| Thursday,
April 17, 2003
Still short shrift time: cleaning
up here
On Gumbo -- I don't think Roast Grasshopper would be
much noticed in most Gumbos. Devil's Food Cake on the other hand...
Your point is, I think, well taken -- for the basic
shape and structure of the US to survive as a unified entity there must be
an overall common culture that is agreed to by essentially everyone.
John Carmody
Murphy was an optimist.
Here’s a nifty little utility for extracting the
uptime of a server or workstation. It must be run in a DOS window.
http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/nts
/downloads/management/uptime/default.asp
Tracy Walters
From: Stephen M. St. Onge saintonge@hotmail.com
Date: April 17, 2003 subject: Death ray
Dear Jerry:
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/sciech/
TechTV/techtv_laserartillery030416.html
Best, Stephen
Dear Dr. Pournelle,
You have lamented (if that is the correct word) that
the US is in the process of becoming an Incompetent Empire. Perhaps. On
the other hand, after watching what we, the British and our allies have
done in Afghanistan and what we have done so far in Iraq, I want to offer
a counter thought.
What we are is an Incompetent Republic.
The Republican nature of the US has been under
pressure almost from its inception. From the inclusion of slavery as a
measure of political selection (almost ensuring the Civil War), to the
Monroe Doctrine, through the Civil War, the two World Wars, and the Cold
War, the Republican form our government here, has been altered and
compromised – while the ideals have held (sometimes barely), but they
have held.
The end of the Cold War and the emergence of “The
End of History” precipitated a movement back to the Republican form (or
forwards to the libertarian view). There was resistance and doubt and
politicking, but in the end, had 9/11 not happened, the Federal Government
would have had to surrender power, either to the states or back to the
individuals it had been granted from. The War on (Some) Drugs would have
ended. Income taxes would have been further reduced, the army and navy
reduced to enough (barely) to maintain shipping. More personal freedom,
more choice, less nannism.
Then 9/11. So there we were, not an empire, not a
Republic, just America. And we got hit upside the head. Prior to 9/11,
there were few if any who liked what had happened in Afghanistan or Iraq
(if they even thought about it), but we are not the world police, we do
not wish to become the world police (think LA or Chicago or New York) –
and we have not. We hit Afghanistan and took out the Taliban because they
would not play ball. They would not even pretend to play ball. They could
not even try to pretend that they might play ball. So, we sucker punched
them, scattered our enemies and their supporters, invited some westernized
exiles back in, gave them some American bodyguards (whose job is to
protect the person who is currently president, to protect the idea of
democracy and open debate). Hopefully, in less then 10 years, they can
come home, and the Afghans can save or screw up their country as they
wish.
The same with Iraq. We took out Saddam, we are
setting up a provisional government and hopefully, they will find a way to
share power among groups who hate each other and have for centuries.
Hopefully, they will hold it together against the religious leaders who
want a return to a theocracy. That is not our concern, though. Not even
freeing children from prison. We hit them, because Saddam supported
terrorism, and he threatened us – words mostly, but he never stopped. He
never learned the lesson.
So, he is gone, or dead and good riddance. And in a
year or five, the small group of Americans we leave there to help the
Iraqis have a window of stability to try their hand at truly governing
themselves will be able to come home.
Hopefully, the message has penetrated. We do not
care if you are a dictator (if we did, as one Arab said, then we would
have invaded all the Middle East). We simply want to be left alone.
Period. We leave you alone, you leave us alone.
So, it is not incompetent empire, it is incompetent
republic. As for the business about not saying bad things about TSA
screeners, and the Office of Homeland Security. Give us a year, with no
attacks, no more wars – and the calls from liberals and conservatives,
libertarians and peaceful socialists, that should take care of most of
that.
If not next year, then in five or ten.
Not Incompetent Empire, Incompetent Republic.
Daniel Safford
//Thinking for yourself is like most addictive
behaviour. It is frowned upon by all right thinking people and is bound to
get you killed sooner or later//
Well, I can hope things will settle in. But I
suspect that we will invade most of the Middle East before we are done. Most
of it needs invading, and we're the only ones who can do it.
Subject: - Intel delays new Pentium 4 chip |
CNET News.com
Hmm, problems with the new P4 for the new Intel
chipset:
< http://news.com.com/2100-1006-996611.html
>
Is this the one that is in Anastasia?
Pete Flugstad
It is indeed the chip that is in Anastasia, and I
know only that they decided not to ship it yet. I have had zero problems
with that chip or that machine; I love it.
Thought you might like this group of assembled links
about how the media's 104th Chairborne fared.
Thanks,
Tim Elliott
Washington Times: News coverage of the war was
wrong, predicting debacle and defeat just four days before Baghdad's fall
http://washingtontimes.com/national/20030413-89318966.htm
THE SPOILS OF WAR COVERAGE Frank Rich: In coverage
of the war, patriotism has emerged as a winning ploy. New York Post: In
the Iraq War, the public may well have learned not to trust the broadcast
networks or the establishment newspapers. Washington Times: News coverage
of the war was wrong, predicting debacle and defeat just four days before
Baghdad's fall. USA Today: Winners and losers of the media battle. Boston
Globe: How gloom became embedded early on. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/13/arts/television/13RICH.html
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/73319.htm
http://washingtontimes.com/national/20030413-89318966.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/life/world/
iraq/2003-04-13-media-mix_x.htm
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/103/nation/
How_gloom_became_embedded_early_on%2B.shtml
Thanks.
Dr. Pournelle:
Regarding Richard Pournelle's comments, this
sentence caught my eye: " A lot of children of immigrants are torn
between rules of the old country and the more open social morays of this
country."
When an eel bites your knee as you swim in the sea,
That's a moray.
Sorry--I've been reading Spider Robinson.
-- Mark Thompson jomath [at] mctcnet.net
When you swim past the reef and you see all those
teeth
That's a Moray...
From Joanne Dow
Subject: The Ali Doll
I can't stop laughing!
http://www.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30000-12289128,00.html
(Sadly I have heard a report he hanged himself, just
now.)
{^_^}
Poor old Baghdad Bob. I would be sorry to hear
that. He could have survived the humiliation, and he wasn't guilty of any
crime I know of.
Subject: Product Activation gone berzerk
This is exactly the sort of thing I worried about
when Microsoft first announced Product Activation. At best Product
Activation is an annoyance; at worst it's another way your software can
fail when you need it.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/30301.html
-- Steve R. Hastings "Vita est" steve@hastings.org
http://www.blarg.net/~steveha
Berserk indeed. Weird. And expectable.
A gent who was definitely weird,
Exclaimed "This is just what I feared!
Please pass me the Lux for a lot of wild ducks
have established a nest in my beard."
Don't ask why I included that. I just did.
Details coming together on Columbia (SpaceDaily)
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/shuttle-03l1.html
Columbia's Secrets Are Reel Enough by Bruce Moomaw
Sacramento - Apr 16, 2003
The pieces of the puzzle of Columbia's fatal
accident are suddenly starting to come together with dramatic speed --
although some major and important details remain puzzling.
The key piece so far has turned out to be its OEX
("Orbiter Experiments") data recorder, found virtually intact in
a Hemphill, Texas field on March 19. Many observers (including this
reporter) had thought that the hunt for debris in Texas was actually
something of a sideshow in the investigation, and that the discovery of
any of those isolated pieces of debris photographed coming off it during
its earlier passage over the western United States would be the crucial
clue -- but so far not one piece of that debris has been located, whereas
the data on the recorder has been invaluable.
The OEX recorder was unique to Columbia, a result of
its status as the initial "test" vehicle for the Shuttle
program. During both launch and reentry, it recorded constant data from
670 different aerodynamics-related sensors for temperature, pressure,
vibration and stress -- many of them not linked to the Shuttle's telemetry
system.
It turns out that most and perhaps almost all that
data is still readable on its tape, and that the recorder continued to
function until the exact moment when the Shuttle broke up. But the key
data already uncovered on it -- after just a very preliminary examination
-- comes from the first few minutes of reentry.
It turns out that the anomalous heating inside the
Shuttle's left wing began much earlier than previously thought -- five
minutes after it began undergoing any significant air resistance at all,
and fully two minutes before the Shuttle's "peak heating" period
began.
At that time, a sensor behind one of the large,
U-shaped "RCC" thermal-protection panels curving over the wing's
leading edge -- which is particularly vulnerable to heating -- began
reporting a dramatic rise in temperature. (This was RCC Panel No. 9,
located just beyond the point where the wing's leading edge bends out more
sharply away from the Shuttle's side.) Three minutes later, at a
temperature of fully 232 deg C, the sensor failed.
Forty seconds later, other sensors at various points
inside the wing began recording the steady erosive inward progress of a
jet of superheated air through the interior of the wing, with some of it
also streaming into the left wheel well (probably through a forward vent
in the well).
Since this progress began soon after that first
sensor -- mounted on the front surface of the wing's internal aluminum
support spar -- failed, the conclusion is that the spar itself melted
through soon afterwards (aluminum melts at 660 deg C), allowing the
super-hot air to stream into the wing's interior.
About two minutes after that, observers photographed
large pieces of debris (probably RCC panels and tiles) starting to peel
away from the Shuttle, and its aerodynamic handling properties began to
deteriorate until its loss of control and breakup six minutes later.
The major conclusion drawn by the Columbia Accident
Investigation Board ("CAIB") from the tape is that the first
breach inside the wing's outer layer of thermal protection began so soon
that it could not have been a subtle flaw in a tile or RCC which was
enlarged and torn open by aerodynamic stress during reentry -- there had
to be some kind of significant hole BEFORE Columbia even began its
reentry.
The heating detected by the initial sensor began
when the Shuttle was still fully 87 km up -- at a point where the air is
so extremely thin that, to quote panel chairman Adm. Harold Gehman,
"you've got to have a ton of heat", or rather a big volume of
hot air, entering the wing and striking the sensor to cause such a
dramatic temperature rise.
William J. Fulco
<snip>
Something that might have been found by
inspection, then. Only they couldn't inspect. No space suits.
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