Oddly, he actually did change his real legal name to Kim Dotcom. While born as Kim Schmitz, you can change your name to any crazy thing you want. He just decided to cash into the internet bubble.

It isn't a lame pseudonym, it is just a lame name that he actually chose for himself. It should say something about his sense of taste too.

I'm pretty sure that the flag is necessary according to both the Geneva Convention (since it is technically a government uniform) and it is also needed according to the Outer Space Treaty in terms of what country is responsible for that astronaut's actions. It is legally required by international law and conventions of space travel.

Furthermore I think it actually looks like a mock-up

Nope, that is the final design, minus a few tweaks. SpaceX engineers have actually been wearing it for human factors design tests.

Take the metric-vs-imperial error that took down the Mars Climate Orbiter as a case study in how well knowledge management is accomplished across teams of rocket scientists.

That doesn't get to the level of a major NASA contract simply getting lost or the final report getting buried like is being done with several FOIA requests from NASA.

What you are describing is making sure everybody understands the data they are receiving and that they are working on the same problem. Essentially it is dealing with an API (to use a software analogy) or interface specification between parts that got screwed up there. Of course I've seen extremely poor documentations on APIs, so such problems are hardly unique to just NASA. I'll bet you a good sized pizza that the unit types were very clearly marked and documented on that Mars Climate Orbiter and it was mostly a lack of paying attention to details which got everybody in trouble including a clash of cultures where multiple groups assumed things that simply weren't true.

As one of the first agencies to move to electronic documents in the federal government and even having one of the first e-mail systems, it is sort of a joke that NASA can't find documents. While the formats and nature of the documents have changed considerably over the years (that sort of happens with pioneers in technology) it isn't all that hard.

> Add to it that NASA is full of geeks and all that who probably don't really give a hoot about filing or other bureaucratic issues

That isn't the NASA I'm familiar with. They take bureaucratic paperwork very seriously and document everything. For much of their engineering work (I'm personally familiar with the STS software development team but it applies to other areas of engineering and contracting work) they are literally the gold standard of documentation. When software engineers are considered prolific because they wrote 4k lines of software in a full year and others did less, you start to see just how much paperwork really happens.

Add to that NASA issues tons of contracts all the time, and it's likely the one you want is in a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door marked "Beware of the Leopard". in the cellar where the lights have gone as had the stairs.

Nice reference to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

That may be perception of the worst aspects of a bureaucracy, but the reality is that everything in terms of contracts and even many of the reports is likely sitting on a server at the NASA HQ in DC. Anything needing appropriations will go through the HQ anyway and not be approved at individual centers unless it is such a small project as to be funded with purely discretionary funding. That is like office supplies and stuff under about $10k, not any major contract at all and thresholds might even be lower for all but center chiefs.

It is far more likely that people getting these FOIA requests are simply lazy and don't want to be bothered.... with their immediate bosses encouraging them to not bother with responding either.

Us humans barely understand our own technology that's older than a few 100 years, the Antikythera mechanism, Stonehenge, Inca's and Egyptians all had very basic tools and crude calculations compared to ours and we barely understand both what they had to say and what they did with it, most of it still being a mystery.

The Antikythera mechanism is pretty well understood and many of the wheels have been mapped to celestial phenomena (like the movement of planets during the times of the ancient Greeks), cultural events (like the Olympics), and even a simple calendar. A really neat feature is a part that predicts the timing of solar eclipses in Europe based upon patterns the Greeks observed in the past.

Stonehenge is a bit more complicated because the culture who built it didn't leave much in terms of written records or explanations of their rituals, although it is plainly obvious that the observation of equinoxes and solstices were integral parts of its purpose along with perhaps other celestial bodies including the Moon. That isn't even unique to Britain as such solar observatories have been found in other cultures on completely different continents. The Mayan observatories which did the same sort of thing even have some written records that describe their use and oddly follow the patterns of Venus as a major component.

In contrast crazy stuff like the Cloaca Maxima, something that is as great of a masterpiece of engineering compared to the pyramids and any of the other ancient "wonders of the world", is extremely well documented including instructions that have been preserved that were essentially a maintenance manual. It is very understood as to its purpose, and it is even recorded as to who made it in the first place (not just a culture.... actual names of real people) and why it was made besides the obvious of flushing manure out to sea.

100k years from now, the English language is still going to be understood by at least scholars and English Wikipedia articles about the Voyager spacecraft and possibly NASA/JPL manuals on its operation may even very likely survive to that time for future archeologists to be able to understand this artifact of humanity. If an alien species (aka something not from the Solar System) finds this spacecraft, they will have those scholars from the Earth to explain it and pull out those JPL manuals to even re-activate the scientific instruments after some repair of the vehicle and replacement of the RTG fuel. It will also be very well preserved in 100k years or even a million years.

Untapped mysteries of ancient cultures is just a scam made by people trying to sell books.... often about UFOs and other nonsense that is being generous to call pseudo science. While some thoughts about those ancient devices and buildings is conjecture and speculation, there is some sound reasoning as to why it is thought to be identified. I don't buy your premise here.

The instructions on how to decyper the phonograph is also listed on the outside of the spacecraft in a pretty simple symbolic code and some picture diagrams on how to recover the information.

I think far more likely that descendants of folks currently alive here on the Earth are going to head into space in a couple of centuries and add on some beacon to the probe as some sort of historical monument and a sort of time capsule. This is a famous artifact of mankind that could very likely be treated the way the pyramids are thought of today. Like the Library of Alexandria, it might be protected by some governments but when that government falls it might even be looted and taken as scrap or pulled apart by future archeologists.

I agree that the odds of it being found by somebody other than mankind is awfully remote. It certainly won't be taken out by a random passing by Klingon cruiser (as was depicted in a Star Trek movie).

You are complaining about the first past the post voting system, which as a tendency produces two major political parties and shuts out 3rd parties except when one of the major parties flounders. That historically did happen with the Whigs in the 1840s-1860's when the Republicans took over starting as a 3rd party and getting one of the major party slots.

There are multiple voting systems that encourage groups besides the majors to be involved including IRV, approval voting, and others. I happen to like IRV (sometimes called transferable or ranked preference voting), but frankly almost anything is better than first past the post. A system where out of ten candidates who are running the winner can be somebody who gets just 11% of the vote and pisses off the other 89% of the voters is not something I call sane or able to rule a society.

All you are saying is that you reject majority rule for minority rule then.

Absolutely! One of the points of the electoral college is that support for a candidate can't be geographically limited. You need to get a broad consensus across a whole bunch of different states in likely multiple regions in order to get elected President. If you are talking majority votes for office winning, that is the point of the U.S. House of Representatives.... which was designed from the beginning to be precisely that kind of political body where its representatives would be chosen in that manner.

Note also that the U.S. Constitution doesn't even require a single vote by citizens of a state to be cast in order to determine who becomes electors. It could be a foot race, a game of poker, people picked out at random like jury duty, or some other process. It is entirely up to the state legislature to determine how those votes are allocated.... which in most states happens to be a state-wide contest that claims all of the electors for a particular political party.

The President of the USA was never intended to be chosen by the majority of voters in a national election.

In order to get a Social Security card, you need to have an ID of some sort. Heck, to collect most welfare benefits you also need an ID card. You also need an ID simply to enter most courtrooms. It is also neither complicated nor incredibly difficult to obtain an ID card in most states other than you need to know how to read a form and fill it out or get somebody you know to help you with that process if you are illiterate.

It really isn't an onerous task to obtain an ID and it is needed for so many things besides voting that having the ID is simply a part of being a citizen. I suppose somebody who is homeless and has never had a job with a W-2 form and living entirely on hand-outs while living completely off the grid might have a problem voting. How many people are we talking about in that situation though?

Voter impersonation has never and will never be a credible threat.

And places where you have a 110% voter turnout is never a credible threat?

I personally know of an abandoned trailer park.... that had several hundred registered voters and people from that trailer park that actually voted in recent elections (according to the county clerk). By abandoned I mean literally there is nothing but an empty parking lot there and no homes of any kind or even homeless folks.

Having meatbags double vote is the least effective and most dangerous method of electoral fraud.

That is somewhat true, although it depends on if the voting judges involved give a damn about what is happening. I'll agree though that the place where voting fraud is most likely to happen is at the point of those collecting the votes. In other words at the local voting precinct. If those judges collude and let people in who shouldn't vote or "stuff the ballot box" and do other kinds of voting fraud, it is still very easy to get into the system. If spread around to multiple precincts/districts, elections can get changed.

That is assuming the internal party politics permits free speech, the ability to contest leadership, and the ability to criticize with the intent to replace policies that might be harmful to that above mentioned free speech.

A single party system is not the same if the ability to criticize is non-existent and the only people who can aspire to any sort of leadership role are those hand selected by the top brass of that party. I know you can find similar complaints in multi-party contested elections, but at least in that situation you can form your own political party if you aren't getting anywhere.

Neil Armstrong also nearly killed himself when trying to perform a similar landing on the Earth. You can see Neil Armstrong at the 2:30 time mark.

For those that think SpaceX is soaking up piles of investor's money, it should be pointed out that SpaceX hasn't had any additional investment since the Fidelity/Google round of investment that arguably wasn't even for operations but rather for the satellite constellation.

More to the point, I think SpaceX is laughing all of the way to the bank right now and making tremendous profits off of its rockets right now. That they might be earning even more profit from each launch due to reflown boosters and space capsules (CRS-11 is a reused Dragon that was originally flown on CRS-4), they certainly seem to be able to meet payroll, pay for major expansions, and engage in R&D for future designs on their own dime. As to if this particular area of operations is profitable yet, I agree that remains to be seen.

All told, I would think that SpaceX has likely put in about a quarter of a billion to a billion dollars worth of R&D resources into its reusable rocket core development program. As per some discussion Elon Musk had after the reflown core happened, SpaceX plans on recouping that investment over the next several years.

That worked out really well for Germany in the 1930's. And then worked out wonderfully for the rest of the world in the 1940's. :)

To be honest, I think that a much better system would be to simply hold a lottery made up of interested citizens that could serve in a legislative capacity and help make the laws rather than holding elections. This is called a Sortion election, something that even dates back to ancient Athens as a governing body selection process. IMHO those who would serve in such legislative bodies would be far more representative of ordinary citizens, hold proportionally similar views of the general public at-large, and such a selection process would be completely free of all of the corruption that comes from the lobbying groups that finance political campaigns. Lobbyists would still exist, but their influence would be substantially diminished and would really only be able to represent their constituency alone. Bribery would need to be blatant... and ineffective so far as their "bought" politicians would be leaving office at the end of the term.

If you feel that you need experienced legislators on a national or federal level, you could have such candidates for a national legislature (aka the U.S. Congress) made up of those who have served for some time on a state or even local level.

There are obviously some problems with such a selection process, but I think that would be far less complicated than the current electoral process.