Boy, I’m sure glad we put the federal goverment in charge of airline security. This certainly make me feel safer to fly.

One air marshal said he didn?t know about the interference problem because ?I never tried to communicate using [the PDA] because I really don?t know how to use it.? This air marshal said he received initial training on the device in September but wasn?t issued one until May ?with no additional refresher training,? he said. ?During the training in 2002, TSA said they were working on a glitch with the [PDAs] interfering with the cockpit transmissions, but I don?t know if they ever resolved the glitch or not,? the air marshal said…

…?We call these [PDAs] the ?Thousand Dollar Game Boy,?? said one air marshal, equating the device to the hand-held Nintendo video game player. ?Some air marshals have up to 70 games on their PDAs that they?ve downloaded from the Internet,? the air marshal said.

Another air marshal said that ?because my PDA is always crashing, I don?t use it anymore.? After his device crashed twice, wiping out an extensive series of notes painstakingly input into the PDA, ?I don?t use it except to play Asteroids,? the air marshal said.

I’ve made the point numerous times that we don’t have any shortage of astronauts, and that their loss in accidents like last February’s shouldn’t be the primary focus of our concern in formulating national space policy.

And actually, it’s old news, but the press is now starting to pay attention, because it’s gotten dramatically worse. That is, the problem of NASA having too many astronauts. NASA has always had more astronauts than it needed, and as the article points out, many of them end up being engineers on the Shuttle program.

What the article doesn’t point out is that one of the reasons for the oversupply was that when George Abbey ran Johnson Space Center with an iron fist, he used many of the astronaut corps as a spy network to know who was and wasn’t loyal, and rewarded or punished them by allowing them to fly, or not. If he’d had a shortage, he wouldn’t have had that kind of leverage over them.

Unfortunately, even though the Abbey regime supposedly ended when Bush came in, many in Houston still live in fear of his return, until they actually see his dead body.

This is one of the reasons that I’m not a member of either major party.

I have nothing to say about the Great Sausage Incident in Milwaukee, except that it represents baseball at its wurst.

I’m just wondering how many of the people who are spurring the president on to send troops to Liberia were concerned about him sending them to Iraq because it would be a “distraction from the war on terrorism and Al Qaeda”?

Jim Oberg writes about NASA’s “see no evil” culture.

Jim Oberg writes about NASA’s “see no evil” culture.

Jim Oberg writes about NASA’s “see no evil” culture.

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Tyler Owen asks, “why are people willing to steal music but not food?”

He puts forth some hypotheses, but misses the most important one (or at least the one that justifies it the most to me).

Here’s a hint. People who wouldn’t steal food also probably wouldn’t lift CDs from Virgin Superstore.

Here’s the critical difference. When you steal food, or a jewelbox with a CD in it, you’ve effectively transferred the property from someone else to yourself. You are richer, and someone who once had a physical object no longer has it, and is thereby made poorer. This is clearly ethically wrong.

On the other hand, when you “steal” information, you’re depriving no one. He still has the property that you “stole.” The only loss to the owner is the actual value of the song to you (i.e., the amount of money that you would have been willing to pay for it if you weren’t able to “steal” it).

The problem that the music industry (and much of the software industry) has is that it values its products much higher than many of its customers do. With material objects (which CDs, and earlier, records were until the digital age, and yes, I’m ignoring the old analog recording for the moment because it wasn’t nearly as convenient though bootleg tapes existed even then), those industries were much in the same position as grocery stores. If the product cost too much, customers either went without, or stole them, and everyone recognized that the latter was a crime, because it left a strong evidentiary trail (i.e., the item was missing from the shelf).

But once it became possible to get it for free, without depriving the original owner of the property, it made sense to do so, and it clearly seemed to be in a different ethical category than knocking over a bank, or even filching an apple.

People don’t necessarily demand that the music be free–the success of iTunes shows that they’re willing to pay for it as long as the price is reasonable–they just don’t think it’s worth what the record industry thinks it is.

This critical difference between intellectual property and physical property will become more important in the future, as molecular manufacturing blurs the difference between hardware and software.

What will a furniture manufacturer say when someone puts a bedroom dresser into a 3-D scanner, puts the results up on a web site, and people start downloading them and cranking out copies, almost literally out of thin air?

Elon Musk’s SpaceX Falcon rocket is partially reusable. The article also describes the biggest barrier to space:

Musk’s company had to fill out 60 documents for range-safety certification. Some of those documents were as large as two Los Angeles phone books. He recommended revising the procedure.

Good recommendation…