Boy, between Bill Gates and Steve Case, Netscape is almost on its deathbed. I know I don’t use it any more. I mostly use Opera and Mozilla these days.

I find it hard to believe that IE’s penetration is as high as they claim, though. Are there still really that few desktop Linux users? May be.

I got a lot of email on last week’s Fox News column on how we don’t need no stinkin’ scramjets. It was interesting–the first few I got were favorable, then I got a lot of argument later in the day and through the weekend. First, to deal with the complimentary ones, since they’re easy. The following several emails appear in order of receipt.

Continue reading Scramjet Feedback →

There was a story last week about the unaccountable accounting on the Air Force’s Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program. This is a program in which the government provided funding to Boeing and Lockheed Martin, the manufacturers of the Delta, and Atlas and Titan launch vehicles, respectively, to help them both improve the performance and reliability of the systems, and to reduce their cost. The catch is that these are ostensibly commercial systems, so this is in effect a taxpayer subsidy of what should be in theory private enterprise.

There is an argument to be made for this: the competition for these vehicles (Europe’s Ariane, the Russian Zenit and Proton launchers, and the Chinese Long March) are all government subsidized, and if we don’t help our industry, they’ll go out of business won’t be able to compete, and the Air Force and NASA will have to launch their payloads on foreign launchers, an unacceptable outcome. In addition, by doing so, the taxpayer will ultimately save money through reduced costs for the launch of future government payloads, and additional tax revenue from a reinvigorated commercial launch industry.

Leaving aside the validity of that argument, it turns out that in order to protect proprietary data of the two corporations, the Air Force is not disclosing how the money was spent, or even exactly how much it was. The idea of the program was to inject funds into the commercial rocket makers, without the wastefulness, schedule constraints, and inefficiency of traditional government oversight. It seems to have worked well, except for the fact that we don’t know exactly where the money went.

Go read the article and decide for yourself whether this was a good idea–as far as I’m concerned, it’s a topic for another day. What I want to focus on is this:

[Colonel] Mashiko said independent research and development reimbursements are “not counted against” the EELV program budget. Such reimbursements are not counted as part of the cost of many big defense programs either. “It’s not bookkept that way,” she said.

“Independent research and development,” better known in the industry as IR&D. This, in my opinion, is a program badly in need of reform. While I don’t necessarily object to subsidization of a truly-critical industry to defend against foreign competition, I do object to a program that raises the barriers to entry for domestic competition, and this is what IR&D effectively does.

IR&D (and its cousin, Bid and Proposal, or B&P) is money that the government gives to aerospace contractors as reimbursement for their expenses in either doing the basic research that they need to do in order to be responsive to projected government program needs, or to bid on government contracts. It’s not contract income per se, which requires that specific things be done per the contract. It’s what’s called discretionary funds, which means that the company can spend it in any way they see fit to maintain a posture to bid and win whatever government contracts they choose to bid on. It is reimbursed by being factored in as a percentage of the rate that the companies charge for their services on contracts, just like overhead, or their award fee.

And therein lies the rub. Like the old saying that you have to have money to make money, you have to have government contracts to win government contracts, at least big ones.

If you’re a startup company, with a lot of engineering talent, and great ideas, too bad. You’re not eligible for IR&D, because it’s provided as a percentage of contract revenue. So in order to go after government work, you have to spend your investors’ money, in competition against an entrenched competitor who can use the taxpayers’ money, for the effort of reseaching and proposing. And if, like most of us, you’re a taxpayer, you face the irony of having to compete against someone who is using resources taken from you, against you. It’s as though the NFL draft were run to give the top picks to the top teams, instead of to the bottom ones.

It gets worse. It turns out that they’re allowed to use IR&D to pursue commercial activities as well, to a certain degree. That means that even if you decide to say, to heck with the government market, and just do a commercial activity, you’re still competing with the government contractors, using your own money (less the amount that you had to pay in taxes to support their bids), while they get their money from the taxpayers.

If you wanted to come up with a system to discourage new entrants into aerospace, it would be hard to come up with a better one. Yet new blood is exactly what the industry needs, particularly since the overconsolidation in the 1990s, in which the several space companies that existed in the 1980s have been narrowed down to essentially two–Boeing and Lockheed Martin (not counting the United Space Alliance, which is the offspring of a shotgun marriage between the two, with NASA holding the twelve gauge, thus joining the two major companies at the hip through it).

Reform of the space industry, and progress and innovation, are going to require some kind of restructuring of how we do IR&D. One possibility might be to set aside a pot of money for new entrants. There are a number of possibilities as to how it would be disbursed, but veteran space entrepreneur Len Cormier has an interesting idea he calls Individual Research and Development.

Let him describe how it would work:

…qualified individuals would receive limited IR&D drawing rights sometime during their lifetimes. As an initial, experimental pilot project, various proposed space launch companies with proposed vehicles that promise to lower the costs of access to space would be able to designate a limited number of engineers, technicians, manufacturing personnel, and other individuals who could further the viability of the proposed launch vehicle. Since the designated individuals would be expending their limited IR&D rights, the designated individuals would likely provide a meaningful peer review from the bottom up. Successful commercial programs would reimburse the IR&D program, thus providing a means for reinstating individual IR&D drawing rights.

Such an idea or variation on it, might level the playing field, and reinvigorate an American space industry that is, in many ways, moribund.

I get tired of following all the “he’s going,” “he’s not,” “he’s going”, “he’s not” ferris wheel-like activities in following the Lance Bass situation. Fortunately, Jim Oberg isn’t. He has an excellent summary of the current situation, and history of similar ones in the past.

My Winblows machine just went out, not with a whimper, but a bang.

I was tapping out a post for the ages, when I heard a loud noise, and viewed a suddenly black screen. I’m hoping that it’s the power supply. It’s got a fairly new motherboard, and if the motherboard went, there’s a good possibility that it took a lot of other expensive items with it, like processor, memory (the price of which has been through the roof lately), drives (particularly the kind that have a lot of valuable data on them, and haven’t been backed up lately), etc.

Fortunately, I had just emailed off my TechCentralStation column before disaster struck.

I’m posting this from my Linux server, which may become my main workstation until I can figure out what happened. I’ll get up and diagnose (and hopefully repair) it in the morning, and then be back to some semblance of regular posting, in between programming and other sundry activities.

In the meantime, go ye and read Lileks’ latest screed, in which he eviscerates yet another brainless misanthropic British columnist. It’s particularly apt in the context of the current international hatefest against technology and humanity going on in Johannesburg this week.

You’ll love the last line. I did.

[Update on Wednesday at 1:17 PM PDT]

As I suspected (and hoped) it was the power supply. I’m not entirely shocked–it was an old unit (an early ATX) and only rated at 250 watts. It was running a 1.2 GHz Duron, with two older (and hence probably less energy efficient) hard drives, and a case fan. It may be that it’s been on the edge for a while, and the accumulation of dirt on the fan blades, or just age, finally caused it to give up the ghost last night.

The problem is that, this morning, I swapped it out with a supply from another cannibalized computer. It lasted about fifteen minutes, then it failed too.

What to do? Was there something fundamentally wrong with the computer that was causing it to become power-supplyacidal? The supply I swapped out had no power rating on it, but had been running a K6-2 350 system.

I couldn’t think of any mechanism, short of simply overdriving it, that could cause a motherboard to kill a power supply, so I decided that it was worth risking another one, as long as it had adequate capacity. I found a 400 watter for twenty-five bucks. It’s been up for almost half an hour now. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

And no, I’m almost a hundred percent sure that the OS is irrelevant. I can’t blame Bill Gates for everything…

California has finally fixed one of the idiocies of the so-called “deregulation” of electricity that made a joke of the notion that it was really deregulation, as opposed to a change from one form of regulation to another, dumber one.

Power companies are now allowed to make long-term contracts. Why they weren’t already allowed to do this in the original plan, which is fundamental to balancing risk and price, and and the lack of which was the cause of much of the gaming by Enron and others, is a mystery known only to the economic cretins who crafted it.

Cathy Young says that we continue to maintain a double standard when it comes to judging Hitler versus Stalin. Uncle Joe’s fans remain unrepentent. And as long as they do, why should we grant them any moral authority?

I got a chuckle out of this. I don’t normally cite Drudge, not because he’s not credible–he does as good a job as the NYT, at least lately–but because he doesn’t have permalinks. It’s one of the things that makes him not a true blogger, in my opinion.

Anyway, Donahue has garnered the lowest Nielsen rating possible, a 0.1. If they had negative numbers, he’d be the guy to do it. It’s a great picture, too–his normal (at least these days) crazed deer-in-the-headlights look.

How much longer is MSNBC going to keep this loser on the air? I guess brainless leftist claptrap doesn’t sell that well any more.

[update a couple minutes later]

And in more good news, oxygen.com is gasping for air. Guess Oprah’s not the draw she used to be, either.

Matt Welch asks an interesting question today: Knowing what we now know about Richard Nixon, if it were 1972 again, and you voted for him then, would you still do so?

Speaking as someone who was a year too young to vote at the time, and had a McGovern bumper sticker sealing a tear in the rear window of my MGA, I’d vote for Nixon over McGovern in a heartbeat now. What’s important is not just what we know about Nixon, but what we also know about McGovern and subsequent history, particularly in foreign affairs, which was where the real difference would have been, since in his own words, Nixon was a Keynesian.

I have a couple problems with Matt’s question, though, or at least the motivation for it, which was to justify whether or not to vote for Gray Davis this fall. Nixon was many (bad) things: paranoid, racist, cold, politically chameleonic, indifferent to liberty (including economic freedom), a poor judge of character in his underlings. But he wasn’t corrupt, at least in the same sense as Gray Davis (and Bill Clinton) are. He never, as far as I’m aware, rawly sold policy for money. I don’t think that the comparison is appropriate.

While he should have resigned over Watergate (and should be commended, unlike Clinton, for having the integrity to do so, though he was helped by being a member of a political party with the integrity to demand it), I don’t believe that Watergate was that bad, at least not as bad as Woodward and Bernstein portrayed it. Yes, he had an enemies list, and he sicced the IRS on some of them.

But that’s not why he lost his job. Bill Clinton, after all, did the same thing–it’s just that his sycophants in the press didn’t want to report about it. You have to be of a particularly trusting nature, unfamiliar with his and Hillary’s adventures in Arkansas, to believe that the FBI files deal was just a “bureaucratic snafu.”

It was both hilarious and sad to watch Woodward and Bernstein, particularly the latter, making the talk-show rounds during the impeachment saga, solemnly intoning how unlike Watergate this was. That this was just about sex, and not about abuse of power. They couldn’t let their scandal be eclipsed by this one.

Not about abuse of power? Tell it to Betty Currie, who was called into the White House on a Sunday to have her perjury suborned. Tell it to Kathleen Willey, whose tires were slashed, whose cat was killed, and like Linda Tripp, whose children were threatened, and whose supposedly private personnel records were made public. Tell it to Billy Dale, who was fired, and then arrested, on trumped-up charges, and then acquitted, after having to spend a great deal of his personal wealth on lawyers defending himself, so Hillary could get “her people” into the White House travel office. Tell it to Judicial Watch, whose IRS audit occurred two weeks after a complaining letter went to the White House from a Democrat on the Hill.

It’s been often said that Clinton gave his enemies the opportunity that they were seeking. So did Nixon. What was different was the nature of their enemies. Nixon lost his job because, just as the press adored Clinton, they hated Nixon with a fiery passion. Once they caught him at actual criminality, and (unlike Clinton, he, for whatever reason, didn’t dispose of the evidence), they tore him apart like a shiver of famished sharks.

Which brings us to Mr. Davis. He has become so unloved, that even the mainstream press has overcome their traditional worship of all things Democratic, and even after the (so far) lousy campaign, and the adverse decision in the lawsuit, Bill Simon still has a chance to beat him. It’s not necessary for the press to push his candidacy. All that may be needed is for them to not promote Davis, and to continue to expose his corruption and venality, and that still seems to be happening.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

Glenn has turned over another year on the odometer.