I’ve been having an argument with someone in the comments section of this post. So for his benefit, and that of others who may have missed the point of that post, I’ll try to lay it out logically and clearly.

Case 1:

Owner (A) has material property, valued to him at some quantity, which may or may not be the same as its acquisition cost. Person (B) decides that he wants said property and doesn’t want to pay for it. Because of its material nature, the only way for this to occur is for B to steal it from A.

He does so.

Now B has increased his wealth by the amount that he values said material property, and A’s wealth has been decreased by the cost of reproducing it (assuming that it’s not a priceless heirloom, in which case he’s been devastated).

Case 2:

Owner (A) has intellectual property, valued to him at some quantity, which may or may not be the same as its acquisition cost (the marginal cost, in this case, being zero). Person (B) decides that he wants said property and doesn’t want to pay for it, and would not under any circumstances. Because of its intellectual nature, this can occur by B making a copy of it.

He does so.

Now B has increased his wealth by the amount that he values said material property, and A’s wealth has not been decreased in any way.

Which is to say that, in case one, A has clearly suffered harm, and in case two, he has clearly not.

This argument has nothing to do with property rights, which is an utterly distinct issue. It is simply making a delineation between the two situations, and it has to do with whether or not the original owner has been harmed.

Some people have trouble seeing this, and claim, for some bizarre reason, that Case 1 and Case 2 are exactly equivalent. I contend that they are not, and to make such an argument is clearly, at least to me, absurd.

Last week they said Pfc. Lynch was injured when her truck had an accident.

Now Newsweek says that she was captured standing and uninjured, and that her injuries were more consistent with beating by blunt objects, such as rifle butts.

What really happened?

I was the last of my generation to use a slide rule in college. Scientific calculators had just become affordable during my sophomore year, and the sound of keys clicking during a physics exam was pretty intimidating to those of us still sliding bamboo or twirling plastic.

I think that the younger generation has lost something in not learning to use one–it gives you a powerful insight into the nature of logarithms and mathematics in general, and it enforces an intuitive feel for orders of magnitude, because it doesn’t keep track of the decimal point for you. I recall grading exams as a TA that had utterly absurd answers on them because someone made a mistake on their calculator and didn’t bother to check it for reasonableness (example: the diameter of a copper atom is 1.3 x 10^12 meters…)

Anyway, they’re no longer manufactured, but predictably, people still collect and use them.

[Update on Monday afternoon]

Bill Simon (not the one who ran the incompetent campaign against Davis–the one who is my site designer) sends me a link to a virtual slide rule that really really works (for those who don’t even know what one looks like). It’s also the most precise slide rule ever designed.

Well, that’s actually paraphrasing the title of the latest lunatic column by Ted Rall, in which he asks if George Bush is going to cancel the elections next year.

Yes, Ted, he’s going to cancel the elections. That’s why he’s out raising a quarter of a billion dollars in campaign funds.

Well, OK, at the end of his little binge of mindlessness, he does come back to within screaming distance of reality:

Bush may be the kind of guy who sees 99 percent odds as 2 percent short of a sure thing, but I bet he’ll look at his $200 million campaign war chest and decide to let the people decide. He’ll surely want to win legitimately in 2004–albeit for the first time. Though they’re capable of anything, Bush’s people probably know that Americans wouldn’t stand for two putsches in four years.

They still can’t get over the fact that the Supreme Court wouldn’t allow Gore and his brigade of lawyers to steal the election…

The missing 727 has been found.

Immediately after its disappearance, American intelligence operators said “the plane mostly likely was taken for a criminal endeavour such as drugs or weapons smuggling”. But, they did not rule out the possibility it was stolen for use in a terrorist attack and were making every effort to get to the bottom of the mystery.

A Western diplomat in Freetown, Sierra Leone?s capital, said it was more likely the plane had simply been snatched from Luanda because its owner was reluctant to pay year-long airport taxes, totalling $50,000 (

No, despite the title of this article, which is actually a pretty devastating critique of the Orbital Space Plane and NASA’s manned spaceflight plans in general.

It gets a few things wrong (e.g., Columbia actually was capable of docking to ISS, albeit with less payload than the rest of the fleet), and I’m pretty leery about simply going back to Apollo capsules. I also disagree that the benefits of wings are “dubious,” though it may be that they don’t justify their costs.

And where have we heard this before?

The basic limitation on the operational lifetime of Shuttle, OSP, or any reusable spacecraft is not the loss rate of crews, it is the loss rate of spacecraft.

Astronauts, after all, are easily replaceable. The number of overqualified applicants vastly exceeds the demand. But the OSP vehicles will be expensive, hand-built national treasures that simply can’t be thrown away.

Just imagine what would have happened if the Shuttle fleet had actually flown the advertised 50 times a year — at a loss rate of 1 in 60 flights, we would have run out of Orbiters long ago. The same logic applies to OSP, only more so because Delta 4 and Atlas 5 are cheap, non-man-rated commercial boosters whose reliability goal is only 98%.

Unfortunately, like most such pieces, it assumes that the current manned space program goals (continuing to support ISS at some minimal level) are appropriate, and that NASA has simply come up with the wrong technical solution. The reality, of course, is that we need to completely rethink the purpose of even having a government-funded manned space program, and until we’ve done that, trying to come up with solutions is pointless.

His title is wrong. It’s not the end of manned spaceflight–it’s the beginning, as private investment is now starting to flow into the field. But it may be the end (and not necessarily inappropriately) of NASA’s operational program to provide it.

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.

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.

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.