February 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: Shuttle Humor, Risk Estimation
by Major Variola (ret) 03 Feb '03

03 Feb '03

At 06:21 PM 2/3/03 -0800, Tim May wrote: > >Had the landing gone OK, we would have been hearing about how NASA had >verified that little damage had occurred. > >Now, it's "we didn't have a chance to look, but even if we had, there >was nothing anyone could do, so we didn't look." One wonders whether various large-aperature terrestrial 'scopes could have / did any surveillance / inspection. (However, I don't even know which side of the bird normally faces Earth ---black side or cargo side.) NASA's inability to change a flat on a roadtrip is really remarkable.

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Re: Shuttle Humor, Risk Estimation
by Eric Murray 03 Feb '03

03 Feb '03

On Mon, Feb 03, 2003 at 05:01:41PM -0600, Harmon Seaver wrote: > The biggest question there is why didn't they inspect it? Seems very > bizarre, since that's what they did in the past. All the KH-71s were busy mapping Iraq's oil fields and photographing Saddam's nose hairs. Eric

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Placing Backdoors Through Firewalls
by Steve Schear 03 Feb '03

03 Feb '03

http://www.thehackerschoice.com/papers/fw-backd.htm "Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." -- Richard P. Feynman

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Re: Say goodbye to the ISS
by R. A. Hettinga 03 Feb '03

03 Feb '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 9:42 PM +0000 on 1/19/03, Malcolm Carlock wrote: > I must admit it also seems very strange that the shuttle couldn't > have been examined while docked to the ISS. It wasn't docked there. It was in a completely different orbit, and higher up to boot. That's why it came over the Western United States on landing, instead of over, I believe, places like Cancun and the Gulf of Mexico. It's also why people were saying they would have been SOL no matter what happened, and why, if you're conspiracy- -- and bloody- -- minded, it's easy to imagine that someone higher up in NASA figured that they were, "heh, cooked, anyway", and decided to stand back and see if a miracle happened. Of course, that probably didn't happen (invoking Pournelle's Law), and, besides, if they *were* that bloody-minded, they would have left it *up* there for an eventual repair and body-recovery mission, sometime in the future. [If you don't think they wouldn't have, "memorial" or not, remember that two people *died* in the Columbia already, in the wrong place, the cargo bay, at the wrong time, while they were pressurizing it with nitrogen during a mock-launch rehearsal before its inaugural launch.] Flying another shuttle to them while people were still alive would have been impossible, of course, so much for a reusable "space-truck" on a rapid turnaround, and, even if it wasn't, I don't think they even have an airlock aboard, and, given the cost of the gold-plated one on the ISS, they probably can't afford one on the ground, either. In other words, when you fly on Uncle's Nickle, you pays the tax payer's money, and you takes your chances. Of course, if we'd actually *privatized* space (not had a single-payer HillarySpace program, which is the case now, even though most of the shuttle program is currently "privatized" -- in the same way that the California power market is "privatized"), like back in the Nixon administration sometime, when he drew a red-line through NASA's budget the first time because it was leftover Kennedy-cruft that was embarrassing him politically, and made stuff like liquid rocket fuel legal to own (wasn't it someone here, or elsewhere, who said maybe we should sue to make very-high-powered rocketry a constitutional right under second amendment? :-)), among other things, there probably would have been *50* re-entries, or maybe 100, today -- and just that many launches. Today's crash, if it had happened at all, would have been lost in the radar clutter, to be completely brutal about it, and it would have been buried in the place where articles about 7 dead marines at Quantico -- or, more likely 7 dead skiers in the Bugaboos -- go. Oh, well. Maybe China will finally collapse already and some entrepreneur in New Shanghai establish a colony in the Belt someday. Too bad I'll be too old to learn Chinese when it happens. Cheers, RAH Who gave up on any illusions of there ever being an American private space industry in his lifetime -- or any career plans in that regard - -- shortly after the Challenger blew up and a bunch of government employees cancelled *all* manned space flight indefinitely. Same shit, different decade... -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 8.0 - not licensed for commercial use: www.pgp.com iQA/AwUBPj8insPxH8jf3ohaEQLODACcDofKm9BtBVOQdGq/lCK9Topwt/YAoOdk NDdomx/bnf0ALLWNuJc13b0p =JY// -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Re: Passenger rail is for adventurers and bums
by Tyler Durden 03 Feb '03

03 Feb '03

"That's redundant in the modern US. Too bad; there needs to be a counterbalance to the right-wing control freaks, but the left just isn't up to it." Good comment. Indeed, the only thing the Democrats seem to stand for is that they aren't republicans. Meanwhile, the economics of the 'real' left leaves them with a big fat credibility hole right in the center, so no one listens to their politics either. -TD >From: Steve Furlong <sfurlong(a)acmenet.net> >To: cypherpunks(a)lne.com >Subject: Re: Passenger rail is for adventurers and bums >Date: Mon, 3 Feb 2003 18:31:03 -0500 > >On Friday 31 January 2003 12:40, Tim May wrote: > > On Friday, January 31, 2003, at 07:58 AM, Harmon Seaver wrote: >(snipped) > > > I understand your politics is lefty...this has been shining through > > for years. > > > > But your analytical skills are lacking. > >That's redundant in the modern US. Too bad; there needs to be a >counterbalance to the right-wing control freaks, but the left just >isn't up to it. > >-- >Steve Furlong Computer Condottiere Have GNU, Will Travel > >You don't expect governments to obey the law because of some higher >moral development. You expect them to obey the law because they know >that if they don't, those who aren't shot will be hanged. > --Michael Shirley _________________________________________________________________ The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail

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Re: "Touching shuttle debris may cause bad spirits
by Major Variola (ret) 03 Feb '03

03 Feb '03

At 06:18 PM 2/3/03 +0100, Thomas Shaddack wrote: >> ...and some very, very tiny fraction may have actually touched >> some component which made them slightly ill. > >Tf they ingested a part made of beryllium alloy, it could make them pretty >sick... Yeah, first thing some people will do with space debris on their lawn is eat it. (Well, *some* will, but that's how evolution works..) Berylliosis is mostly from *inhaled* Be dust. You can touch the metal. ----- Smell that, son? Nothing else in the world smells like that.... I love the smell of hydrazine in the morning.... It smells like incompetence.

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Re: Passenger rail is for adventurers and bums
by Steve Furlong 03 Feb '03

03 Feb '03

On Friday 31 January 2003 12:40, Tim May wrote: > On Friday, January 31, 2003, at 07:58 AM, Harmon Seaver wrote: (snipped) > I understand your politics is lefty...this has been shining through > for years. > > But your analytical skills are lacking. That's redundant in the modern US. Too bad; there needs to be a counterbalance to the right-wing control freaks, but the left just isn't up to it. -- Steve Furlong Computer Condottiere Have GNU, Will Travel You don't expect governments to obey the law because of some higher moral development. You expect them to obey the law because they know that if they don't, those who aren't shot will be hanged. --Michael Shirley

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Gullible Journalists
by Tyler Durden 03 Feb '03

03 Feb '03

John Kelsey wrote... "For some reason I've never been able to fathom, many journalists seem to be remarkably gullable, when they're told something from the right kind of source, especially a government agency or other official source." Chomsky (dig around on http://www.zmag.org/weluser.htm) and others have commented on this quite a bit. What it seems to boil down to is a sort of natural selection. Basically, it works like this: 1) Government is releasing some cool smart-bomb commercials, erh I mean video to a few select news sources. 2) NBC sends a questioning, smart, well-informed dude to said press conference. 3) During said smart-bomb footage notices the Arabic word for Hospital on the top of the smart-bombs target, and asks "Is that a hospital?" 4) Government takes NBC off list of cool "insider" info: "Can't be trusted, not playing ball" 5) NBC, now out in the cold, assigns said informed journalist to covering Ruwanda or other low-profile stuff, and assures military officials that they'll send someone a little more cooperative next time. I'm exagerating for effect here of course...there's possibly not as much conscious decision making, and supposedly this kind of list-making happens for much quieter, "insider" stuff (not smart bomb footage). But clearly, there's got to be SOMETHING like this happening. -TD _________________________________________________________________ Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail

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checking weirdness
by Harmon Seaver 03 Feb '03

03 Feb '03

So what do we get here -- Harmon Seaver CyberShamanix http://www.cybershamanix.com

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RE: Passenger rail is for adventurers and bums
by Steve Mynott 03 Feb '03

03 Feb '03

Bill Stewart > Tim commented about railroad stations being in the ugly parts of town. > That's driven by several things - decay of the inner cities, > as cars and commuter trains have let businesses move out to suburbs, > and also the difference between railroad stations that were > built for passengers (New York's Grand Central, Washington's > Union Station) In the UK at least railway stations tend to have been built in the ugly parts of towns for good reason -- simply because land is a lot cheaper in the low rent parts of town. Also railways stations and the associated cheap hotels with a large transient population tend to attract undesirables such as drug dealers, muggers and hookers and the sort of thing which pushs the value of your house down and nice middle class people don't want on their doorstep. The people in richer areas tend to have more political clout and more effectively oppose development of this sort. -- Steve

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