Space

Congratulations

…to Peter Diamandis, who has won the Heinlein Prize. Michael Belfiore notes the appropriateness of the award itself:

Heinlein’s work is characterized by ordinary people cobbling together ordinary resources to do extraordinary things–like go to the moon. In Rocket Ship Galileo, three high school students and a nuclear physicist build a moon ship just because they can. It must have seemed possible in 1947, when that book came out. Then in the 1960s, NASA convinced everyone that only massive government programs could send people into space, and stories about people building spaceships in their back yards went by the wayside.

Now, finally, in the 21st century, science fact has caught up with the science fiction of the 1940s and 1950s. Private citizens are now building space ships for real, in large part because the winning of the Ansari X PRIZE proved it was possible.

The sad thing is that it could have been done much earlier, at least from a technological standpoint. It has been our own attitudes and policies holding us back.

War Commentary

Taking Stock

On Memorial Day weekend, Victor Davis Hanson recounts our many policy mistakes in Iraq. Over the past decades. (Hint: removing Saddam wasn’t one of them, and few of them were committed by the current administration.)

There are few Ernie Pyles in Iraq to record the heroism of our soldiers; no John Fords to film their valor

Political Commentary

The Absurdity Of The Senate “Immigration” Bill

From (non-citizen) Mark Steyn. Brief, but correct:

My wife and the kids had their Green Cards stolen the other day. Cost of replacement of legal permanent resident cards: $1,040. Fine for 20 years of law-breaking within the United States: $2,000, less Social Security and EITC entitlements. Hmm.

I told the missus to hold off filling in the form for the replacement card. Having been rendered inadvertently undocumented, she may at last be in the winning category.

Political Commentary

The Absurdity Of The Senate “Immigration” Bill

From (non-citizen) Mark Steyn. Brief, but correct:

My wife and the kids had their Green Cards stolen the other day. Cost of replacement of legal permanent resident cards: $1,040. Fine for 20 years of law-breaking within the United States: $2,000, less Social Security and EITC entitlements. Hmm.

I told the missus to hold off filling in the form for the replacement card. Having been rendered inadvertently undocumented, she may at last be in the winning category.

Political Commentary

The Absurdity Of The Senate “Immigration” Bill

From (non-citizen) Mark Steyn. Brief, but correct:

My wife and the kids had their Green Cards stolen the other day. Cost of replacement of legal permanent resident cards: $1,040. Fine for 20 years of law-breaking within the United States: $2,000, less Social Security and EITC entitlements. Hmm.

I told the missus to hold off filling in the form for the replacement card. Having been rendered inadvertently undocumented, she may at last be in the winning category.

Space

Why Make Spacecraft Safer Than Cars?

My contribution to the NPRM (which the vendors themselves can’t say):

The 30 expected fatalities of the uninvolved public per million flights standard is too stringent. If six families drive from Austin to Las Cruces round trip across half Texas to go to the Spaceport to watch the dads all take a flight together, together they will expect incur 150 deaths per million flights in auto accidents.

Administrative

Linux Problems

I’m trying to upgrade from Fedora Core 3 to Core 5. Unfortunately, my installation of Firefox seems to have a bug in it, in that I can’t download a file without crashing it. This means that I also can’t download Opera, or anything else. I’ve attempted getting the *.iso files via Bittorrent on my Windows machine, then dragging them over on the network, but I can’t get the sha1sum to match on them. The most shocking thing is that I don’t even have lynx installed, so I have no way to download files at all from the web.

I don’t know what to do at this point, except try FTP.

[Update a few minutes later]

Weirder and weirder. Every time I do a sha1sum on the disk1 iso, I get a different result. What is that all about?

[Update about 10:30 AM EDT]

OK, I seem to have wget. But what is the explanation for my sha1sum problem? If sha1sum isn’t giving reliable results, how can I know if I got a clean download?

[Update about 11:16]

Well, I’m wgetting the first two discs, and I’ll see if they work. Sha1sum is now giving consistent results (have no idea what was going on earlier), but consistently wrong, so I know the one I got yesterday is fubar (I burned a disk with it, and it failed testing). I’ll see what happens with these new versions I get via wget.

[Update about quarter till twelve noon]

OK, the wget downloads for discs 1 and 2 seemed to work, and I’m getting consistent sha1sums now (don’t match on yesterday’s, do match on today’s). I guess I’ll chance burning the disks with these. What concerns me is that I originally downloaded them a couple months ago, when Core 5 came out, and they checked out fine at that time (I just hadn’t gotten around to burning the disks). I am afraid that I’m having hard disk problems that corrupted them in the interim.

[Update at 2:30]

Uh oh.

When I checked the downloads they were all fine, and consistently showed the right sha1sum. I burned the disks, and rebooted. Once again, they all had errors on them. When I rebooted, and rechecked the sha1sums in today’s downloads, they’re coming up inconsistent–no same result twice.

I guess I’d better take the machine down and check all the drive connections. I’m also backing it up to another drive that I keep in the machine, but is usually unmounted. I may have to switch over to that one, and do a clean install.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!