Insightful? There's nothing insightful about being an anarchist...even less so on /.

Might be insightful if you had pointed out that civil rights (granted to you by state via common law) and human rights ("God" given for just being a human) are actually useful ideas, but you went in the opposite direction. I can only recon this direction to anarchy, which is cognitively dissonant with your final conclusion:

    >Your rights are granted to you by society (i.e. the people, i.e. you)

I have news for you, you are governed. It's worked out pretty well at times, and not so well at other times. You are governed by society at large- what is sad is that society is now defined by whomever spends the loudest.

+1 insightful for meddlesome.

I've always thought there should be posted minimums and the law/convention should say no faster than 20-30kph over posted minimum on ANY road. (for instance a 50 would be posted as 20kph min). Speed limits on highways should be trashed, with a blanket law that no faster than 140kph for safety. This seems counter intuitive but it addresses several issues:

* slower, meandering, indecisive, unpredictable traffic is far more dangerous than controlled "speeding"
* it rids us of speeding scope creep (ie everyone else is doing 10 over) and would normalize traffic speeds subconsciously
* it encourages drivers to drives as they are comfortable, not as they fear

*Full disclosure, I tend to disregard limits and drive at whatever speed I feel is safe for myself and those around me. It's not uncommon for me to drive 20 over, or 10 under depending on conditions and traffic.

>- management's role is to assess the risks presented by the engineers and determine an acceptable curse of action in the face of differing assessments
>The real problem lies with the organization - from the engineers who assess the risks and presented the results to the managers who made the decision to launch

No, it was very well established in the "post mortem" that the decision to launch was made for mostly political reasons, in the direct face of engineer's risk assessments. It was found assessments, if any had very little to do with it. It is not Managements job to re-assess risk. Engineers both quantify and qualify risk. Management ignored these risks for political gain.

>Actually, it is both very understandable and important to understand what lead to the decision - understanding is the first step to fixing.

No it is not, it was unmitigated risk taking by NASA management. I don't know what the hell you're off about on understanding what happened. Of COURSE. You seem to be the only person on the planet who DOES NOT understand what happened, why it happened, or what risks were identified prior to launch.

>The real problem, IMHO, is that no one was able to clearly quantify the risk in a manner that made people understand the real risk and take the right action, which lead to the loss of the vehicle and the crew.

Really? because this dead fellow we're discussing was very much able to quantify the risk of shuttle failure (Not just due to frozen brittle gaskets) to something like 1 in 50 launches. Hey, a few dozen launches later....

Very much not confused thank you.

>produce conflicting opinions, make mistakes, and are subject to the same type of biases

Management has no business assessing risk as they are susceptible to efficiency bias. When 3 engineers tell you about a high probability of fault, you had damn well listen when it comes to mission critical. (Can we agree the shuttle is mission critical?) Managers should take their cues about fault probability from engineers, not a statistics class they took once. When it comes to mission critical, all management should be saying is "How do we mitigate this risk?".

>Understandable is different than acceptable -

This is why I separated the two. It's not acceptable. It's not understandable. It's incomprehensible. I cannot grok how putting 2.5 Billion in 1986 dollars up in smoke was good management, or even comprehensible in the situation we discovered after the fact.

>That's hardly a straw man but a very real consideration in post event investigation. It's very easy to go in and say "here's where you screwed up" and very difficult to determine why they screwed up.

I think you had missed my point when you made this comment. I don't think anyone here is arguing about the value of a proper Root Cause Analysis during the post-mortem. The problem here though is far more sinister, where politic trumps reason: engineers and extremely high risk profiles not being accepted by management. In fact in most risk-averse business scenarios, the mere fact that something is so polarized/politicized is a major indicator that risk analysis needs to be revisted before proceeding.... So it's not useful to point out that hindsight is 20/20 when the issue here is clearly using foresight to mitigate extreme risk.

This is why management has no business in risk analysis. Management needs to stick to risk *reporting* and decision making based on a proper risk assessment carried out by engineers ESPECIALLY when lives and billions in equipment are on the line. You are really just saying the same thing as the parent post, except that it is somehow acceptable (or at the very least understandable!) that, managers are making poor risk assessments. It's neither acceptable nor excusable.

It's an awful strawman to point out that hindsight is always 20-20. Of course it is!

You need to read more if you missed reference to OWS

And this is why people need to lobby and beat the RIAA at their own game. They only appear to be powerful!

Methinks the RIAA ought to allow OPEN to stand, and then hedge their racket by sending some of their best lawyers to vigorously enforce it via due process to a bitchin' soundtrack. They could even get the MPAA involved and do a montage. That way people will buy it on the left, right AND up the middle.

But they're not smart enough to think of that.

Agreed, at worst AGW is a useful hypothesis, but you have to admit so was the bible at some point. I'm keeping an open mind while endeavouring to reduce my *energy* footprint as a matter of good survival.