How much should Microsoft fear Google Chrome?
Who knows? We’ll see.
“Materially False”
That’s how the McCain campaign describes stories about their not properly vetting Governor Palin. Surely the media, with all its vaunted layers of fact checkers and editors, would never do such a thing?
A Libertarian Governor
Well, it’s what one might expect from an Alaskan. It also explains why the press and the left are so completely wrecking themselves in attempting to derail her. They don’t understand libertarians, only able to think in simple minded terms of “liberal” and “conservative.” And I have to say that if this is what John McCain means by “maverick” I’m all for it.
Kudos
I want to say that I appreciate both Senators Obama and Biden strongly declaring that candidates’ children should be off limits. Of course, they know that this stuff is poison, and can severely damage their campaigns with the non-nutroots.
I hope that their campaign staff (and surrogates) are listening. They can’t be held responsible for what Kos and TalkLeft and their ilk (including, sadly, Andrew Sullivan) do (and I expect the vile behavior from those quarters to continue, and I also expect a big backlash against it from McCain supporters, both current and future). But I also hope that if evidence does come to light that a staffer has been feeding this stuff to the bottom feeders that Senator Obama follows through on his pledge and has him or her (or them) shown the door.
No, she’s not going to step down. This is only going to make her and her supporters more determined to stay in and defeat these digital brownshirts (and their enablers in the press).
Sea Versus Space
Dwayne Day has an interesting history comparing undersea exploration technology with space exploration technology.
One other point of coming convergence–the increasing use of underwater suit concepts for space suits (particularly for high-pressure suits that can eliminate the need to prebreathe). Historically, NASA has generally ignored the undersea folks, though there has been a lot of private interaction (Phil Nuytten of Can-Dive has been developing hard suit concepts for decades). It looked like that might be changing with the selection of Oceaneering for the new EMU program, until NASA cancelled the contract and reopened the competition. We’ll see what the future holds, and if Hamilton Sunstrand retains their grip on the agency space-suit budget.
Has He Been Vetted?
When will Barack Obama drop out?
Fakes
Is the mainstream media like the World Wrestling Federation?
For Our Own Good
The government doesn’t want you to have access to your own genome data.
Sorry, I outgrew my nanny many decades ago.
[Via Geekpress]
Whistling Past The Graveyard
The Ares graveyard, that is. Mark Whittington once again proudly demonstrates his ignorance about space technology. Some would be embarrassed by it, but never Mark.
Now, I’m not adroit at deciphering the somewhat arcane language of NASA documents, though I’ve read my share of them. But the numbers that Jon quotes is under a column called “Current Analysis” which is to the right of a column called “TPM REQT.” That suggests, just drawing on an ability to read the English language, that the numbers quoted are a snapshot in time and do not reflect where the folks working on Constellation expect to be when the Orion and Ares start flying. Therefore not quite as alarming as Rand, Jon, or the mysterious person who calls himself “Anonymous Space” would like to imply.
You’re right. You are not adroit (though there’s nothing “arcane” about this particular document). Of course it’s a “current analysis.” That’s the only kind of analysis that one can do in the present. When it’s redone in the future, that analysis will be the current analysis. And the current analysis says that the LOC/LOM are nowhere near what was originally promised for the vehicle (just as was the case for the Shuttle). There are no obvious ways to improve it–the hazards that lower it to those numbers are essentially intrinsic to the design, and probably not mitigatible within the mass budget. There is also no obvious way to “expect” something different in the future. This reality is almost certainly the reason that the Preliminary Design Review was delayed into next year.
It should also be noted that, despite the mythology about how “safe” the Saturn/CSM were, we were damned lucky to not lose a crew during Apollo. Had we flown a lot more missions, it’s almost guaranteed that we would have. Had the oxygen tank that exploded in Apollo XIII occurred on the way back, we would have lost the crew, no matter how innovative and responsive ground control was, no matter how many times Gene Kranz declared that failure was not an option. Sometimes, failure happens. And one of the reasons that space costs so much, the way NASA does it, is that when failure isn’t an option, success gets outrageously expensive.
But it gets better:
Putting it another way, it is so of like suggesting that the LOM probability for SpaceX’s Falcon 1 will be %100 just because the first three test flights have all failed to achieve orbit.
No, that is not “putting it another way.” That is saying something entirely different and utterly irrelevant. If he’s attempting to do a Bayesian probability of future Falcon success based on its history, the next flight would have a 75% chance of failure, not a hundred percent. But there’s a big difference between making an empirical estimate from past performance, and an analytical estimate based on a probabilistic risk analysis, the latter of which is where the Orion/Ares LOC/LOM numbers come from. Ares hasn’t flown yet, so it’s absurd to compare it to Falcon’s actual record.
“Cheneyesque”
Does John Kerry have any idea how pathetic and stupid he sounds trying to paint Sarah Palin as another Dick Cheney? Apparently not.
How epic is the fail, on so many levels, of such a comparison? Of course, it also assumes that if he can get people to make such an association, that it’s politically helpful to him. This kind of idiotic projection of their own derangement and hatred on the American public is one of the reasons that the Dems haven’t been able to get a majority of the popular vote in over thirty years.
Hilarious. I just wish that Stephanopolous had asked him to elaborate.