired. So far, the network has been pretty reliable, although there have been a couple of outages due to the severe weather where we operate. Ever seen a microwave dish crushed by ice expanding from the tower behind the dish or ice shields that collapsed because they couldn't handle the weight of ~ two feet of ice build up? It's pretty impressive.
Uh huh. And how do you get diesel to the sites to refuel? What do you do when (not if) the generator breaks down? Now what do you do if either of these happen in the middle of a storm?
The company I work for provides service on the west coast of Alaska -- rather similar to Northern Canada. We have a couple of mountain top sites that we assume we simply won't be able to reach for at least a week at a time. As a worst case example, we had a site go OTA in April. By the end of June, the ice on one of these mountain tops had finally melted enough to get a crew up to repair damage to the microwave antennas, which is what took the site down.
Dropping 802.11g routers every 125 miles to reach Northern Canada would probably be even worse than sticking with satellite.
He is probably talking about a channel on the satellite. Yes, the satellite is shared, but the satellite has multiple communications channels running in parallel. So, he has a shared channel and wants a dedicated channel.
I guess not all satellite services are created equal. I work for a company that uses satellite to connect from our main offices to our service area 500 miles away. Our ping times from the main office to our service area is on the order of 600ms. We do use VoIP (sometimes) and it does work (sometimes), but then again, we have half the latency you described above.
In most of my college classes, I honestly didn't notice. However, I do remember one class that started with me (Caucasian), one Chinese student, one student of Japanese descent (but born in the U.S.), and one other Caucasian. The other Caucasian guy dropped out a third of the way through the semester, leaving me the minority by 2-1:)
My only problem with any kind of profiling is that it makes it easy to become prejudiced.
I agree when you said "if girls don't want to study science them [sic] please, for the love of science, don't try to make them. I sincerely believe that statistically, men are better at science than women. There are enough objectively identifiable differences between the sexes to justify such a statement."
However, here is the catch: a particular women may very well be better at <pick scientific field here> even though statistically speaking, women (as a group) tend not to better at <same scientific field> than men (as a group). Plumbing alone is not sufficient to determine whether a man or a woman should be admitted to a degree program, offered a job, etc. If the best candidate for the opportunity is a woman, select her. If it's a man, select him. If it's a person (either sex) of African, American Native, Polynesian Islander, Caucasian, etc., select that person without regard for skin color, sex, orientation, etc.
This is why quotas are a bad idea. With either quotas or with profiling, you are discriminating on the basis of irrelevant evidence (skin color, sex, etc.).
This is slightly off-topic, since I'm arguing about aviation rather than science. However, aviation is another environment that tends to be rather conservative and that traditionally has been dominated by men.
Anyway...my flight instructor when I was working on my commercial pilot's license was a talented young lady named Rebecca -- good pilot, sharp lady and a pretty decent instructor. I ran into her a few years after I earned my commercial ticket, and she was no longer instructing, but was instead a corporate pilot. At one point in our conversation, the topic of sexism in the cockpit came up. Her response -- "Definitely not. In fact, if you are a woman you probably have an advantage trying to get a flying job right now, since employers are bending over backwards to recruit women into aviation." I was kind of surprised by this since, like I said, the aviation community tends to be slow to accept change.
What I've seen and experienced in aviation does not necessarily hold true for science, but since human nature tends to be pretty constant, I'd be pretty surprised to learn that it was all that much different.
The problem with conspiracy theories is that everyone involved in the conspiracy must keep silent, or else the conspiracy will be outed. Most people have a lot of trouble doing that because let's face it -- our egos are just too big. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending upon whether or not you're in on the secret), once anyone else knows, everyone else knows.
So yeah, that sounds like it would be a great exploit, but do you really think it is likely that anyone could convince everyone involved to be a part of such a conspiracy? Surely *someone* would have refused, and to date, the only person I know of who is even loosely connected with FOSS that has...ummm...disappeared...lately is the late Mrs. Reiser.
But okay, let's assume you're right. So, Dan Kaminsky and Paul Vixie and everyone else involved manage to do what you described despite the problems I mentioned. Has everybody patched? Yeah, they created quite a scare, but sys admins are a skeptical, paranoid bunch. Surely someone left an unpatched system or kept the source code for the unpatched versions of the major DNS servers hidden away somewhere -- even if only the FOSS versions. So if on August 7th, everything goes to ****, a bunch of people roll back to the old version. Yeah, the world's largest beowulf cluster of bots is still running, but the really paranoid guys are busy rolling back to unpatched DNS servers, and are working on patches for all the compromised systems. Assuming that Kaminsky, Vixie and co. aren't bludgeoned to death by a mob of angry sys admins, how long do you think it will be until it's business as usual again?
Slashdot Mirror
Was the marriage broken up because of the prankster, or was it broken up become one of the parties was a cheating scumbag and got discovered by the spouse? There is a very significant difference.
I am glad you never taught any of my college courses.
Launching a payload into orbit is not an easy task. Yes, SpaceX has a lot of other peoples' experience to draw upon, but that still leaves a lot of R&D to be done.
Also keep in mind that the technology used to launch a payload to orbit is remarkably similar to the technology used to lob a nuclear warhead from one continent to another. I would not be surprised if a lot of the "other peoples' failures" is still classified.
SpaceX are infinitely more likely to reach orbit than Scaled Composites.
HEY!!! You are dissing one of my heroes!
In all seriousness, I would be very curious to find out why you think so. I would expect the opposite, in fact. Burt Rutan is very definitely an engineer with decades of aerospace experience under his belt. Elon Musk is neither an engineer nor experienced, at least in aerospace. Reading a recent article on the development of the Tesla Roadster, I found myself shaking my head at some of the design constraints Musk demanded. If he runs SpaceX the same way the article alleged Musk ran Tesla, I am not surprised they are having difficulties.
No, his analogies are not completely senseless. Putting a payload into orbit is an extremely difficult task. NASA, ESA, the Russian space program and the Chinese space program have all spent a very, very long time getting to the point they are at today. Each of them has had numerous failures along the way -- some of those failures were more catastrophic than others, but even NASA has lost spacecraft in recent history. I won't dispute that three out of three catastrophic failures is indeed "an extremely bad track record" but keep in mind that SpaceX is using commercial launches as their R&D. The companies buying space on SpaceX's launch vehicles knows the risks and are buying anyway. In a sense, they are investing in SpaceX's future.
After enough failures, they will figure out where it's really cheaper to do things, well, cheaper and where it's actually *more expensive* to do things cheaper. How many payloads do you have to lose before it becomes cheaper to add some of the redundancy back in?
Anyway, it is called rocket science for a reason? Hypothesize, test, analyze results, repeat as required, right?
And if there are three (or even only one) intruders in your house, the only correct reaction is to make a shit-load of noise and call the cops.
That's wishful thinking. If they are *already in your house* where exactly are you going to go while you are waiting for the cops to arrive? I lost all faith in LEO as protectors about fifteen years ago when a group of gang members threatened a friend of mine at his work place. He was a manager at a storage facility. They wanted their stuff back, but owed quite a bit of rent. My friend told them they could have it back when they paid the rent that was due. They said they'd be back with some friends to take it back. My friend called the cops, and was essentially told "call us when there is blood or a body."
So here's the way I see it: LEO says defend yourself; we'll come by after a crime has been committed. However, if you defend yourself, you'll likely get arrested. Do you see the catch-22 there? Given that choice, I will defend myself and my family, err on the side of keeping my family safe, and if that puts me in jail, so be it.
Well, he forgot the "" tag but I at least thought it was pretty obvious.
First case: common sense prevails.
Second case: there's some wiggle room here, but if someone is trespassing in the middle of the night, then as far as I am concerned, I have a reason to be afraid for the well-being of myself and my family, and consequently, I *will* take action to defend myself.
Third case: Nineteen times? Sounds like the homeowner was (justifiably, IMHO) concerned for his and his family's well-being (assuming he has family), and was simply reacting in response to the "fight-or-flight" mechanism that all of us possess. Have you ever been the victim of violent crime? Do you *know* how you would react in a similar situation? 'Kay, then...don't judge him. Remember, he took on three intruders at night -- I'd be chock full of adrenaline in such a situation, and would react accordingly, I suspect.
I determined in second grade, IIRC, that if I was going to be punished for defending myself, that's fine...but I would not be a victim.
Having said that, in many cases, it is a lot easier to simply roll over, and unfortunately, that seems to be the choice most people make anymore.
After living in Alaska for nearly 20 years, I have found that if the road surface is so slick that braking is essentially nil, I can almost always stop the car and avoid an accident by gently nudging the curb with my tires. Unless you've already screwed up so badly that you are spinning out of control, there is almost always enough traction to change your direction of travel by a few degrees, and by rubbing your front tires against the curb, you can get enough traction to stop just about every time. I've only had to do this a couple of times when road conditions at an intersection were much worse than the conditions on the rest of the road, but it has always worked.
Assuming you are referring to a piston engine, then you are mistaken; you are flying in an airplane that is powered by a controlled burn. An explosion in a piston engine is called detonation, and it will destroy the engine if you allow it to continue. (see http://www.streetrodstuff.com/Articles/Engine/Detonation/ for more information).
The wikipedia article on detonation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_knocking) states that pretty much all diesel engines do experience detonation to some extent, but goes on to state that even in a diesel engine, the engine designer takes care to minimize the detonation as much as possible, so as to extend the life of the engine.
Sigh...I'm quite familiar with experimental aircraft. My airplane uses one of the two-cylinder Rotax engines you mentioned and you are correct that it only takes a 40 hour test period to get the restrictions removed from your experimental airplane (actually, I think in some cases, it can be as little as 20 hours). Having said that, experimental airplanes a peculiar niche in aviation. From the context, it sounded like the parent post was referring to commercial (i.e. airline) flights, in which case my response was entirely accurate: it is not merely thousands of parts produced by the lowest bidder flying together in formation.
As for whether or not you can do pretty much what you want, that's true as long as you can get the FAA inspector who reviews your airplane to sign off on it. So while you might feel perfectly safe using a couple of pieces of clothesline to tie you into the seat instead of a $50 restraint from Aircraft Spruce (or whoever), unless the FAA inspector signs off on it, you aren't legal (not to say someone probably hasn't tried it or that someone isn't flying without being signed off, but...). You could almost certainly get by with a seatbelt from the local junkyard, but like I said earlier, experimentals are a niche within aviation in general. You *won't* find junkyard seat belts in a Cessna, and if you do, it won't be legal. You for sure won't see them in an airliner.
Thousands of people fly every day, miles above the Earth, propelled by a controlled explosion
No, it is produced by a controlled burn. There is a significant difference. In most cases, the burning (not exploding) fuel expands, gets squeezed out a nozzle, and then turns a turbine which in turn (no pun intended) rotates a ducted fan on the forward end of the engine. Very little of the exhaust gasses directly drive the aircraft, thus the name "high-bypass ratio turbofan engine".
In a machine with a whole lot of moving parts supplied by the lowest bidder.
Most people in that situation get a $5, single-strap safety restraint.
B.S. Even the "non-certified" restraints used in the so-called "amateur built experimental" category *start* at about $50 and go up from there. Certified restraints used to retrofit small general aviation airplanes like the single engine Cessna and Piper airplanes you see buzzing around the sky start at about three times that cost. The restraint in a 737 is going to be somewhere near the cost of a restraint in a Cessna or Piper, I'd bet. The pilot and crew? I'd estimate $200-300, but not being a Boeing/Airbus employee, I couldn't tell you for sure.
...in real life there's usually some reasonable compromise between "the most safety we can provide at any cost" and "the most safety we can provide at a reasonable cost, considering the inherent risk of this situation"
Yep, exactly.
...but after an engineering analysis...
What do you think makes the seat belts so expensive?
The Riverbed units will only help if your upstream bandwidth is greater than the bandwidth you are trying to provide. We tried to replace our Sky-X Mentat boxes with Riverbed last fall, but found that the Riverbed didn't perform even as well as the Mentats in our network.
In a nutshell, we have 6MB from our upstream via fiber or copper (not sure which) and we provide 6MB Internet service to our service area (500 miles away) via satellite. After hooking up the Riverbed, we had no perceptible difference between accelerated/unaccelerated traffic. After doing some testing, we figured out why: the far side Riverbed would send the request to the near side Riverbed. The near side would request the web page (or whatever) from the Net, then would calculate some kind of hash or checksum, which it would send back to the far side. Meanwhile, the far side unit would check for a cached page, and if it found a cached page, it would calculate a checksum as well. If the checksums matched, the near side would serve the cached page; if not, it would download and cache the new version.
Unfortunately, if your upstream bandwidth is the same as your service bandwidth, you get no acceleration, since the near side unit can't download the requested data any faster than the far side.
In fact, the protocol acceleration that the Riverbed devices provide isn't quite as good as the protocol acceleration that the Mentat boxes provided, so the Sky-X Mentats actually performed slightly better for us than the Riverbeds did, even though the Mentats don't do any caching.
And when you have no other choice, you use satellite, even for business.
Also, your backbone doesn't have to be built on cable (copper or fiber). In extremely remote -- or ecologically sensitive -- areas, laying copper or fiber may not be an option. The company I work for built a smokin' Metro-E ring using terrestrial microwave. We would have had to lay about 600 miles of copper or fiber across the Alaskan permafrost if we were to go wired. So far, the network has been pretty reliable, although there have been a couple of outages due to the severe weather where we operate. Ever seen a microwave dish crushed by ice expanding from the tower behind the dish or ice shields that collapsed because they couldn't handle the weight of ~ two feet of ice build up? It's pretty impressive.
You've never been to the far north, have you? ;)
WiFi is a last-mile technology. Before it will do you any good, you first have to build the backbone to the last mile.
Uh huh. And how do you get diesel to the sites to refuel? What do you do when (not if) the generator breaks down? Now what do you do if either of these happen in the middle of a storm?
The company I work for provides service on the west coast of Alaska -- rather similar to Northern Canada. We have a couple of mountain top sites that we assume we simply won't be able to reach for at least a week at a time. As a worst case example, we had a site go OTA in April. By the end of June, the ice on one of these mountain tops had finally melted enough to get a crew up to repair damage to the microwave antennas, which is what took the site down.
Dropping 802.11g routers every 125 miles to reach Northern Canada would probably be even worse than sticking with satellite.
He is probably talking about a channel on the satellite. Yes, the satellite is shared, but the satellite has multiple communications channels running in parallel. So, he has a shared channel and wants a dedicated channel.
I guess not all satellite services are created equal. I work for a company that uses satellite to connect from our main offices to our service area 500 miles away. Our ping times from the main office to our service area is on the order of 600ms. We do use VoIP (sometimes) and it does work (sometimes), but then again, we have half the latency you described above.
In most of my college classes, I honestly didn't notice. However, I do remember one class that started with me (Caucasian), one Chinese student, one student of Japanese descent (but born in the U.S.), and one other Caucasian. The other Caucasian guy dropped out a third of the way through the semester, leaving me the minority by 2-1 :)
My only problem with any kind of profiling is that it makes it easy to become prejudiced.
I agree when you said "if girls don't want to study science them [sic] please, for the love of science, don't try to make them. I sincerely believe that statistically, men are better at science than women. There are enough objectively identifiable differences between the sexes to justify such a statement."
However, here is the catch: a particular women may very well be better at <pick scientific field here> even though statistically speaking, women (as a group) tend not to better at <same scientific field> than men (as a group). Plumbing alone is not sufficient to determine whether a man or a woman should be admitted to a degree program, offered a job, etc. If the best candidate for the opportunity is a woman, select her. If it's a man, select him. If it's a person (either sex) of African, American Native, Polynesian Islander, Caucasian, etc., select that person without regard for skin color, sex, orientation, etc.
This is why quotas are a bad idea. With either quotas or with profiling, you are discriminating on the basis of irrelevant evidence (skin color, sex, etc.).
This is slightly off-topic, since I'm arguing about aviation rather than science. However, aviation is another environment that tends to be rather conservative and that traditionally has been dominated by men.
Anyway...my flight instructor when I was working on my commercial pilot's license was a talented young lady named Rebecca -- good pilot, sharp lady and a pretty decent instructor. I ran into her a few years after I earned my commercial ticket, and she was no longer instructing, but was instead a corporate pilot. At one point in our conversation, the topic of sexism in the cockpit came up. Her response -- "Definitely not. In fact, if you are a woman you probably have an advantage trying to get a flying job right now, since employers are bending over backwards to recruit women into aviation." I was kind of surprised by this since, like I said, the aviation community tends to be slow to accept change.
What I've seen and experienced in aviation does not necessarily hold true for science, but since human nature tends to be pretty constant, I'd be pretty surprised to learn that it was all that much different.
Yeah, I like to be different :)
Do you write plot themes for Hollywood?
The problem with conspiracy theories is that everyone involved in the conspiracy must keep silent, or else the conspiracy will be outed. Most people have a lot of trouble doing that because let's face it -- our egos are just too big. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending upon whether or not you're in on the secret), once anyone else knows, everyone else knows.
So yeah, that sounds like it would be a great exploit, but do you really think it is likely that anyone could convince everyone involved to be a part of such a conspiracy? Surely *someone* would have refused, and to date, the only person I know of who is even loosely connected with FOSS that has...ummm...disappeared...lately is the late Mrs. Reiser.
But okay, let's assume you're right. So, Dan Kaminsky and Paul Vixie and everyone else involved manage to do what you described despite the problems I mentioned. Has everybody patched? Yeah, they created quite a scare, but sys admins are a skeptical, paranoid bunch. Surely someone left an unpatched system or kept the source code for the unpatched versions of the major DNS servers hidden away somewhere -- even if only the FOSS versions. So if on August 7th, everything goes to ****, a bunch of people roll back to the old version. Yeah, the world's largest beowulf cluster of bots is still running, but the really paranoid guys are busy rolling back to unpatched DNS servers, and are working on patches for all the compromised systems. Assuming that Kaminsky, Vixie and co. aren't bludgeoned to death by a mob of angry sys admins, how long do you think it will be until it's business as usual again?