| Thursday,
From Sue Ferrara
To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com
/wp-dyn/articles/A51418-2003Apr7.html
Ruling Backs Anti-Spam Activist
By Jonathan Krim An Internet site that
provides personal information about an alleged purveyor of mass e-mail is
not harassment and does not need to be removed, a Maryland district court
judge ruled yesterday.
Francis Uy, a tech specialist at Johns
Hopkins University, posted the site to expose the activities of George A.
Moore Jr., owner of Maryland Internet Marketing Inc. in Linthicum. Moore,
whose company sells nutritional weight-loss products, such as Fat-N-Emy
and Extreme Colon Cleanser, has been identified by spam-tracking
organizations as a leading spammer.
Uy's site encourages people to sue spammers
under Maryland's anti-spam law, and it includes Moore's address and
telephone number, which Moore claimed led to harassment by anti-spam
vigilantes. Threatening phone calls were left on his answering machine,
and he received dozens of products in the mail that he never ordered,
including about 200 unwanted magazines and catalogues, he charged.
Moore, who denies he is a spammer because he
contracts with third parties to market his products, asked the court to
force Uy to pull down the site.
Anne Arundel District Court Judge Robert C.
Wilcox declined, saying there was no evidence that Uy had harassed Moore
directly, which Moore also had alleged.
Moore said in an interview after the hearing
that he simply wants the harassment to stop. He said that as a result of
an article about the case in yesterday's Washington Post, he received
eight more harassing phone calls, one of which was a death threat.
As Eric has often said, spam won't stop until
something physically painful publicly happens to a number of spammers.
I note that the Direct Mail Association is still
defending the right of spammers to spam our troops overseas even though
they are choking up the narrow bandwidths. It was, after all, for spammer
rights that the troops bled at Valley Forge...
Here is something to remember:
Subject: Re: historical parallel
Sand in the engines, and sand dust ingested in the
engines while running, does degrade the engines over time. In fact, it
coats the turbine blades with a layer of glass that causes them to operate
less efficiently. But a month or two of ops won't kill off the fleet.
What happens is that we return from the war and the
pentagon budget asks for money to repair and replace aircraft engines that
are burnt out "ahead of schedule." Congress indicates it is
tired of paying defense budget bills and, besides, the war is over so it
is time to shovel some bucks at domestic spending. The next generation of
pilots comes along and gets less flight time or flies cranky aircraft that
fall out of the sky. Congress grounds the fleet of aircraft that
"didn't live up to expectations" and buys either hideously
expensive replacements (read: F-22) or buys so few cheap replacements that
they become hideously expensive in the long run.
I'm now old enough in the system to have watched a
few cycles of essentially that process.
Peyton
Indeed.
And now a long screed on NASA
and the Columbia and Challenger disasters, followed by some thoughts on
what to do about NASA: (to skip click here.)
-----Original Message----- From: A C Sent: Thursday,
April 10, 2003 11:05 AM To: Jerry Weinberg (E-mail); jerry@jerrypournelle.com
Subject: Extrapolations and Communication Columbia Challenger &
Richard Feynman -
Jerry & Jerry
It's Challenger all over again--hubris of the
management. It's disheartening to see ADM Gehman's statement. At the very
least the Boeing answer would have to have a very large uncertainty and be
very imprecise. My professors at Harvey Mudd College would have failed me
if I were to base a firm conclusion on extrapolated data from a data set.
It would be like trying to plug in numbers outside the bounds of a curve
fit. The answer is extremely suspect.
It saddens me to see that once again the problem is
not technical but rather one of communication. This reaffirms that we need
to embrace Virginia Satir's approach to communication and Jerry Weinberg's
introduction of it into the engineering disciplines. The fundamental
defect will be in the management decision process. That led to the
technical flaw.
If I am not misstating his opinion, I agree with
Jerry Pournelle that NASA has got to go. The "X" prizes approach
that Jerry and former Congressman Gingrich suggest is to me a better
approach for manned space flight.
Regards,
Charles Adams, Bellevue, NE
Attachments: 1) MSNBC article & 2)
Richard Feynman's observation on Challenger
http://www.msnbc.com/news/867336.asp
Panel lists NASA's shuttle missteps <snip>
The analysis led by NASA contractor Boeing
Co. during Columbia's mission reviewed whether significant damage was done
to the left wing by a chunk of hardened foam that came off the fuel tank
during liftoff. Its conclusion that little harm was done was a crucial
element in the belief by NASA that the seven astronauts would return
safely.
But the analytical model had never been used
before during an actual shuttle flight, Ride said.
Gehman, a retired Navy admiral, described the
model as a spreadsheet, not a computational design, and noted that it was
based on testing of much smaller debris - not anything nearly as large as
the 2-pound (1-kilogram) piece that hit Columbia 81 seconds after liftoff.
Gehman said that although hindsight has
revealed the analysis to be wrong, it doesn't mean the decision-making
based on it was wrong at the time.
<Snip>
Describing the miscommunication, Ride said it
appeared that "one group was saying, 'Let's wait until the analysis
is complete to see whether we need photos' and then that was interpreted
as, 'There will be no photos.' In other cases, it was for different
reasons. It's a pretty complex story. It's a real web of interpersonal
communications."
Ride said this web apparently stretched even
up to the astronauts aboard Columbia, who accepted the engineers'
conclusion that they would be in no danger during their descent through
the atmosphere on Feb. 1.
That conclusion by Boeing engineers, after
just a week or so of analysis, was accepted by virtually everyone.
But other company engineers testified earlier
Tuesday that the space shuttles' outer thermal protection layers were
never meant to be struck by anything stronger than perhaps bugs or rain -
certainly not a 2-foot-long (60-centimeter-long) piece of hardened foam.
TOO ACCUSTOMED TO PROBLEMS
Testimony by engineers and comments by board
members seemed to reveal a culture in which problems became acceptable
over time because no lives were lost.
NASA became accustomed to the more than 140
debris strikes that occurred on every flight. Such damage was viewed as a
nuisance that called for more maintenance, these engineers told the board.
Recalling her own tenure as an astronaut
unaware of the many life-threatening problems affecting a space shuttle,
Ride said, "I'm not sure that it's an appropriate analogy, but I'd
never heard about O-rings before the Challenger accident."
A member of the presidential commission that
looked into the Challenger disaster, she added that NASA's same acceptance
of routine hazards was evident then as well: "You survived it the
first time, so suddenly it becomes more normal."
<snip>
http://www.fotuva.org/feynman/challenger-appendix.html
Personal observations on the reliability of the
Shuttle, by R.P. Feynman Introduction
It appears that there are enormous
differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of
vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1
in 100,000. The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the
very low figures from management. What are the causes and consequences of
this lack of agreement? Since 1 part in 100,000 would imply that one could
put a Shuttle up each day for 300 years expecting to lose only one, we
could properly ask "What is the cause of management's fantastic faith
in the machinery?"
We have also found that certification
criteria used in Flight Readiness Reviews often develop a gradually
decreasing strictness. The argument that the same risk was flown before
without failure is often accepted as an argument for the safety of
accepting it again. Because of this, obvious weaknesses are accepted again
and again, sometimes without a sufficiently serious attempt to remedy
them, or to delay a flight because of their continued presence.
<snip>
Conclusions
If a reasonable launch schedule is to be
maintained, engineering often cannot be done fast enough to keep up with
the expectations of originally conservative certification criteria
designed to guarantee a very safe vehicle. In these situations, subtly,
and often with apparently logical arguments, the criteria are altered so
that flights may still be certified in time. They therefore fly in a
relatively unsafe condition, with a chance of failure of the order of a
percent (it is difficult to be more accurate).
Official management, on the other hand,
claims to believe the probability of failure is a thousand times less. One
reason for this may be an attempt to assure the government of NASA
perfection and success in order to ensure the supply of funds. The other
may be that they sincerely believed it to be true, demonstrating an almost
incredible lack of communication between themselves and their working
engineers.
In any event this has had very unfortunate
consequences, the most serious of which is to encourage ordinary citizens
to fly in such a dangerous machine, as if it had attained the safety of an
ordinary airliner. The astronauts, like test pilots, should know their
risks, and we honor them for their courage. Who can doubt that McAuliffe
was equally a person of great courage, who was closer to an awareness of
the true risk than NASA management would have us believe?
Let us make recommendations to ensure that
NASA officials deal in a world of reality in understanding technological
weaknesses and imperfections well enough to be actively trying to
eliminate them. They must live in reality in comparing the costs and
utility of the Shuttle to other methods of entering space. And they must
be realistic in making contracts, in estimating costs, and the difficulty
of the projects. Only realistic flight schedules should be proposed,
schedules that have a reasonable chance of being met. If in this way the
government would not support them, then so be it. NASA owes it to the
citizens from whom it asks support to be frank, honest, and informative,
so that these citizens can make the wisest decisions for the use of their
limited resources. For a successful technology, reality must take
precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
I would not end NASA entirely, but I would close
down all its operations, and take away from NASA the development of space
access capabilities. I'd give those to the services where their missions
require (which would mean they would fund X projects) and I would take
competitive bids on launching NASA science projects.
NASA has some good science capabilities. Some of
the NASA designed satellites have achieved wonders. JPL has often done far
better than anyone expected in building science satellites. Yoji Kondo at
Goddard built and operated science systems that lasted years after their
design spec, and did them on time and in budget.
It's in operations that NASA falls short; and the
turf wars have prevented design and construction of decent space suits, so
we still don't have any on-orbit assembly capabilities.
When it comes to building and operating rocket
ships, let NASA buy launch services on the open market. The result will be
a great improvement in such services. And let the military being X
projects to develop systems to meet their particular needs.
On Hydrogen Wells
Dr. Pournelle-
With the recent talk about hydrogen and how to
produce it, it reminded me of a project I remember hearing about some time
ago: The Integral Fast Reactor. This was what looked to be a wonderful new
design for a nuclear reactor that solved many of the problems with current
and proposed designs. It was able to fail safely, reprocessed the fuel on
site and in such a way that the fuel itself was useless for producing
fission weapons, and greatly reduced the amount of radioactive waste
produced as a byproduct, and this waste supposedly had a much shorter
half-life than existing waste products.
It seems that at Clinton’s urging congress
terminated all funding in ’94, only four years before the project was
set to be completed.
I seem to remember having heard somewhere that
someone was trying to get this project going again, and I was wondering If
you had heard anything about it.
Here are a couple of links about the project:
http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/designs/ifr/
This site has a better short overview of the design
itself: http://www.anlw.anl.gov/anlw_history/reactors/ifr.html
Henry Lyles
I thought I knew about most such projects but I am
unfamiliar with this one. Thanks.
Hi Jerry,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2919249.stm
Lies closer to your "needles from space"
than the Goons' cardboard bombs!!!
Stay well,
Tony Brown
Indeed. The reference, incidentally, is to a Goon
Show, "Neddy Seagoon tried to work his ticket."
Seagoon had a thousand cardboard tanks put at
Charing Cross Road in World War II during the blitz. The show goes on,
then "We interrupt with a special bulleting from the BBC. The German
Air Force has just dropped thousands of cardboard bombs on Charing Cross
Road..."
On the Plutonium
Story
Jerry
Read article in USA Today a few weeks ago noting
that nuclear weapons with limited effectiveness can be built with as low
as 20% enriched uranium.
From the report I saw on the Pu find in the secret
facility, they apparently dragged all of their waste containers and left
them near the entrances in order to set a trap for the troops and confuse
the issue. I agree it's unlikely that they have weapons grade Pu; the
background is probably too high to tell that without specialized equipment
including PPE. I agree that the secret facility is big news independently
of whether the Pu -- or enriched U -- is weapons grade or not.
And I suspect that they may need to check for a mass
grave for the laborers who pulled all those waste containers into the
open. (And also double check for explosive booby traps in the middle of
that.)
Incidentally, my speculation is that the leadership
attacks sufficiently disrupted the command structure to preclude the
issuance of instructions to use CW, Though it's also possible that it
could be used in the coming days of fighting near the production/storage
sites suspected in Northern Iraq.
Jim Woosley
You can certainly build "dirty bombs"
from chemical explosives and spent fuel cannisters.
I believe they have CW munitions, but my guess is
that their field commanders have better sense than to use them, and the
junior officers even more so.
Some Iraqi soldiers are patriots and will not
want to see the destruction that would come from real use of BW/CW weapons
against the Alliance.
Jerry: Forgive me for commenting on the possible
Plutonium find when I don't have any good references handy, but I feel
that my comments are still valid. As you along with a discouragingly small
handful of people know, the radioactivity of any isotope is inversely
proportional to its half-life. As I recall, U-238 has a half life measured
in billions of years while U-235 has a half-life of a few hundred million
years. This explains why the radioactivity of depleted Uranium is low
enough to make it reasonable to use it for AP ammo.
Obviously, if you find yellow cake that is more
radioactive than expected, one will reach the conclusion that it is highly
enriched Uranium. However, due to the long half-life of U-235, even bomb
grade Uranium isn't going to be "highly radioactive."
There are about a dozen, known isotopes of
Plutonium, all of which have half-lives that are significantly shorter
than the half-lives of the common Uranium isotopes. As I recall, the
longest lived isotope of Plutonium is Pu-239, which has a half-life of
about 24,000 years. While it is misleading to claim that Pu-239 is
"highly radioactive," it is still thousands of times more
radioactive than Uranium. If the yellow cake that has been found is very
much more radioactive than one would expect bomb grade Uranium to be, then
it isn't unreasonable to speculate that it might be Plutonium. As your
comments suggest, the composition of any radioactive material can be
conclusively determined by measuring the energy of the decay particles.
However, I suspect that the Marines don't have the instruments to perform
these measurements.
Another isotope of Plutonium that should be of
concern is Pu-240 which has a half-life of a few centuries (once again I
apologize for speaking up when I don't have references at hand) and
undergoes spontaneous fission to release neutrons.
While weapons production reactors such as the one
the French built for Saddam and the Israelis bombed, are designed and
operated in a manner that minimizes the concentration of Pu-240 (the
excessively high neutron flux makes it far more difficult to compress the
fissile material into a supercritical mass) as well as Pu-238, the spent
fuel from civilian nuclear reactors contains large concentrations of these
isotopes.
This is one reason why we shouldn't be concerned
about terrorists making bombs out of reactor wastes. Given the
differential decay rate between Pu-239 and Pu-240, burying the stuff for a
few thousands years rather than burning it in power reactors is actually
an excellent way to provide future terrorists with vast quantities of
super pure, bomb grade plutonium.
(I think I see an idea for a good Sci Fi story
in this that would be educational) As you know, neutrons will penetrate
far more shielding than either alpha, beta, or even gamma particles. Given
the description on the news about how the radioactivity of this material
was detectable through a concrete wall, I'm willing to speculate that it
might be reactor waste grade Plutonium. If this is the case, Saddam
was still a long way from having a nuclear bomb unless he has the
technology to do isotope separation on Plutonium. If this is the case,
he'd find it simpler and easier to extract pure U-235 from natural
Uranium.
The bottom line is that the real story here is the
fact that the UN inspectors failed to find such a significant facility.
[Emphasis added: JEP]
Thanks. This was my first thought as well. But it
may have been mistaken: see below.
And on another subject:
Subject: Implementing VisiCalc.
http://www.frankston.com/?name=ImplementingVisiCalc
Roland Dobbins
By Frankson...
And on energy:
In the May Discover magazine is an article about an
industrial-scale process to turn waste into usable products, among them
various carbon-chain molecules and recovered minerals which make good
fertilizer. The products include a light oil (C-fraction 18 as I recall)
nearly identical to the fuel oil used in homes. There are other
possibilities.
It is also quite efficient (~85%), which is
remarkable considering that its input is waste. The example used was
"turkey byproduct" -- offal from a Tyson processing plant. The
conversion takes ~2 hours in the demonstrator; the engineering does look
feasible. A large plant is being built next to a turkey processing plant
in Missouri.
A teaser version is online at the Discover magazine
website, but for the full article you must buy the paper magazine.
I'd be interested in a critique from the energy
engineers (readers, lurkers) here.
Annlee Hines
and
Dear Jerry,
At the risk of beating a dead horse, I'd like to add
my bit to the conversation on energy. Instead of hydrogen why not
biodiesel?
http://www.biodiesel.org/
Hydrogen has some serious problems not the least of
which is the classic chicken-and-egg dilemma. That isn't that case with
biodiesel as it can be used interchangeably in unmodified diesel engines.
There is no rocket science here; people cook this stuff up in there
garages for about the same cost as petroleum diesel using old fryer grease
from the local restaurants. Large-scale manufacture ought to be able to do
better than that even if they have to start with “fresh” vegetable
oil.
Just a thought. I'm not against hydrogen but that
seems to be a more long-term proposition. This is something we can do (and
in fact are doing) right now.
Ric Frost
I wrote about biowaste as energy sources back in
my Galaxy days and I expect there is an article in A Step Farther Out
Jerry
I thought of Grant and Lee when I read John Keegan's
piece. The thrust of his argument was "Saddam's correct strategy
would have been to group his best forces in the south, to oppose the
Anglo-Americans as far from the capital as possible, and then to conduct a
fighting withdrawal up the valleys of the great rivers, leaving
devastation behind." How wrong, how wrong.
Grant and Lee, in the US Civil War, never understood
how a new technology - - the Minie ball - - had changed the battlefield.
The Minie ball gave a soldier a rifle he could load as fast as a musket.
The senior leaders never understood this. They never learned not to throw
troops at prepared positions, and so many American soldiers died
fruitlessly.
In the same way, Keegan doesn't get that the use of
precision guided weapons in air attacks has changed the battlefield again.
Iraqi Republican Guard tried to face American forces south of Baghdad,
exactly as Keegan would have had them do in the far south. American air
attacks destroyed these forces, leaving mere shells of divisions to face
the US ground attacks. The only chance these forces had was to have stayed
inside Baghdad and forced the coalition into urban warfare (note how
tentative the Brits had to be at Basra, for example). Saddam, apparently
better versed in modern warfare than Keegan, understood this and by all
accounts planned to do this.
What went wrong for Saddam? Why did his troops come
out to get killed? I suspect it was because he was out of communication -
- injured, perhaps - - and his toadies were afraid not to make some
showing of diligence. In any case, the fate of the Republican Guards on
the battlefield shows the folly of the advice of people who haven't
learned when technology has changed what works in battle.
Ed Hume
The US was fighting in real time. The Iraqis were
turn based, and they didn't get many turns.
And it never troubles a wolf how many the sheep
be.
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