Comment Re:Difficult decision. (Score 2) 650
OS/2 was withdrawn from sale and ended support in 2006.
Problem here is that you cannot ethically send anybody to certain death just to go explore Mars first hand.
The radiation exposure required for a trip to Mars is significant. The total expected dose is high enough to warrant asking ethical questions about what risks we are asking people to take to make the trip. Where I am sure all of the space going crew members would be totally aware of the risks and agree to them, that still doesn't exempt NASA from the moral and ethical obligation to asses the risks and mediate them.
At some point, somebody needs to draw a line and say, over there is too much risk to be acceptable, we will stay on this side of the line. If we don't have boundaries and stick by them, things like Challenger or Apollo 1 will happen and we will have needless loss of life because we didn't asses risks properly or take them seriously enough.
Of course you can send someone to certain death. The problem is peoples ethical radars are so fucked up today that they don't believe in peoples right to make such a decision for themselves. Personally I find it far more ethically questionable that you believe people don't have a right to make this decision for themselves.
Software production is assumed to be a line function, but it is run like a staff function. -- Paul Licker
