Space

Time To Give Up On NASA

That’s what Michael Mealing says.

while I agree with Rick and Jon that NASA and Congress could do a lot better, the odds of being able to convince the existing organizations to change is so slim that its hard to justify spending your time attempting to change it. The political reality is that the various Shuttle derived systems exist because no other plan pays the political bribe that gives NASA the budgets it needs to do other things. Any suggestion that causes the standing army to stand down is dead on arrival. It sucks but its just the nature of our system of politics. Its the nature of any large organization.

Does that mean you give up and start cheerleading for the Architecture as the only show in town? No. Did Jobs and Wozniak become cheerleaders for mainframe computing? No. They simply ignored the current way of doing things. While their products did eventually disrupt the computing industry rather radically, they didn’t set out with that goal. They did it by finding new markets and routing around adoption barriers.

I’ve thought this for a long time, which is one reason that I don’t devote much (unpaid) time or energy in trying to change the agency or its plans, or even in critiquing them. And Michael’s suggestion is exactly the path by which space will be opened up.

Administrative

Windows Update Problems

And please, no advice to get a Mac. It’s not helpful, and some of my clients require that I have a Windows machine.

I don’t seem to be able to update. When I look through my update history, in fact, I can see a large number of failed updates, going back a year or two. There are no instructions as to what to do about this at the Windows update site. Also, I’m getting a message that I have ActiveX disabled, so that the Windows Update site can’t “display” properly. How did I do this, and how do I undo it? Or should I? Is that causing my problems?

[Update a few minutes later]

I should note that in my IE Security Options, the only thing disabled for ActiveX is downloading unsigned objects. Surely that can’t be the problem on a Microsoft website? I should also add that the specific thing that it’s trying and failing to install (at least for now) is Microsoft Installer 3.1 (something that another web site told me that I had to uninstall in order to avoid a different error message).

[Update about 6 PM EST]

FWIW, I just downloaded and ran Microsoft’s beta version of their new anti-spyware software, and it found no problems…

[Saturday morning update]

Oops, spoke too soon. Overnight it did discover MyDoom and Netsky on the machine. I’ve removed them, but I still can’t do the update.

[Saturday afternoon update]

Well, I never really figured out why it won’t do updates, but I spent a couple hours doing manual updates for about a year’s worth of security upgrades, and all seemed to go well, except for one, called “.NET Framework 1.1” for which it wants to install a service pack. Unfortunately, it’s a catch-22ish sort of thing, because whenever I try to install the thing, it tells me that I have to have .NET Framework 1.1 installed. When I try to install that, it bombs out.

So I don’t know if this is a problem or not, but it’s the only thing that Microsoft wants to upgrade that can’t be now.

Space

More Progress On The Prize Front

NASA has two new Centennial Challenges:

The space agency is challenging innovators to build an autonomous aerial vehicle to navigate a tricky flight path or robots capable of building complex structures with only limited guidance from their human handlers, NASA officials said.

I hope that a few of these start to pay off soon, to provide incentive to start spending a lot more money on them. Right now, by my count, they’re spending about a hundredth of a percent of the agency’s budget on them.

Leonard David also has a report on a recent space tourism roundtable in California. The giggle factor continues to dissipate.

War Commentary

Let’s Get Real

This is a few weeks old, but I hadn’t seen it before: “I want a realistic wargame.”

Speaking of innocents, I want a War Sim where native townsfolk stand shoulder-to-shoulder on every inch of the map and not a single bomb can be dropped without blowing 200 of them into chunks. Forget about the abandoned building wallpaper in Red Alert 2. I want to have to choose between sending marines door-to-door to be killed in the streets or leveling the block from afar, Nuns and all, with 30 carriers. I want to have to choose between 40 dead troops or 400 dead children, and be damned to Hell by chubby pundits from the safety of their studios regardless of which way I go.

[Via Jim Oberg, who adds,”I would have added, however, an accounting corps who hounded me every few days to provide precise costs of each engagement, including ammo expended.”)

War Commentary

Let’s Get Real

This is a few weeks old, but I hadn’t seen it before: “I want a realistic wargame.”

Speaking of innocents, I want a War Sim where native townsfolk stand shoulder-to-shoulder on every inch of the map and not a single bomb can be dropped without blowing 200 of them into chunks. Forget about the abandoned building wallpaper in Red Alert 2. I want to have to choose between sending marines door-to-door to be killed in the streets or leveling the block from afar, Nuns and all, with 30 carriers. I want to have to choose between 40 dead troops or 400 dead children, and be damned to Hell by chubby pundits from the safety of their studios regardless of which way I go.

[Via Jim Oberg, who adds,”I would have added, however, an accounting corps who hounded me every few days to provide precise costs of each engagement, including ammo expended.”)

War Commentary

Let’s Get Real

This is a few weeks old, but I hadn’t seen it before: “I want a realistic wargame.”

Speaking of innocents, I want a War Sim where native townsfolk stand shoulder-to-shoulder on every inch of the map and not a single bomb can be dropped without blowing 200 of them into chunks. Forget about the abandoned building wallpaper in Red Alert 2. I want to have to choose between sending marines door-to-door to be killed in the streets or leveling the block from afar, Nuns and all, with 30 carriers. I want to have to choose between 40 dead troops or 400 dead children, and be damned to Hell by chubby pundits from the safety of their studios regardless of which way I go.

[Via Jim Oberg, who adds,”I would have added, however, an accounting corps who hounded me every few days to provide precise costs of each engagement, including ammo expended.”)

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!