I believe they would. I worked for American Rocket Company in 1989. They developed hybrid engine IP that SpaceDev now owns.

Anyhow, in the late 80's the owners of what would become AmRoc decided to go into the launch business and build a single stage suborbital proof of concept vehicle. Oxidizer was helium pressurized LOX tank and steered by the injected fuel vector control (60% Hydrogen Peroxide, just a few gallons). It needed a guidance system. I was a new grad hired to help obtain it, and do some of the wiring and testing.

The vendor was in Boulder CO. I forget their name. The name no longer exists because AmRoc's chief competitor, Orbital Sciences Corporation sabotaged AmRoc's avionics contract. How? On the eve of our CDR with this Boulder company, all of the employees quit, except for the two owners and a single tech who'd started the company with them. Why did they quit? Orbital Sciences Corp (now Orbital ATK, after they acquired Alliance earlier this year) hired every one of them out from under their feet promising to open a Boulder office.

And it worked. Instead of a custom designed flight computer, gyros, telemetry, data acquisition and etc., we got an avionics system made from secondhand Japanese gyros, engineering model electronics left at the Boulder shop, and the rest from the Omega catalog. Furthermore, only two gyros were available, and in that case, the Z-axis is the only choice to go uninstrumented. Which meant that the flight profile would have to rely on a simple timer schedule: when to start steering away from vertical, when to separate payload, etc. And when to pull the umbilical cord.

All of these things contributed to the failure mode: which was that the LOX valve (a 2.5" gate valve) became encased in ice after frost from the previous day's rehearsal/test pooled around the valve and then refroze when the LOX was filled on launch day. It actually opened about 10%... enough to light the engine. And the person in charge of manually pulling the umbilicals (a payload customer, not an employee) jumped the gun and didn't wait for visual verification of liftoff... so no command could be given to close the valve and turn off the engine. As a result, the rocket sat on the pad and idled, the timer ran up to the moment when the thrust vector Peroxide started flowing... and the X and Y accelerometers saw no response... so more peroxide flowed. Until it pooled in the flame bucket and caught fire.

We sent a nice big black cloud over Santa Maria that day. You can read about it here. But we did prove how safe a hybrid is: if it had been a solid engine or liquid fueled rocket, there would have been a very large explosion. Instead we effectively had a tire fire.

Amroc laid off 90% of its employees within 2 months. Closed its doors and sold its IP to Westinghouse a couple of years after that. Westinghouse later sold it to SpaceDev. And some very happy very well paid engineers in Boulder Colorado earned some very bad karma.

Do I think that Orbital ATK would pay a third party vendor to skimp a little on Acceptance Testing of critical structural components made for SpaceX?

Why yes. Yes I do.

After the doge meme's 15 minutes of internet fame, your sentence actually much parses.

"the vendor is a lying bastard"

As a former aerospace systems engineer (now RF systems engineer), I found that that is certainly how the US Government and their Prime Contractors treat their suppliers. Every process in place is there to make sure you're not lying about something, cutting a corner, or inflating expenses. And the depressing thing is that every one of them is there to prevent recurrence of a dishonesty that actually took place in the past.

So even if you are one of those vendors that acts in good faith, and believes that a quality product is the best advertising, and that if your project is paid for by tax money then you're ethically obligated to do the best job possible, you get treated exactly like the asshole who made the decision to make a few extra bucks profit by not properly verifying the workmanship on a major structural component for a vehicle that he knew would eventually be manned.

And as an engineer, I know that most engineers want to act in good faith. Some are inept or inexperienced but they still have good faith. The problem lies in management. Once you get the lawyers and bean counters involved is when asshole decisions like that get made.

There are only so many eyeball seconds to go around.

In the US: 300 million x 24 hours per day x 3600 seconds per hour x 0.66 waking hour fudge factor equals only 17 Billion eyeball seconds ever day.

Clearly, that's not enough. If it were, then we wouldn't be assaulted by ads competing for our attention every second of every day. Therefore it must be a common pool resource.

And whoever learns how to project ads onto the insides of closed eyelids and access that lost 8.5 Billion eyeball seconds will make a fortune!

If the proposed completely unregulated system were to indeed come into being, the airwaves would be filled with porn and misinformed rants.

Just like the internet.

Both are very inexpensive to produce.

And none of us paid any attention to the above, of course.

Well played.

He probably didn't get "aggressive" just got pissed off. I'd wager money he never once used a threatening word or gesture, that he merely expressed outrage, like any of us would. This then becomes inflated into "unacceptable behavior." I've seen it over and over again:

1) Individual attracts attention of police for something innocuous, like having too much melanin, excess hair, non-conformist attire, etc.

2) Law Enforcement Authority (LEA, either public officer or private security) observes individual and waits for them to do something objectionable, however minor (broken taillight, liberating electricity, sitting on sidewalk).

3) LEA then has something they can inflate into "probable cause" or "reasonable suspicion" to detain or arrest individual. Any witnesses at trial will be posed a question whose honest answer will uphold the LEA's account of the incident.

4) Individual has expected reaction, namely, becomes outraged that they were selectively enforced.

5) Individual expresses outrage, either verbally or gesturally. No explicit threat is needed, just behavior other than calm subservience.

6) LEA then has something they can inflate into "aggressive behavior," "resisting arrest," or even "fear for the safety of myself or others." Again, any witnesses at trial will be posed a question whose honest answer will uphold the LEA's account of the incident.

7) Individual then goes to jail, often after being physically beaten. The likelihood of the beating is directly proportional to the melanin concentration / length of hair / degree of nonconformity present at phase 1).

Phase 5 is where most people screw up. In police states like the US and UK are becoming, the police get very offended if you don't respect their ahthoritah. Even talking back can get you beaten and thrown in jail, especially if your melanin concentrations are too high.

I always use foo@bar.net. I'm sure the mailhost at bar.net forwards foo's mail right to the black hole.

Most retail monkeys don't get it and think it's a real address.

But the code monkeys know better.

Well, it appears he was right.

Umm... clearly they want all of the rights and none of the obligations or liabilities. Even the biggest corporate penalties ever, the Deepwater Horizon fines levied against BP, are not any worse in the context of the companies earnings than a good spanking would be to an 8 year old. How is this justice, when the amount of damage they caused (workers killed, cleanup costs, fishery collapses, etc.) that would have put an individual person in jail for life?

No, thank you, Princess Projection of Ironica!

The Lifehacker article describes the process, but fails to provide a link to an actual tone, and the site referenced in plaintext no longer has the tone.

But Wikipedia does. The proper tone is IC_SIT.ogg

Not sure I was quite as strong on 'Greeks are victims' as you make out. That said, I like the idea of using Poland as a comparison country. Let's agree that Poland has been far more sensible than Greece over the last 10 years, and so isn't in anywhere near the same hole Greece is now in.

So, what now? Greece can only pay the creditors if someone gives them more money. You won't, so assuming other people take your stance, that means the creditors won't be paid. After that comes banks being refused cash and the general populace unable to withdraw cash.

Within Greece the next step will be a spectacular depression with unemployment so high it makes the current 25% look like a dream. Eventually the Drachma devalues enough that Greece emerges and everyone left gets on with their lives. Maybe 10 years of that? Outside Greece the cost of the default will be increased interest rates across Europe for a number of years.

If they stay with the Euro that's a little more complicated since they can't devalue their currency. I'm not really sure what would happen there, my gut reaction is the rise of a barter economy / informal currency.

That's my guess, what's yours?

Let's continue whoever57's analogy.

Your family have lived in a house for generations. A few years ago the house needed a bunch of work adding rooms and generally upgrading it to fit your new status as members of the respectable middle class. You didn't have the cash but you had the status and rates were cheap, so you took out a bank loan to cover it. As that loan came due, your husband lost his high paying job and had to take a cut.

So you begged with the banks and eventually they agreed to lend you more money, but at a higher interest rate. Paying more interest on less money is tough, the house continues to need work to keep it in good repair and you continued to not quite make ends meet. You go to the banks and beg for more money so you can keep paying the interest and repairs but the banks say no, they say you need to live within your means.

You promise to do that, and you quickly 'adjust' your finances to show how it's all going to work out. The bank sees through the farce immediately but he's a greedy fellow and with you agreeing to add 200 more basis points onto the rate, it's gotta be good for him. If you default, your cousin will probably cover it anyway so it isn't much risk.

You keep struggling, and you have to beg the banks for money every month. This starts to annoy and worry the banker, so he starts taking an increasing interest in your life. Don't do a good repair here, just leave the window broken... Don't send your kids off to uni, educate them at the local community college. These things save a little cash, but they also lead to you having to spend a whole lot more time looking after the house instead of making money. Even worse, your kids having a lower level of education means they can't get such a high paying job to help out which is a real problem since your grandparents have now retired and are moving back in.

You get desperate and crawl to the bank begging for more and more. They look over the situation and say, well, maybe, but you have to cancel all expenditure. House repairs, who needs them? Further education, completely abolished!

You hold a family conference. What to do? Give in to what the bank wants and destroy your family's future? Or default and have the bank potentially take possession of your family home. Put like that, it isn't such a hard call, you tell the bank to f. off and wait too see what will happen.

Who's at fault? You for living beyond your means? Yep. You for lying to the bank? Yep. The bank for accepting such an obvious lie? Yep. The bank for loaning money to someone that couldn't possibly pay it back? Yep. The bank for insisting on austerity measures that will have a negative long term fiscal impact, yep.

Does that help?