Best short summary: Norm Augustine's testimony to Congress http://legislative.nasa.gov/hearings/5-12-10%20AUGUSTINE.pdf
"...the mismatch of ends and means coupled with technical problems that were encountered on the Ares I program were such that during its first four years the program slipped between three and five years...". Read that again. After four years of development and billions of $, the objective was no closer than it was at the start of the program. I could cut NASA some slack on that if they were attempting to develop new technology, but the Ares I program was largely based on well-understood technology and an existing industrial production base.
The Program Manager does not set the budget and he was not delivered the budget that was estimated for the job. So maybe the dismissal was unfair. But the PM's job is explicitly to develop the program within the actual (not wished for) triangle of resources, schedule and performance. If the delivered resources are so inadequate that the completion date never gets closer, then something else needs to change - this is the PM's job.
First of all - take a look at the joint US-China statement - the only thing we have agreed to is a high-level visit. Not a marriage, maybe just a coffee date.
Second - what is this really about? Probably not NASA. More likely this is just a deal sweetener for something else we want, like: - devalue the Chinese currency (see NYTimes this week) - improve WMD nonproliferation efforts - green technology
At the NASA level, which is at best a secondary concern of most US politicos, here are some possibilities: - hedge against Russian monopoly of US human access to space during the Gap - engagement may offer US a better view into Chinese goals and means re: space than isolation would - possibly a veiled threat to NASA: Ares is not the only game in town: get your act together
The MIT Space, Policy & Society Research Group took a step back from the "do this" / "no, do that" debate and examined the very questions being posed by the National Academy of Sciences.
The above link has a 16-page document that examines the reasons for a human spaceflight program. The report is compelling, challenging and thought-provoking.
The Moon-Mars plan is referred to as the "Vision for Space Exploration."
What exactly is the vision? The founding document [large PDF warning] for the "VSE" lists goals and strategies, but no vision of what the goals and strategies are meant to accomplish. A vision involving the Moon could be "create a new civilization on the Moon that might do for the U.S. what the New World colonies did for the Old World." (you can snicker but that is an example).
"Go to the Moon and Mars" is not a vision. It's an strategy. "Build launchers and spacecraft based on current infrastructure & technology" is an implementation of that strategy.
A few posts have noted the use of the debugger to see the thread of control. Assuming you have a scalar application (no IPC and no multithreading), that should be useful, but a bit tedious. How about this: use your text editor to put some debug (trace) statements in every function so you can see the actual thread of control. If text output can be created on your platform (e.g. stdio or iostream), just create logfiiles. Otherwise, reserve some memory and figure out how to log interesting things and how to extract the log records from the machine. Even if you have a very primitive embedded platform, you should be able to figure out how to create a log of where you went at runtime. If using the C preprocessor, the __LINE__ and __FILE__ tokens may be invaluable with appropriately designed CPP macros. Even if your platform has nothing like stdio, if you think a bit you may be able to create a way to uniquely identify each file with a unique integer and then use __LINE__ to create a unique description of where you are. Think a bit, experiment and you may arrive at a solution.
If the code is OO with many instances, the above methods may yield rather high entropy results. You could always log the 'this' pointer to try to discern object lifelines and behaviors. Use grep or perl to organize the output into some useful form.
Then, find your use cases (you do have use cases, right). If there are no use cases, talk to some actual users (not programmers) to see a few actual sequences of operations. Assuming you are supposed to maintain this product, those use cases will likely form your regression test suite.
For state machines, well you just have to derive them from the code. If the original developers were disciplined, the states and signals can be discerned without too much difficulty. It's important to analyze them carefully to see which states and transitions are possible (as opposed to the ones that were actually used in a given test run). If the developers were undisciplined then your reverse-engineered state charts will look a mess but at least you have a starting point for analysis.
None of the above is a panacea, but maybe helpful. Have fun.
"Well, technically wood is a mixture of polymers "
Boy you really got me! Zing! Gee, there's really no answer for the great examples you gave. I guess you're right, the govt is purely an obstacle to the real innovators... nothing good ever came out of a govt research program, grant, or subsidy.
I'm not going to get into a pissing match, trying to prove Rutan's inadequacy. He's clearly a very skilled and brilliant designer. The question is however, would the private sector, on its own, do as well? Again, the kernel of my argument is that Rutan did not do the basic research on composites, only the applied R&D. That in itself points to a very effective argument that has been made about NASA -- that it should be more like the NACA of old -- perform and direct basic research and generic technology development, then let the private sector figure out what sorts of specific platforms to build from it, and how to exploit the technology in the operations arena. (and going back to NACA, keep in mind that it was govt money that seeded the development of the airplane and airline industry).
Just today I read an article where a vulture capitalist stated that they are only interested in projects where profits can be realized in 5 years. Here it is http://www.wired.com/news/space/0,2697,65364,0 0.ht ml?tw=wn_story_page_prev2
How far would Rutan have gone without federal R&D? Some of the contracts on which he developed his expertise were federal contracts. Carbon composite structures probably had a lot of federal R&D, particularly from the military. And let's face it -- the huge economic expansion of the 1960s was greatly aided by the GI Bill.
It is simply a myth that private enterprise always knows how to spend money better than the govt. We can debate about the particulars (where to draw the line), but extreme libertarian viewpoints have never been demonstrated in a modern economy.
General outlines: - More NASA funding for research - More balanced priorities (read: less spending for operations, less human spaceflight, more research) - Probably no Human Moon/Mars program -- he claims Bush can't pay for it either, which I agree with. - More aeronautics R&D - Continued international cooperation - NASA management reforms
So in short, it seems Kerry endorses more science, more R&D, and less Buck Rogers. While I like the Buck Rogers stuff, I have to agree that unless we're going to do it in a radically different manner, we've reached a dead end with Shuttle and ISS. I would rather park Shuttle and halt development of ISS, instead of spending another $50B to complete construction. I've posted comments to this effect on many occasions... so I won't bore you with it again.
Hackers, tell us when it will get here
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Good Bad Attitude
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· Score: -1, Flamebait
"(Hackers) can sense totalitarianism approaching from a distance, as animals can sense an approaching thunderstorm."
There are plenty of real civil liberties issues to worry about, but your right to watch a DVD on linux is not going to get you sent to Guantanamo. And the government is not opening gulags for hackers, crackers, or digital content thieves.
Hackers: tell us how soon totalianarianism will get here, so that we can all stop listening to you when you are proven wrong.
As I mentioned in another post, this project was one of the better-faster-cheaper ilk. I think BFC is not entirely without merit, but it was applied in precisely the wrong manner. Whose fault was that? NASA, not LM, and not even JPL. While it's easy to point the finger at LM (a subcontractor to JPL on this), JPL's job is to make sure the design and test were adequate. And NASA's job was to invest resources and conduct oversight. And Congress...
When the final report comes out, we will presumably learn why the sensor was not fully tested -- where was the decision made and why. Until then, all we have is the proximate cause, not the root cause.
The MCO failure was NOT merely LM's bad propulsion database. JPL's navigators saw the errors building and did not act. And JPL did not adequately staff the navigation operations console. And the reason was the emphasis on "cheaper".
The NOAA satellite really was LM's fault, and they will pay for it.
Genesis was designed during the Goldin era of so-called better-faster-cheaper. We should not be surprised that this sort of thing happened, since the project suffered under similar constraints. However, most of the preflight testing did occur AFTER the loss of the two Mars 98 probes, so JPL and LM should have known better.
I imagine JPL and LM are sweating over Stardust at this point -- or at least they should be. Although it does not have the same landing system as Genesis, it is far more likely to have problems, given that its design and testing were coincident with the two Mars failures.
The Economist Magazine has covered the issue of bribery in the past. I don't recall precisely their conclusions, but I doubt that they would endorse a bribocracy over a bureaucracy. If nothing else, economists tend to favor transparency in markets. Bribery is completely opaque, and it tends to favor the creation of monopolies simply because might makes right (the company that can dispense the most bribes can avoid regs, thus lowering its costs, increasing profits and leading to an ability to crush the competition).
The founding fathers, as imperfect as they were, understood that it is better to have a nation of laws than a nation of men. Men (human beings) are corruptible, but so long as you create some oversight, it becomes harder to get away with abuses. Note that I'm not in favor of excessive regs -- for example, the CAB was a ridiculous concoction (Civil Aviation Board? Anyway, it set airline fares and regulated airline routes and markets -- ridiculous).
However, I think you have raised an issue that bears discussion -- the relative merits of bribes vs honest bureaucrats.
I do think that there is "legalized bribery" in the making of laws (i.e. campaign contributions). I don't think that means that we should do away with regulatory agencies however.
It's amazing that the overwhelming majority of the posts so far have been: the govt exists only to propagate itself, bureaucrats are determined to strangle a nascent industry that they fear they cannot control, and the govt merely wants to find a new way to increase tax revenues. Oh, and so Big Brother can impose a police state. What amazes me is that these claims are made as if they were revealed truth -- no supporting evidence whatsoever.
So, in the interest of being "fair and balanced," here are some aspects that need regulation and some *supporting rationale* for this: 1. Airspace hazards -- this should be obvious, but any airplane flying from ground level up to 100 km (and back) needs to avoid smacking into other airplanes. Not to mention the possibility of SS1 crashing into people or property on the ground. So they're doing it out in the Mohave now. Unless there is regulation, there is nothing to prevent them from offering flights over your favorite large city. 2. TFOA -- things falling off aircraft. People on the ground should not merely place their trust in some offshore LLC to be responsible in maintaining the aircraft. 3. Because it's a model that works better than self-regulation *in the long run*. A passenger cannot be epected to perform his own airplane inspection any more than he can perform his own enforcement of pollution laws or anti-trust laws or any other regulatory function.
One of the reasons the US is a better place to live (for most people) than Mexico is not because we have better laws, or better people, but because the laws are made by (representatives of) the people, and equally important, the laws are actually enforced. Although the regulatory agencies have permitted abuses to occur, in most cases it's because they rely on industries to "self report" errors and violations. Do you really think it would be better with no oversight whatsoever? If so, please tell me which country is closer to your definition of utopia.
From the NYTimes article: "Dr. Emanuel and the study's authors cautioned that it was too soon to know whether hurricanes would form more or less frequently in a warmer world. Even as seas warm, for example, accelerating high-level winds can shred the towering cloud formations of a tropical storm."
The important take-away is that the models predict a higher proportion of severe hurricanes, but no one knows yet whether there would be more or less hurricanes.
Ironically, we could wind up with both drought and more severe hurricanes. If the total number of hurricanes diminishes, large areas of the South could experience drought. Yet, when a hurricane does form, it could be more severe than has been usual so far. Worst of both effects...
Anyone who doubts that climate change is going on, put your money where your mouth is and buy a home in Florida. If you're right, you will make money on the house and if you're wrong your home will be washed away by storm surge. Either way, you're at least gambling with your own life and property, which is more than I can say for doubters who live in Wyoming (yes I mean Cheney).
I agree at least 90%. If you reach your 20s and don't have the ethical framework and basic understanding of human nature to become a leader, this won't get you there and no artifact will.
Leadership is about taking a stand in the face of risk. You can read about it ("Profiles in Courage"), you can watch movies about it ("To Kill a Mockingbird"), and you can observe it in the actions of those around you. But you only learn what it means when you have a stake in the outcome.
The reviewer mentions that Aldrich says the military teaches leadership in simulations. I wonder if this means war games or computer sims. In the case of war games, there is something real at stake even though people are only simulating death and wounds: one's evaluations are at stake, which probably has a big effect on one's career. Does Capt So-and-so accept responsibility for his decisions, or does he blame the weather, equipment failures, or worst of all, his men? How the commander behaves after the fact speaks volumes about his leadership, perhaps is almost as important as during the action. (I'm speculating here -- any military types care to comment?)
Can this sort of thing be taught in a simulator? Can those who have some leadership skills be improved this way? Or even identified this way? I doubt it.
Saddam had a long history of pursuing weapons programs. It's possible that he decided to change tactics and find any way possible to harm the US, including via a proxy. But most of what I have read indicates that his goals were (a) to control domestic opponents and boost his image within Iraq, (b) to shake free of the sanctions imposed after Desert Storm, so that he could return to weapons production and (c) to become powerful in the region (he saw his destiny as being a modern Saladin). Mark Bowden wrote a profile of Saddam (origins, personality, goals) in the May 2002 Atlantic Monthly (not on-line, but your library likely has it).
Tony Blair said that the intel on which the Iraq war was predicated was faulty -- quoted this morning on NPR's Morning Edition. I think the original interview was on a British talk show. The statement was too vague for me to tell if he was talking about the bogus Niger deal specifically or the bigger picture of nuclear refinement (Aluminum tubes), poison-dispensing UAVs, mobile bio-weapons labs etc. I think it was probably the latter.
I poked around to see what Google turns up for "tony blair niger iraq uranium", and one story is consistent with some others I've read recently. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne ws/2004/09/05/wuran05.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/09/05/ ixworld.html
It says that the intel services and govt leaders are all pointing at one another over the Niger forgery. They are trying to identify who created and passed the forgeries. UK is pointing at France, France is pointing at Italy, etc.
It's not clear to me that Saddam ("Iraq: c'est moi") would find it in his interest to help any other nation in the region, since his greatest desire was to be the modern Saladin (perhaps his belief was reinforced by having been born in Saladin's birthplace, Tikrit -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saladin). It's difficult for me to believe there was any relationship between Saddam and Iran, since Iran and Iraq are historical and contemporary enemies. He invaded Iran twice, and he was oppressing the Shia majority for both political survival as well as revenge for their abortive uprising after Desert Storm. I suppose anything's technically possible, but Iran-Iraq collusion makes little sense for this any many other reasons.
Collusion with Libya, Syria? I suppose it's possible, but consider this. If you wanted to buy something illicit (say some marijuana), and a particular person was known to be under continuous surveillance, would you buy it from him? Seems like a good way to get caught. Libya seems to have gone directly to the source (AQ Khan). And if Iraq had been able to acquire some Uranium in spite of the sanctions and inspections, why would they sell it to a potential rival? I admit that Saddam did things that don't make sense in my worldview, but such actions would seem to conflict with his own worldview.
What about Saddam helping Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups that oppose the US? Again, it was in the realm of possibility, but there was apparently no reason to believe before the invasion that there was any assistance, nor has any such evidence come to light since. Although a rational person might think Saddam would "exploit" such groups if he thought he could do it undetected, his grandiosity might explain why he did not. Saddam, the modern Saladin, deal with the cave-dwelling leaders of AQ?
The question of nukes in the middle East is a frightening one indeed. There is no doubt that Saddam wanted nukes -- he had a prodigious program until the Israelis bombed it. Libya was pursuing nukes and now claims to have given them up (I have no reason to trust a terrorist like Qaddafi, so I hope the inspections are thorough). I think just about everyone believes that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons under cover of nuclear energy programs. And if Iran achieves the bomb, experts expect Saudi and Egypt to get it next.
Meanwhile, no one has been given a complete account of the activit
Infrastructure and the driver experience
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NYT On Flying Cars
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· Score: 3, Informative
I would like to see flying cars a la Blade Runner or 5th Element. But until we have anti-gravity, we're still going to have to deal with takeoff and landing. There lies the biggest unavoidable problem (I consider the in-air collision problem at least theoretically avoidable, by use of some advanced TCAS-style technology).
Let's say I live in Morgan Hill CA and want to commute to San Francisco (about 70 miles, all highway). I can drive my modular flying car in putt-putt mode to the local airport (Reed-Hillview), then attach the wing unit, fly to SF, and then what? Where do I land?
Let's assume for a moment that SF can build a floating airfield in the Bay (somehow surmounting legal challenges from NIMBY's and enviros, ferry owners and others whose oxen would be gored by this). Even if you can land next to the Ferry building, I don't think this commute experience adds up to being worth the hassles, either for the city or for private developers or for the individual driver.
The amount of time needed for the transition from rolling to flying, and the distance from door to airport, are the biggest problems.
The ducted fans (Moller, Yoeli) don't have these problems, but unless developers start building heliports on buildings in the city, it's still not viable end-to-end. The heliports would have to be complex, expensive systems similar to military helicopter-carrier ships (unless they are merely a big parking lot, unfeasible in congested cities).
Another issue is maintenance. Airplanes require a lot of expensive maintenance. Would air-cars somehow be cheaper to maintain? What would the annual total cost of operations be? Point of comparison: Here's a rundown of estimated costs to operate one of the cheapest airplanes in production: the Liberty XL2.
This is my last comment on this. I sense that we're going to have to agree to disagree on this. You seem to be hung up on one statement (which I have not seen) to the Washington Post, which matters much less than what he said to the goverment about his mission. By the way, if your standard is perfection, then no one who led us into Iraq has any credibility... but that's another debate, and this one has reached its conclusion.
He reported to the US govt that he interviewed govt officials in Niger, where he had personal contacts from his previous posting there. He was not asked to examine the forgeries. His specialty is not in verification of documents, he is a career diplomat. It became public knowledge that the documents were forgeries. It would not surprise me if Wilson commented to this effect.
The Senate concluded that Iraq did not have a nuclear program. Wilson's conclusions were correct, and those that believed there was a nuclear program were wrong. His conclusions were not based on the documents but on personal interviews with officials in Niger who are supposed to know what's going on with their mines, ore processing facilities, and exports.
This article http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39834-20 04Jul9 has some links to the PDF's of the Senate report. I read enough of the "Conclusions" that I think Wilson has been found credible in his methods and his conclusions.
Instead of reading the interpretations of the American Daily and the Washington Post, I looked at the Senate report conclusions (PDF referenced on the washington post article).
Wilson said the documents were forged. That he never saw the documents himself does not change the fact that they were forged. He was assigned to go to Niger and make the rounds of government officials he knew from his previous duties there, to try to determine whether there was any reason to believe there was a deal in spite of the bogus documents. He reported his conclusions to State, and when President Bush raised the issue in the SOTU Wilson blew the whistle.
I've seen nothing that says Wilson lied, "in effect" or otherwise. So he stated to the Washington Post that the documents were forged -- so what? Everyone agrees that they were forged. Unless you can find a quote where he said that he examined them and determined that they were forged, he didn't lie.
More importantly, Wilson accurately reported what he (didn't) find on his little excursion to Niger. He conducted an impartial investigation and when the President publicly misused (in Wilson's view) intelligence, he called him on it. Nothing wrong with that.
"Joe Wilson testified to congress that he in effect lied..."
I think anyone making a claim that someone lied needs to provide some documentation. Can you provide a specific cite in the Washington Post or in Congressional testimony?
My understanding is that he was indeed there months after the supposed attempt to purchase, and he never claimed to have been there at the time of the claimed purchase. The trail as I understand it was that an Italian journalist was given the Niger documents and did not publish a story on the subject because the documents and claims could not be substantiated (take that, CBS!). The journo handed the docs to Italian govt officials and eventually the US got it. Wilson was sent there months after the Italian journo got it, and Wilson never claimed to have been present during the deal (which never happened, so how could he have been there). In fact, he wrote a piece in the NY Times of 6 July 2003 saying that he had never seen the forged documents.
As I understand it, he never lied, in effect or otherwise, about his mission to investigate the phony deal.
"What's stopping _you_ from going over there and putting a stop to it? If you care so much, hop to it."
"Don't be so willing to send other people to go die for a cause in your name while you surf slashdot."
From what you said, I inferred that you meant that the person should grab a rifle and go take direct action. I don't think that was an unreasonable inference, based on what you wrote. The aid organizations cannot stop genocide without security, they can only do so much.
You would think after the fiasco about media credulity of Iraq WMDs, the media would be more suspicious of this sort of thing. In both cases, evidence was uncritically accepted because it fit with a preconceived notion of the facts.
We knew Saddam had developed and used WMDs in the past, we knew that Saddam had disobeyed UN resolutions in the past, we knew that Saddam had cheated on international weapons inspections in the past. Why wouldn't he have WMDs? When evidence was presented, everyone was ready to accept it. Even the Joe Wilson story (Niger yellowcake) didn't keep people from accepting the worst case scenario.
Similar thing with the Bush National Guard records. We know that Bush jumped to the head of the applicant list through the good ol' boy network. We know that he did not perform the duties he signed contracts for.
There was nothing in the content of the forged memos that raised suspicion -- instead it was abbreviations and typography that gave it away. Interestingly, the same was true of the Niger yellowcake documents -- one of the big giveaways was that the names of govt officials were not contemporary with the dates on the documents.
Even old pros like Rather need to learn: just because evidence seems to fit does not make it true.
Slashdot Mirror
Best short summary: Norm Augustine's testimony to Congress http://legislative.nasa.gov/hearings/5-12-10%20AUGUSTINE.pdf
"...the mismatch of ends and means coupled with technical problems that were encountered on the Ares I program were such that during its first four years the program slipped between three and five years...". Read that again. After four years of development and billions of $, the objective was no closer than it was at the start of the program. I could cut NASA some slack on that if they were attempting to develop new technology, but the Ares I program was largely based on well-understood technology and an existing industrial production base.
The Program Manager does not set the budget and he was not delivered the budget that was estimated for the job. So maybe the dismissal was unfair. But the PM's job is explicitly to develop the program within the actual (not wished for) triangle of resources, schedule and performance. If the delivered resources are so inadequate that the completion date never gets closer, then something else needs to change - this is the PM's job.
First of all - take a look at the joint US-China statement - the only thing we have agreed to is a high-level visit. Not a marriage, maybe just a coffee date.
Second - what is this really about? Probably not NASA. More likely this is just a deal sweetener for something else we want, like:
- devalue the Chinese currency (see NYTimes this week)
- improve WMD nonproliferation efforts
- green technology
At the NASA level, which is at best a secondary concern of most US politicos, here are some possibilities:
- hedge against Russian monopoly of US human access to space during the Gap
- engagement may offer US a better view into Chinese goals and means re: space than isolation would
- possibly a veiled threat to NASA: Ares is not the only game in town: get your act together
I am surprised the following report has not been posted or submitted to /.
Future of Human Spaceflight (16-page PDF)
The MIT Space, Policy & Society Research Group took a step back from the "do this" / "no, do that" debate and examined the very questions being posed by the National Academy of Sciences.
The above link has a 16-page document that examines the reasons for a human spaceflight program. The report is compelling, challenging and thought-provoking.
Give it a read!
The Moon-Mars plan is referred to as the "Vision for Space Exploration."
What exactly is the vision? The founding document [large PDF warning] for the "VSE" lists goals and strategies, but no vision of what the goals and strategies are meant to accomplish. A vision involving the Moon could be "create a new civilization on the Moon that might do for the U.S. what the New World colonies did for the Old World." (you can snicker but that is an example).
"Go to the Moon and Mars" is not a vision. It's an strategy.
"Build launchers and spacecraft based on current infrastructure & technology" is an implementation of that strategy.
Again... what is the vision?
A few posts have noted the use of the debugger to see the thread of control. Assuming you have a scalar application (no IPC and no multithreading), that should be useful, but a bit tedious. How about this: use your text editor to put some debug (trace) statements in every function so you can see the actual thread of control. If text output can be created on your platform (e.g. stdio or iostream), just create logfiiles. Otherwise, reserve some memory and figure out how to log interesting things and how to extract the log records from the machine. Even if you have a very primitive embedded platform, you should be able to figure out how to create a log of where you went at runtime. If using the C preprocessor, the __LINE__ and __FILE__ tokens may be invaluable with appropriately designed CPP macros. Even if your platform has nothing like stdio, if you think a bit you may be able to create a way to uniquely identify each file with a unique integer and then use __LINE__ to create a unique description of where you are. Think a bit, experiment and you may arrive at a solution.
If the code is OO with many instances, the above methods may yield rather high entropy results. You could always log the 'this' pointer to try to discern object lifelines and behaviors. Use grep or perl to organize the output into some useful form.
Then, find your use cases (you do have use cases, right). If there are no use cases, talk to some actual users (not programmers) to see a few actual sequences of operations. Assuming you are supposed to maintain this product, those use cases will likely form your regression test suite.
For state machines, well you just have to derive them from the code. If the original developers were disciplined, the states and signals can be discerned without too much difficulty. It's important to analyze them carefully to see which states and transitions are possible (as opposed to the ones that were actually used in a given test run). If the developers were undisciplined then your reverse-engineered state charts will look a mess but at least you have a starting point for analysis.
None of the above is a panacea, but maybe helpful. Have fun.
This study was done in 1991 when the first Bush Lunar-Mars plan was proposed.
g ov/19910008686_1991008686.pdf
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.
See also
http://marie.jsc.nasa.gov/
"Well, technically wood is a mixture of polymers "
Boy you really got me! Zing! Gee, there's really no answer for the great examples you gave. I guess you're right, the govt is purely an obstacle to the real innovators... nothing good ever came out of a govt research program, grant, or subsidy.
I'm not going to get into a pissing match, trying to prove Rutan's inadequacy. He's clearly a very skilled and brilliant designer. The question is however, would the private sector, on its own, do as well? Again, the kernel of my argument is that Rutan did not do the basic research on composites, only the applied R&D. That in itself points to a very effective argument that has been made about NASA -- that it should be more like the NACA of old -- perform and direct basic research and generic technology development, then let the private sector figure out what sorts of specific platforms to build from it, and how to exploit the technology in the operations arena. (and going back to NACA, keep in mind that it was govt money that seeded the development of the airplane and airline industry).
0 0.ht ml?tw=wn_story_page_prev2
Just today I read an article where a vulture capitalist stated that they are only interested in projects where profits can be realized in 5 years. Here it is
http://www.wired.com/news/space/0,2697,65364,
How far would Rutan have gone without federal R&D? Some of the contracts on which he developed his expertise were federal contracts. Carbon composite structures probably had a lot of federal R&D, particularly from the military. And let's face it -- the huge economic expansion of the 1960s was greatly aided by the GI Bill.
It is simply a myth that private enterprise always knows how to spend money better than the govt. We can debate about the particulars (where to draw the line), but extreme libertarian viewpoints have never been demonstrated in a modern economy.
Take a look at this article about Kerry's official position on space. Or better yet, see what Kerry's web site says about NASA.
General outlines:
- More NASA funding for research
- More balanced priorities (read: less spending for operations, less human spaceflight, more research)
- Probably no Human Moon/Mars program -- he claims Bush can't pay for it either, which I agree with.
- More aeronautics R&D
- Continued international cooperation
- NASA management reforms
So in short, it seems Kerry endorses more science, more R&D, and less Buck Rogers. While I like the Buck Rogers stuff, I have to agree that unless we're going to do it in a radically different manner, we've reached a dead end with Shuttle and ISS. I would rather park Shuttle and halt development of ISS, instead of spending another $50B to complete construction. I've posted comments to this effect on many occasions... so I won't bore you with it again.
"(Hackers) can sense totalitarianism approaching from a distance, as animals can sense an approaching thunderstorm."
There are plenty of real civil liberties issues to worry about, but your right to watch a DVD on linux is not going to get you sent to Guantanamo. And the government is not opening gulags for hackers, crackers, or digital content thieves.
Hackers: tell us how soon totalianarianism will get here, so that we can all stop listening to you when you are proven wrong.
thanks
As I mentioned in another post, this project was one of the better-faster-cheaper ilk. I think BFC is not entirely without merit, but it was applied in precisely the wrong manner. Whose fault was that? NASA, not LM, and not even JPL. While it's easy to point the finger at LM (a subcontractor to JPL on this), JPL's job is to make sure the design and test were adequate. And NASA's job was to invest resources and conduct oversight. And Congress...
When the final report comes out, we will presumably learn why the sensor was not fully tested -- where was the decision made and why. Until then, all we have is the proximate cause, not the root cause.
The MCO failure was NOT merely LM's bad propulsion database. JPL's navigators saw the errors building and did not act. And JPL did not adequately staff the navigation operations console. And the reason was the emphasis on "cheaper".
The NOAA satellite really was LM's fault, and they will pay for it.
Genesis was designed during the Goldin era of so-called better-faster-cheaper. We should not be surprised that this sort of thing happened, since the project suffered under similar constraints. However, most of the preflight testing did occur AFTER the loss of the two Mars 98 probes, so JPL and LM should have known better.
I imagine JPL and LM are sweating over Stardust at this point -- or at least they should be. Although it does not have the same landing system as Genesis, it is far more likely to have problems, given that its design and testing were coincident with the two Mars failures.
The Economist Magazine has covered the issue of bribery in the past. I don't recall precisely their conclusions, but I doubt that they would endorse a bribocracy over a bureaucracy. If nothing else, economists tend to favor transparency in markets. Bribery is completely opaque, and it tends to favor the creation of monopolies simply because might makes right (the company that can dispense the most bribes can avoid regs, thus lowering its costs, increasing profits and leading to an ability to crush the competition).
The founding fathers, as imperfect as they were, understood that it is better to have a nation of laws than a nation of men. Men (human beings) are corruptible, but so long as you create some oversight, it becomes harder to get away with abuses. Note that I'm not in favor of excessive regs -- for example, the CAB was a ridiculous concoction (Civil Aviation Board? Anyway, it set airline fares and regulated airline routes and markets -- ridiculous).
However, I think you have raised an issue that bears discussion -- the relative merits of bribes vs honest bureaucrats.
I do think that there is "legalized bribery" in the making of laws (i.e. campaign contributions). I don't think that means that we should do away with regulatory agencies however.
It's amazing that the overwhelming majority of the posts so far have been: the govt exists only to propagate itself, bureaucrats are determined to strangle a nascent industry that they fear they cannot control, and the govt merely wants to find a new way to increase tax revenues. Oh, and so Big Brother can impose a police state. What amazes me is that these claims are made as if they were revealed truth -- no supporting evidence whatsoever.
So, in the interest of being "fair and balanced," here are some aspects that need regulation and some *supporting rationale* for this:
1. Airspace hazards -- this should be obvious, but any airplane flying from ground level up to 100 km (and back) needs to avoid smacking into other airplanes. Not to mention the possibility of SS1 crashing into people or property on the ground. So they're doing it out in the Mohave now. Unless there is regulation, there is nothing to prevent them from offering flights over your favorite large city.
2. TFOA -- things falling off aircraft. People on the ground should not merely place their trust in some offshore LLC to be responsible in maintaining the aircraft.
3. Because it's a model that works better than self-regulation *in the long run*. A passenger cannot be epected to perform his own airplane inspection any more than he can perform his own enforcement of pollution laws or anti-trust laws or any other regulatory function.
One of the reasons the US is a better place to live (for most people) than Mexico is not because we have better laws, or better people, but because the laws are made by (representatives of) the people, and equally important, the laws are actually enforced. Although the regulatory agencies have permitted abuses to occur, in most cases it's because they rely on industries to "self report" errors and violations. Do you really think it would be better with no oversight whatsoever? If so, please tell me which country is closer to your definition of utopia.
From the NYTimes article:
"Dr. Emanuel and the study's authors cautioned that it was too soon to know whether hurricanes would form more or less frequently in a warmer world. Even as seas warm, for example, accelerating high-level winds can shred the towering cloud formations of a tropical storm."
The important take-away is that the models predict a higher proportion of severe hurricanes, but no one knows yet whether there would be more or less hurricanes.
Ironically, we could wind up with both drought and more severe hurricanes. If the total number of hurricanes diminishes, large areas of the South could experience drought. Yet, when a hurricane does form, it could be more severe than has been usual so far. Worst of both effects...
Anyone who doubts that climate change is going on, put your money where your mouth is and buy a home in Florida. If you're right, you will make money on the house and if you're wrong your home will be washed away by storm surge. Either way, you're at least gambling with your own life and property, which is more than I can say for doubters who live in Wyoming (yes I mean Cheney).
I agree at least 90%. If you reach your 20s and don't have the ethical framework and basic understanding of human nature to become a leader, this won't get you there and no artifact will.
Leadership is about taking a stand in the face of risk. You can read about it ("Profiles in Courage"), you can watch movies about it ("To Kill a Mockingbird"), and you can observe it in the actions of those around you. But you only learn what it means when you have a stake in the outcome.
The reviewer mentions that Aldrich says the military teaches leadership in simulations. I wonder if this means war games or computer sims. In the case of war games, there is something real at stake even though people are only simulating death and wounds: one's evaluations are at stake, which probably has a big effect on one's career. Does Capt So-and-so accept responsibility for his decisions, or does he blame the weather, equipment failures, or worst of all, his men? How the commander behaves after the fact speaks volumes about his leadership, perhaps is almost as important as during the action. (I'm speculating here -- any military types care to comment?)
Can this sort of thing be taught in a simulator? Can those who have some leadership skills be improved this way? Or even identified this way? I doubt it.
Saddam had a long history of pursuing weapons programs. It's possible that he decided to change tactics and find any way possible to harm the US, including via a proxy. But most of what I have read indicates that his goals were (a) to control domestic opponents and boost his image within Iraq, (b) to shake free of the sanctions imposed after Desert Storm, so that he could return to weapons production and (c) to become powerful in the region (he saw his destiny as being a modern Saladin). Mark Bowden wrote a profile of Saddam (origins, personality, goals) in the May 2002 Atlantic Monthly (not on-line, but your library likely has it).
Tony Blair said that the intel on which the Iraq war was predicated was faulty -- quoted this morning on NPR's Morning Edition. I think the original interview was on a British talk show. The statement was too vague for me to tell if he was talking about the bogus Niger deal specifically or the bigger picture of nuclear refinement (Aluminum tubes), poison-dispensing UAVs, mobile bio-weapons labs etc. I think it was probably the latter.
I poked around to see what Google turns up for "tony blair niger iraq uranium", and one story is consistent with some others I've read recently. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne ws/2004/09/05/wuran05.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/09/05/ ixworld.html
It says that the intel services and govt leaders are all pointing at one another over the Niger forgery. They are trying to identify who created and passed the forgeries. UK is pointing at France, France is pointing at Italy, etc.
It's not clear to me that Saddam ("Iraq: c'est moi") would find it in his interest to help any other nation in the region, since his greatest desire was to be the modern Saladin (perhaps his belief was reinforced by having been born in Saladin's birthplace, Tikrit -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saladin). It's difficult for me to believe there was any relationship between Saddam and Iran, since Iran and Iraq are historical and contemporary enemies. He invaded Iran twice, and he was oppressing the Shia majority for both political survival as well as revenge for their abortive uprising after Desert Storm. I suppose anything's technically possible, but Iran-Iraq collusion makes little sense for this any many other reasons.
Collusion with Libya, Syria? I suppose it's possible, but consider this. If you wanted to buy something illicit (say some marijuana), and a particular person was known to be under continuous surveillance, would you buy it from him? Seems like a good way to get caught. Libya seems to have gone directly to the source (AQ Khan). And if Iraq had been able to acquire some Uranium in spite of the sanctions and inspections, why would they sell it to a potential rival? I admit that Saddam did things that don't make sense in my worldview, but such actions would seem to conflict with his own worldview.
What about Saddam helping Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups that oppose the US? Again, it was in the realm of possibility, but there was apparently no reason to believe before the invasion that there was any assistance, nor has any such evidence come to light since. Although a rational person might think Saddam would "exploit" such groups if he thought he could do it undetected, his grandiosity might explain why he did not. Saddam, the modern Saladin, deal with the cave-dwelling leaders of AQ?
The question of nukes in the middle East is a frightening one indeed. There is no doubt that Saddam wanted nukes -- he had a prodigious program until the Israelis bombed it. Libya was pursuing nukes and now claims to have given them up (I have no reason to trust a terrorist like Qaddafi, so I hope the inspections are thorough). I think just about everyone believes that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons under cover of nuclear energy programs. And if Iran achieves the bomb, experts expect Saudi and Egypt to get it next.
Meanwhile, no one has been given a complete account of the activit
I would like to see flying cars a la Blade Runner or 5th Element. But until we have anti-gravity, we're still going to have to deal with takeoff and landing. There lies the biggest unavoidable problem (I consider the in-air collision problem at least theoretically avoidable, by use of some advanced TCAS-style technology).
Let's say I live in Morgan Hill CA and want to commute to San Francisco (about 70 miles, all highway). I can drive my modular flying car in putt-putt mode to the local airport (Reed-Hillview), then attach the wing unit, fly to SF, and then what? Where do I land?
Let's assume for a moment that SF can build a floating airfield in the Bay (somehow surmounting legal challenges from NIMBY's and enviros, ferry owners and others whose oxen would be gored by this). Even if you can land next to the Ferry building, I don't think this commute experience adds up to being worth the hassles, either for the city or for private developers or for the individual driver.
The amount of time needed for the transition from rolling to flying, and the distance from door to airport, are the biggest problems.
The ducted fans (Moller, Yoeli) don't have these problems, but unless developers start building heliports on buildings in the city, it's still not viable end-to-end. The heliports would have to be complex, expensive systems similar to military helicopter-carrier ships (unless they are merely a big parking lot, unfeasible in congested cities).
Another issue is maintenance. Airplanes require a lot of expensive maintenance. Would air-cars somehow be cheaper to maintain? What would the annual total cost of operations be? Point of comparison: Here's a rundown of estimated costs to operate one of the cheapest airplanes in production: the Liberty XL2.
This is my last comment on this. I sense that we're going to have to agree to disagree on this. You seem to be hung up on one statement (which I have not seen) to the Washington Post, which matters much less than what he said to the goverment about his mission. By the way, if your standard is perfection, then no one who led us into Iraq has any credibility... but that's another debate, and this one has reached its conclusion.
0 04Jul9 has some links to the PDF's of the Senate report. I read enough of the "Conclusions" that I think Wilson has been found credible in his methods and his conclusions.
He reported to the US govt that he interviewed govt officials in Niger, where he had personal contacts from his previous posting there. He was not asked to examine the forgeries. His specialty is not in verification of documents, he is a career diplomat. It became public knowledge that the documents were forgeries. It would not surprise me if Wilson commented to this effect.
The Senate concluded that Iraq did not have a nuclear program. Wilson's conclusions were correct, and those that believed there was a nuclear program were wrong. His conclusions were not based on the documents but on personal interviews with officials in Niger who are supposed to know what's going on with their mines, ore processing facilities, and exports.
This article http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39834-2
Instead of reading the interpretations of the American Daily and the Washington Post, I looked at the Senate report conclusions (PDF referenced on the washington post article).
Wilson said the documents were forged. That he never saw the documents himself does not change the fact that they were forged. He was assigned to go to Niger and make the rounds of government officials he knew from his previous duties there, to try to determine whether there was any reason to believe there was a deal in spite of the bogus documents. He reported his conclusions to State, and when President Bush raised the issue in the SOTU Wilson blew the whistle.
I've seen nothing that says Wilson lied, "in effect" or otherwise. So he stated to the Washington Post that the documents were forged -- so what? Everyone agrees that they were forged. Unless you can find a quote where he said that he examined them and determined that they were forged, he didn't lie.
More importantly, Wilson accurately reported what he (didn't) find on his little excursion to Niger. He conducted an impartial investigation and when the President publicly misused (in Wilson's view) intelligence, he called him on it. Nothing wrong with that.
"Joe Wilson testified to congress that he in effect lied..."
I think anyone making a claim that someone lied needs to provide some documentation. Can you provide a specific cite in the Washington Post or in Congressional testimony?
My understanding is that he was indeed there months after the supposed attempt to purchase, and he never claimed to have been there at the time of the claimed purchase. The trail as I understand it was that an Italian journalist was given the Niger documents and did not publish a story on the subject because the documents and claims could not be substantiated (take that, CBS!). The journo handed the docs to Italian govt officials and eventually the US got it. Wilson was sent there months after the Italian journo got it, and Wilson never claimed to have been present during the deal (which never happened, so how could he have been there). In fact, he wrote a piece in the NY Times of 6 July 2003 saying that he had never seen the forged documents.
As I understand it, he never lied, in effect or otherwise, about his mission to investigate the phony deal.
"What's stopping _you_ from going over there and putting a stop to it? If you care so much, hop to it."
"Don't be so willing to send other people to go die for a cause in your name while you surf slashdot."
From what you said, I inferred that you meant that the person should grab a rifle and go take direct action. I don't think that was an unreasonable inference, based on what you wrote. The aid organizations cannot stop genocide without security, they can only do so much.
You would think after the fiasco about media credulity of Iraq WMDs, the media would be more suspicious of this sort of thing. In both cases, evidence was uncritically accepted because it fit with a preconceived notion of the facts.
We knew Saddam had developed and used WMDs in the past, we knew that Saddam had disobeyed UN resolutions in the past, we knew that Saddam had cheated on international weapons inspections in the past. Why wouldn't he have WMDs? When evidence was presented, everyone was ready to accept it. Even the Joe Wilson story (Niger yellowcake) didn't keep people from accepting the worst case scenario.
Similar thing with the Bush National Guard records. We know that Bush jumped to the head of the applicant list through the good ol' boy network. We know that he did not perform the duties he signed contracts for.
There was nothing in the content of the forged memos that raised suspicion -- instead it was abbreviations and typography that gave it away. Interestingly, the same was true of the Niger yellowcake documents -- one of the big giveaways was that the names of govt officials were not contemporary with the dates on the documents.
Even old pros like Rather need to learn: just because evidence seems to fit does not make it true.