Emptying The Belfries

I haven’t had time to read the NPRM from the FAA on the new space passenger regulations, or formulate any inputs, but Jeff Foust has done a little research and come up with some amusing examples of people who have.

I will say that I think that it’s a little premature for the FAA to be worried about smuggling on commercial space transports, disarming the universe, or especially people on a spacewalk throwing things at the planet.

As for the concern about requiring that space transport pilots be licensed aviation pilots, I doubt if the FAA considers that to be a sufficient condition, but it’s certainly not unreasonable to make it a necessary one.

Meanwhile, over at Space Law Probe, Jesse Londin has more serious thoughts on it.

OK, Enough Is Enough

It has now been two days since I’ve been able to access the Bellsouth’s NNTP server, at newsgroups.bellsouth.net. It’s been flaky ever since I started using it over a year ago, when I got my Bellsouth DSL connection, but now it doesn’t work at all. When I try to log in to it, I get a message box from Agent saying that there is an “error reported by server: 502 authentication failed.” It’s done this periodically in the past, but never for this long.

So, have I talked to Bellsouth about it?

I have. I called them three times yesterday, two of which resulted in contact with human beings, and talked to numerous people, both in India and stateside, none of whom knew what to do about it, and most of whom wanted me to reboot my computer (that’s their first-resort solution to everything, even when it clearly has absolutely nothing to do with my computer–for instance, I was trying to reconnect my router to my modem the other day, and the nice woman in Bangalore told me to reboot my computer).

The first person I talked to in the morning said that they would have to try resetting the server, and that it would probably take about twelve hours to take effect. I was dubious. In fact, I’ll go beyond that and say that he was probably lying (or to be more generous, misinformed), but figured that I’d wait and see if anything happened.

I should add that all of these phone calls were preceded by attempts to find some solution on the Bellsouth web site, one of which was a help form that I started to fill out. It demanded the number I was calling from, and the number that I was dialing up on (I have a DSL connection, remember), and refused to accept the form until I would tell it. In addition, it demanded the time and date of occurrence, but the pulldown menu for “year” contained only the years 2002, and 2003, so apparently the folks at Bellsouth aren’t interested in any technical issues that have developed within the past two years.

Also, there are often long delays and sometimes timeouts when attempting to get to the various web pages in the technical support area. But hey, that’s to be expected from one of the largest telecommunications companies in the country, right? I mean, it’s not like they have a lot of bandwidth, or money for servers, when they’re only charging me a paltry hundred bucks a month. After all, that quality tech support over in the jewel of the Empire doesn’t come cheap. Of course, I should mention that my confidence in tech support at Bell South (at least when it comes to solving, or even comprehending, problems more complex than those that can be fixed by rebooting your computer), hasn’t been high since the DNS incident a year ago.

So I called, and got passed from one person who didn’t know what was going on, to another (having to give my phone number to each one, of course, except once, I caught them, and determined that they already knew it–it was all just part of the fun ritual hazing that all Bellsouth customers go through). At one point, I was told that I was going to finally be transferred to a specialist in this area. The moron who picked up the phone started by asking me to fire up Outlook express, so we could determine what was wrong with my email (I guess that I should have been grateful that he didn’t ask me to reboot my computer). Ignoring the fact that I don’t now, never have, and never will use a Microsoft email client, I didn’t have an email problem. I told him this, and told him that I thought he was going to help me with the problem with the NNTP server. He had never heard those four letters in that particular combination before.

I finally managed to get him to pass me on to a tech who actually had heard of NNTP, and explained the issue, once again. It was not authenticating my username and password. It had done so for months, with intermittent failures, but that it had not done so since the previous morning. The culmination of this consversation, and the hours of others that I’d had throughout the day (combined with more time perusing a cryptic and slow tech support web site) was that I finally managed to get him to admit that there was nothing that he could do, that in fact Bellsouth didn’t actually have an NNTP server. What they had was a contractor who ran their news server, and they just forwarded the bellsouth.net domain on it. They had no administrative control over it. His recommendation was to send an email to newshelp@bellsouth.com, and report the problem to them.

I did that last night. I have not yet received so much as an acknowledgement of its receipt–it seems to have simply disappeared into the black hole that is tech support at whatever second-tier rackhouse they’ve hired to provide their customers with Usenet news.

Am I an unhappy Bellsouth customer? You guess.

Supine

Robin Burk has a disturbing story from France. They are at war, from without and within, and don’t even realize it. They watch the barbarians violently ravish their women, and they do nothing.

Which somehow brings to mind Lileks’ latest screed:

It goes without saying that selling anti-Christian iconography to European fashionistas is a brave an act as reducing the food pellet allotment to your pet hamster; a true act of bravery would be yanking the dead wildebeest out of a lion

What Do Our Youth Know?

A very disturbing (at least to me) article on the state of higher education:

To be sure, the current crop of students is the most educated and affluent ever. Their enrollment rates in college surpass those of their baby-boomer parents and Generation X, and their purchasing power is so strong that it dominates the retail and entertainment sectors. Credit-card debt for 18-to-24-year-olds doubled from $1,500 in 1992 to $3,000 in 2001, much of it due to the new array of tools, such as BlackBerries, that keep them up to date with contemporaries and youth culture. Students have grown up in a society of increasing prosperity and education levels, and technology outfits them with instant access to news, music, sports, fashion, and one another. Their parents’ experience

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!