It's all pretty standard for any kind of large project. Why should a spaceport face less environmental review than a shopping mall?

That's an admirable thing -- if you actually make the effort. Not believing experts but not being bothered to prove them wrong is not quite as admirable.

Well, it's a bit like stairs. It's really important to make sure each riser is exactly the same, because people going up and down those stairs adapt with remarkable precision to the height of the first few steps they climb. If you took a slow motion picture, you'd see their foot gliding onto each step with a scant millimeter or so to spare. A 2mm difference in all the stairs nobody will notice; a 2mm difference in one stair will trip people up, even though you can't even *see* it.

People build around flood levels the same way. They build right up to what the historical floodline is for the frequency they can tolerate. If they can tolerate one flood every ten years, they'll build right up to to the ten year floodline. But if the sea levels rise 15cm/5.5 inches, as they have since 1945 or so, that spot might be flooded every year. You can easily imagine a gravesite that was stable in its balance between sand deposition and erosion for many years "suddenly" getting washed away, although in truth the line between stable and unstable has been continually creeping up over the decades.

Understand this is not a simple situation; 5 inches of sea level rise doesn't mean suddenly lots of homes are under water everywhere around the world. But it can mean lots of homes are getting flooded in some parts of the world. It depends on local conditions and building practices. Here in Boston, for example, we have two meter tides, and massive variation between spring and neap tides, and with the direction of wind and air pressure, and we've historically built accordingly. 5 inches of sea level rise over half a century has made no noticeable difference *here*. Other places that have very low tidal amplitudes and don't experience large storms with persistent low pressure (e.g., Venice) might find a lot of stuff getting flooded after a 5 inch sea level rise.

I skimmed the front page, and misread the title to this story as "Updating the Integrated Space Pen". Intrigued at what those ambitious scamps at the Fisher Space Pen company might be up to, I skimmed the summary for links and misread the address of the linked website as "thefacepalm.com". I still have no idea what the story is actually about, but I thought I'd chip in my contribution anyway.

All in all, the start of a perfect Slashdot Sunday for me...

I often find people don't seem to understand when talking about countries like Pakistan or Egypt that the military, police and intelligence services aren't just bureaucracies within the government. They are institutions that have a life of their own, a life that is parallel to the civilian government. And when push comes to shove, the nominal subservience of the security services to civilian authority goes out the window.

And here in the US, people are already crossing the line from respecting and honoring the men and women who serve this country in uniform to revering the military as an institution, and that we should never do.

The myth, by the way, was never just about killer machines per se. It was about unintended consequences, like the myth of King Midas or of Pandora's Box. The killer robot trope came down to us by way of legends of the Golem, which often come with a not-so-subtle warning about hubris.

It was only when the golem legend was translated into sci-fi that it became laughably implausible -- at least until recently. So many bad stories recycled this bit of mythological lumber for its scare value, and peopled the story with cardboard characters. In the old golem stories the creature is created by good and wise men, who can't always contain the consequences of their well-intentioned actions.

This is not some new-fangled "gee I don't know how to design a 'computerized' user interface" thing. Poorly thought out and over-elaborate controls are embedded deep within GM design culture, and have been for at least fifty years if not longer.

As proof I present the heat controls which I remember totally ruining my Mom's otherwise awesome '68 Skylark Sport Coupe for her.

To call for heat or air conditioning, you frob the thumb wheel until you think the bar graph is indicating the temperature you might want. The problem, as you'll see if you look at the worm gear mechanism inside, is that in order to give enough mechanical advantage to work the cables with a thumbwheel, the wheel has to turn maybe five full revolutions to move through the entire range. On top of that, you manipulate the wheel through the exposed arc that sits above the panel, which means you can move it at most about 45 degrees with a swipe of your thumb, or 8 swipes to get a full 360 revolution, or forty swipes to go from max heat to max AC. All the while you were supposed to be watching the bar graph instead of the road. Many's the time I heard my sainted mother swearing under her breath as she tried to get a little heat or AC out of the damned thing.

If I recall, one "helpful" feature of the bar graph was that it turned blue when going from heat to AC and orange when going the other way. This is another very GM touch. When I was in college I had a friend who had an Oldsmobile from the same era with a bar graph speedo that turned red when it exceeded 100MPH. You can imagine how safe *that* feature was in the hands of a young male driver.

Well, if you look at the initial failures if the M16 and F35 as black boxes, this seems like a reasonable analogy. On the other hand if you open up the black boxes to see what actually happened, the analogy falls apart.

The M16 rifle's initial failure was due to deploying it with different ammunition than it was designed for. The ammunition used powder that was incompatible. Also, soldiers were told (incorrectly) that the M16 was self-cleaning. If the F35 were failing for an analogous reasons, those reasons would be something like using the wrong jet fuel and telling crews to skip normal maintenance.

If you open up the the F35 failure box, you see something different. You see difficulties getting all the critical features working on the most complex weapons system ever devised. You also see a program that is by design too bit to fail or even scale back much. A program whose cancellation would be the single largest economic and technical failure in military procurement history. From an engineering standpoint this is all "here be dragons" territory. We're off the map, and that means estimates of when we will get where we intend to go are mere speculation.

So this isn't like the M16, in which the introduction of a demonstrably sound design was bungled. We're talking about committing the defense of a nation to a weapon that has never successfully demonstrated the capabilities it needs to have. We're even retiring critical, proven weapon systems in order to make way for this thing. When have we ever done anything like that before?

Man, I would *SO* buy one of those. In fact I'd buy one for every kid I know, as well as one for myself, especially if it used those awesome new strontium aluminate paints.

But I see little to indicate that other car manufacturers have more trustworthy cultures. In a world where an automotive engineer will sell his soul for a nickel on a car that retails for over twenty-thousand dollars (in the words of a close friend who is an automotive engineer), you can't trust a car company not to kick the can down the road so they can make their quarterly profit projections.

Nor should we have to trust them. There needs to be someone else, someone for whom the immediate effect on the company's bottom line is not paramount, keeping watch over the company's safety practices.

"Limousine Liberals"? Really? That's the fantasy dystopia you're living in?

You don't get to count the Clipper Chip as something bad the government did. It didn't happen because people didn't want it to happen, which is how government *is supposed to work*.

Oh, and as someone who lived in the 1960s, I can attest that AM and FM radio didn't stop being a vital part of our communication system in 1960. It was irreplaceable up until around 1995 or so, and still vital up until a few years ago. And what has replaced AM and FM radio? The Internet.

I started using the Internet back when it was the ARPANet. I'm probably one of the few people alive who remember what a "TIP" was. Now who paid for ARPANet? Here's a hint:the final "A" in ARPA stands for "Agency". For a long time the backbone of the Internet was NSFNet, run by the National Science Foundation, which, despite its name, is NOT a private foundation. Now here's the part that's going to be astonishing for someone whose concept of what the House of Representatives can accomplish is shaped by the last four or five Congresses. Back in 1992 a committee of the House of Representatives held hearings which resulted in legislation opening up this nationally managed network to commercial traffic. This created the Internet as we know it today.

Think about that. The *House* held a hearing that identified an opportunity to do something useful, and actually produced legislation accomplishing that thing and transformed the world, for better or worse, but mostly for the better. So what happened in the intervening 20 years? Well, people elected Congressmen whose ideology claimed that government can't do anything productive, and (surprise) the House stopped accomplishing anything useful.

Oh, and the poster's argument still stands. That smartphone you've replaced your FM radio with is using regulated airways.

The F35 isn't operational yet. It wouldn't be able to compete with aircraft that actually work.

But Sterling got rich as a personal injury lawyer, and then mega-rich as a slum lord. He's the one man in America *everybody* can despise. Ballmer has actually found a situation where he can step in and people will heave a sign of relief.

Well played, sir. Well played.

Apparently you're under the delusion that just *liberals* don't like Sterling's opinions.