| Monday
Subject: 45 years ago today.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/satellite-tech-03c.html
Roland Dobbins
We should be halfway to Alpha Centauri
by now...
Greetings, Dr. Pournelle,
A couple of comments on varied subjects:
-The spirit of the X projects is still alive, as is
the pursuit of space. You don't seem to have mentioned John Carmack and
his crew over at Armadillo Aerospace on your site. Surely you can't be
unaware of his efforts to build an X-Prize vehicle and fly it? http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/
Fascinating videos of their progress to date.
-Your recent mailing problems. You say you do your
current mailing list by bcc'ing all subscribers on a message to yourself.
This is horribly primitive and prone to being filtered out as spam by many
ISPs, and could explain your recent problems mailing to Hotmail users.
Hotmail and other free webmail providers tend to silently drop mail they
think is spam, and large numbers of bcc'd recipients is a pretty good
indicator of spam. You need a real mailing list manager, preferably one
that does bounce detection through a technique known as VERP. ezmlm
(actually ezmlm-idx) is the best mailing list manager for this. It
completely eliminates the need for manual administration due to bounces,
etc -- you could say goodbye to your badmail page and all the time you
currently spend maintaining the list. I'm not a subscriber to your site,
but I like your writings, so I'll volunteer to host your mailing list for
you in this fashion at no charge. Just email me to get this set up.
Thanks,
Charles Cazabon --
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Charles Cazabon <web-jpdotcom@discworld.dyndns.org>
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Carmack was at the meeting.
Welcome to my primitive place. I
know I don't have an optimum system, but I don't think the solution is to
hand the list to someone else. Thanks for the offer.
Subject: Ignoring the unthinkable.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35567-2003Mar16.html
Roland Dobbins
Indeed. I have written on this
before; and it may be the best incentive to full empire. On the other
hand, empire may provide the incentive.
CoDominium security...
Subject: shuttle
e-mails chip away at NASA's credibility, an article
in the Kansas city Star should be of interest. http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascitystar
/news/opinion/5401951.htm Thanks for an interesting web site,
Tim Harness.
I am afraid I has little faith in
NASA's credibility to begin with?
Subject: Stalin's legacy.
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/
comment-satter031403.asp
Roland Dobbins
And it's hardly the end. There are
still many victims of the 70 Years War, but I suspect our education class
hasn't learned any of this, and continues to fill the heads of our youth
with mush.
I recommended this last week, but
it's worth repeating:
Subject: An interesting article
http://www.techcentralstation.com/1051/
defensewrapper.jsp?PID=1051-350&CID=1051-031103A
Mike Flynn
An intriguing analysis of history.
And a commentary on the article from John Welch:
Hello, Jerry,
I saw the article last Friday, pointed out by
another of your regular readers, by the way.
I replied:
The article shifts silently between Saddam and Osama
bin Laden; the argument makes no sense unless they are the same.
The article refers to both are "radical
Islam", and uses Saddam and Osama as if they were interchangeable.
It makes a convincing case for overthrowing Mullah
Omar and the Taliban, because they protected Al Queda. Yes. Agreed, and
done.
It is a persuasive defense of any semi-covert
actions that the US, and our allies, need to take in, say, Pakistan, to
capture Fundamentalists. And by Islamic Fundamentalists, or "Islamists",
as Judith Miller calls them, I mean an identifiable cluster of allied
groupings, active in many Muslim countries, who believe that "Islam
is the answer", and who work to bring their countries under the
countrol of Sharia, the old-fashioned Islamic law as explained by
right-wing Saudis and Egyptians ("Muslim Brotherhood").
One bunch of them spent years murdering Algerian
villagers. Another hunts Coptic Christians in Egypt. Another controls the
religious institutions of Saudi Arabia. Another has the allegiance of most
of the people of Pakistan. Another planted bombs in Bali.
Saddam is a different animal, different politics,
different history: a Saddamite, but not an Islamist.
There is a second shifting of targets in the
article: it slides back and forth between poison gas / chemical weapons,
and nuclear weapons.
Yes, if Saddam had gotten a nuclear weapons plant
going, we should bomb it. No hesitation, and for most of Harris's reasons.
However, Iraq does not have nuclear weapons -- sure Saddam wants them, but
a nuclear program takes time, space, work, we have the power to stop him
as soon as he starts.
He does have some amount of chemical weapons, which
makes him dangerous inside his own borders, and probably along his
frontier. However, he can't do much with chemical weapons as long as he
has to move them constantly.
The article makes an interesting point when Harris
says that nations have to define themselves, to build themselves out of
struggles with others. It leads to interesting questions about Israel /
Palestine, but what does that have to do with Iraq? Does Harris believe
that overthrowing Saddam, and occupying Iraq, will improve relations
between Palestinians and Israelis? How?
Finally, the entire section on world-historical
events should be an alert-buzzer. When a leader thinks they face a
world-historical moment, life gets worse. Think about Kaiser Bill in
August, 1914. In fact, it might be a fruitful subject to study the appeal
to intellectuals of Hegels's world-historical moments. Shouldn't we be on
guard whenever we hear that phrase?
*
Regards,
John
Subject: Shooting Yourself in the Foot Dept
The Federal Government is trying to help the
passenger air travel industry to kill itself off, but the job the industry
itself is doing is not too shabby.
From a report on the Game Developers' Conference
found at http://www.gignews.com/gdc2003a.htm
.
<<BEGIN>>
Let's Begin This Recap With a Big Fat
Self-Commiserating Rant
Airline customer service plans are always
quick to point out that the companies are not responsible for damages
caused by delays, cancellations, lost baggage, or anything else. Which
basically means that they can do whatever the heck they want, and if
you're not happy, you can always dial
1-800-We-don't-give-a-crap-because-all-of-our-
competitors-are-just-as-lousy-anyway.
Case in point: my flight from Montreal to San
Jose, with connection in Chicago, on March 5th. To make a long story
short, I arrived in San Jose five hours late because of an incident that
was solved with a foot of duct tape.
(Some baggage handler dude had backed his
truck into the plane, which was parked at the gate at the time and
therefore neither hard to see nor sneaking up on the truck in treacherous
fashion. After careful inspection, application of the aforementioned
adhesive and copious paperwork shuffling, we lifted off just in time to
get to Chicago, sit helpless on the tarmac while our connection left on
time - the one plane in a million to actually do so - and spend the rest
of the day waiting for the next one. The kicker: between us and another
group coming in from Toronto at the same time, there were thirty of us who
missed that flight. By a grand total of 90 seconds.)
Qualitative Analysis
Airlines can wait an hour for one foot of
duct tape, but not five minutes for thirty passengers. Duct tape,
important. Customers who have non-refundable tickets, not important.
Quantitative Analysis
Duct tape costs, what, five bucks for 100
yards? That makes it about 1.5 cents a foot. It took less than a foot of
duct tape to keep us on the ground in Montreal for an hour (I was sitting
8 feet away from the whole surreal process) but we'll round it up to 1.5
cents anyway. Dividing that 1.5 cents by 30 passengers, we reach the
conclusion that, since the airline couldn't wait for us in Chicago, the
value of a captive passenger is less than five hundredths of a cent.
My dead, desiccated remains will be worth
more than that, based on atoms of trace elements alone.
Transportation is the backbone of a modern
economy. You have to wonder how the USA have managed to remain a
superpower, despite the airline industry's best efforts to bludgeon it
back into the Stone Age.
<<SNIP-END>>
Once the feet are shot off they can
begin with the legs.
I used to shop at Pep
Boys. [Perhaps I still do, see their response below]:
Subject: So much for supporting our troops....
Afternoon Jerry,
I'm still on the fence about the war, but have no
reservation about supporting our troops. It appears that Pep Boys has a
different attitude - they're firing reservists:
http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/business/3_15_03reservist.html
Interesting choice. If it were discrimination
against anyone but soldiers we'd already have calls for a nationwide
boycott.
Regards,
Doug Lhotka
PGP Sig: C2F9 EB96 127A D4DD 02C7 ABE0 13A0 4C30
9C93 9D6F
alterius gratia numquam vive nec pete ut alius tui
gratia viva
Well, I certainly will no longer
take my business to Pep Boys. [But see Below]
Interesting Article
Goes into some details about how all of the networks
are basically about to field-test millions in pristine video, satellite,
editing, laptop tech to cover the war.
http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=23585
-Dan S.
You've probably already seen this, but in case you
haven't:
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/5401775.htm
My sympathies are reserved for the AF Security
Police, who might have to pull the trigger on (terminally stupid) US
citizens. As for the protesters themselves, I say leave 'em for the
buzzards, or hang up the bodies as a warning to the rest.
John Stephens
I hadn't seen it. I am not
surprised. Terminal stupidity is not an uncommon cause of death...
Subject: The New Arab Way of War
http://www.usni.org/Proceedings/Articles03/prolayton03.htm
Roland Dobbins
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