The 20th Century: Loser Style 278
Ant wrote to us with Wired's depressing end of the century list. Reasoning that all of these "best of the eons" lists need to have an ugly relative, they commisioned the folks at Ig Nobel to come up with a list of notable failures.
Re:Hemos Sucks Ass (Score:1)
Re:Hemos Sucks Ass (Score:1)
tacoma narrows bridge (Score:1)
League of Nations & the United Nations (Score:1)
Formed in 1919 by the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I (the war to end all wars), the League of Nations had no true military power to enforce their edicts, and the United States never really joined. Japan and Italy withdrew from the League, and the USSR was kicked out in 1939 over their invasion of Finland. The League of Nations was abandoned in 1945, as...
...the charter for the United Nations (b. Oct 24, 1945; d. ?) was drafted in San Francisco, from April to June of 1945, which was ultimately refined, then signed, by 50 countries, on June 26, 1945. The League was merged - meaning, its Council became the Security Council of the UN, consisting of the five victors of World War II (the US, USSR, China, France, and the UK).
The burning wick that may lead to the UN's demise (though it will surely fail to prove to be a loser any time within the '20th' century):
1) The hard rule that any one of the above mentioned 5 nations have veto power, which means any one of those old boys can stop the UN dead in its tracks. This was taken advantage of by the USSR, in a series of vetoes that made GI generation Americans highly familiar with the term "Nyet".
2) The UN is very selective and fickle about where they enforce the peace. While they are waging war on Milosevich in Bosnia, slave trading is rampant among Africans, and there was no UN action in Rwanda, where 1 million Africans died. (Perspective: more Rwandans died in that war, than all blacks in the US who died from racist or random black on black violence, since the 1940's. Maybe in this whole century.)
3) The UN is attempting to breach national sovereignty (telling the US to curb its death penalty laws, for instance). This is going to make enforcement almost impossible without the excessive use of military force. (In fact, this runs against their own declared statement of intent: The UN may not interfere in the domestic affairs of any country.
Fickleness, the Old Boy crony system, and the wavering of the UN with regards to the sovereignty of individual nations, may doom it to become a 20th century boondoggle, even if it takes well into the 21st century for it to fall over.
Tacoma Narrows and Cold Fusion (Score:2)
http://www.me.utexas.edu/~uer/papers/paper_jk.h
I'm sure others can be found. Not that it detracts from its inclusion on the list. I love that video.
There was an interesting article about cold fusion a while back on http://www.sfgate.com by Hal Plotnick that really questions how "stupid" cold fusion was. I was unable to find a link in their archives, but the bottom line is that research is still going on (not just by P&F) and getting some interesting results. Cold fusion may not be dead yet, but it may also not be fusion.
P&F certainly earned disdain for their "peer review".
Re:Y2K (Score:2)
Ah, but how much would it have cost if they'd done it right to begin with? I don't have any documentation to link to but I read that it may have cost more to be "Y2K" compliant right away then to leave it to be fixed later.
That would be an interesting study, if not down fully already. What was the savings for leaving a problem to be fixed later?
Certainly being Y2K Compliant in the 50's and 60's, and perhaps even in the early 70's would have been very expensive, to the point where some projects would have just become unfeasible. However, there was no excuse for anything to not be Y2K compliant once IC's became widely used for processors and memory. Anything designed since that point, unless it was specifically supporting a legacy system, should have been written with Y2K in mind.
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On the subject of the Hindenburg (Score:1)
http://engineer.ea.ucla.edu/releases/blimp.htm
Why not Vietnam? (Score:2)
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
Re:"Wrong Way" Corrigan (Score:2)
- Robin
Re:Planet X (Score:1)
Re:Yes! Metric! (Score:2)
Re:Some inaccuracies, other disasters (Score:2)
Since the US had a monopoly on He. we doled it out to the English and French (whom also had Zeppelin programs - based off of German technology taken after the First World War) we decided to be bastards and not give the Nazis any.
Now...I saw a thing on Discovery Channel about some retired NASA propulsion engineers that went over the negatives of the Hindenberg disaster and decided that it was the fabric doping (some aluminum compound) that caused the fire. Not the Hydrogen, if it would have been a Hydrogen induced fire the first flames would have been clear.
I'm sure someone else can shed more light on this.
Tacoma Narrows Bridge (Score:2)
They did know about harmonics at the time. It was a real FUBAR by the engineers that designed the bridge.
Re:Honest John (Score:2)
A 155mm or 120mm recoiless rocket with a 20 to 250 ton warhead. They were either tripod or jeep mounted. They had a tested range of 1.77 miles.
They were removed from service because the Army didn't want to trust a nuke to a mear Sargent.
That and it's a real bad idea to have a nuke that only fires 1.77 miles.
Re:Why not Vietnam? (Score:2)
Maybe that one about the beards...other than that one then.
Re:Tu-144 Concordski (Score:2)
Thats what that NASA page is about. All the other Tu-144s are no longer flying.
http://www.bird.ch/Russians/Tu144/TU144P02.html
"Status - Several aircraft preserved, one aircraft used as testbed."
If I remeber right...they were used in the late 70s-early 80s on one route in Russia. Moscow to Omsk or Rostov I think.
I have a photo here in Volume 13 of World Airpower Journal of three Tu-144s sitting at Zhukhovsky in the grass.
Tucker (Score:2)
From what I know of the story it was vast Auto Industry consperacy to keep him down.
Re:Some inaccuracies, other disasters (Score:2)
Hiroshima & Nagasaki? (Score:1)
J.
Re:The Chilean one was news to me (Score:1)
Re:The Ford Pinto (Score:1)
The Chilean one was news to me (Score:2)
It goes to prove Mitch Radcliffe's contention that:
how about... (Score:1)
Rather than having a nice 68000 based system, with flat memory model from the start, we end up with a segmented, "640k should be enough for anybody" pile of crap 8086 cpu from intel, which stifles development for years
hrm...
smash
Re:Some inaccuracies, other disasters (Score:1)
Can't say I feal any sympathy for Nazi Germany.
Re:The Vincennes tragedy (Score:2)
1. There was no F-14 in the air at the time. It's considered doubtful that Iran had any F-14s capable of flying at that time.
2. The Airbus was in a civillian air corridor - Vincennes the the air corridors plotted wrong.
3. The "separate warnings" all identifed the aircraft they were "warning" based on relative position from the ship. A civillian aircraft doesn't have any way to know where the ship is, and isn't about to respond to calls make to "Iranian F-14 30 nautical miles north of my position and diving" when it's an Airbus, it's climbing, and it doesn't know where "my position" is.
4. Vincennes picked up no Mode 3 squawks from Iranian airspace.
5. Vincennes disobeyed a direct order and left it's patrol area in order to put itself in that "danger" that Captain Rogers thought he was in.
6. Rogers flagrantly disobeyed the rules of engagement many times during this incident, including when he ordered the firing of two Standard Missiles against this improperly identified target.
7. Rogers had been cited several times for disobeying the rules of engagement in the past, and Vincennes was known in the fleet as "Robocruiser" because of it.
Cold Fusion (Score:1)
Re:Several of these "Screw ups" are poorly explain (Score:1)
The O-rings were near the top of (IIRC) a 20-item list of critical problems--i.e. "never fly again until these are fixed." They were redesigned twice. In each case, the redesign was worse, so they returned to the original (flawed) design.
Re:tacoma narrows bridge (Score:1)
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Re:How could they forget... (Score:1)
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Re:actually the maginot line worked years later (Score:1)
Granted the fortifications around Metz gave Patton 40 fits in autumn of '44, but that's another story. (I don't think that the Metz fortifications were an official part of the Maginot Line anyway.)
Re:Why not Vietnam? (Score:1)
Now *that's* a sentence.
Re:tacoma narrows bridge (Score:1)
What I didn't get was the fact that even through wind tunnel testing, which, inevitably proved what would happen, the engineers insisted on doing it the wrong way.
Wasn't it because of that incident that the government stepped in and laid down huge safety requirements?
What really happened to Mariner I (Score:1)
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/8.75.html#sub
for a more technical overview...
(no html tags. fooey.)
"Wrong Way" Corrigan (Score:5)
So instead he said that he was flying to California, with CAA's permission, and then after take-off he just flew to Ireland.
Afterwards, to keep the CAA off his back he said "oops, I made a mistake"...
Who are these guys? (Score:2)
And the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.. I'm not sure anyone knew about harmonics then. I know it inspired research into the effect.
Re:DDT (Score:2)
Re:Tacoma Narrows and Cold Fusion (Score:2)
What many people don't know, is that there was a dog in the car. The owner didn't save the dog, so the poor critter was barking all the way down into the water.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
Yah, & here's my nominations (Score:2)
Boojum
Re:Challenger (Score:2)
- Ring-like segments of the booster rockets are joined together much as you would expect, with and overlap and a rubber seal
- In fact, there are two rubber O-rings that go around the entire rocket at the (each?) join
- As the rockets burn, the sudden change in temperature and/or pressure causes the sections of the boosters to bulge.
- This means that the rubber O-rings have to expand quickly to stop any fuel or gas from escaping through the join
- The escaping gas is very corrosive and if the rings can't seal the gap they will quickly fail, completely.
- The day of the launch was one of the coldest that the shuttle was ever launched on. The cold temperatures meant that the rubber reacted slower than "normal". They failed, obviously.
The lowly engineers wanted to stop the launch. Management wanted it to go ahead (for money reasons no doubt). The head engineer in the middle caved in on the side of management.Boom.
Wired also got the Hancock tower wrong (Score:4)
Check out the following link:
http://www.sgh.com/hancock.htm
...for a report on the failure. A summary of this appeared in the Boston Globe a few years back. I would have thought that the IgNobel people (at MIT no less) would have known abou this.
I believe it is true, however, that the sway dampener in the Hancock was put in after its construction -- but I could be wrong, and can't find verification on the web.
Pinto and the price of a life. (Score:2)
Actually, there is no way to avoid making this kind of decision on any project where the product can kill someone. You can always make a car or a building safer, no matter how safe or unsafe it already is. You have to make a decision on where to draw the line. This decision is partly dictated by law, which sets minimum safety standards, and partly dictated by cost/benefit analysis.
Yes, you can assign a cost to a human life. Depending on what kind of calculation you're doing, this might be the total cost that your customers are willing to pay to make the product safer that on average one fewer person dies, or the average cost/liability to you per death, or what-have-you. When the cost of making the product safer exceeds the actual cost of the lives saved as measured above, you stop making the product safer.
Anyone who drives a car makes this decision. You'd have to take a hit in either pay or quality of life to work at a place within walking distance (or live within walking distance of work), so you drive a car. However, there is a chance that you or another person will die as a result of your driving or as a result of mechanical failure in your car. You are exposing yourself and your other potential victins to this risk when you get behind the wheel, willingly, rather than accept the cost of not driving.
Is this a valid choice to make? Sure. But in making the choice, you still place bounds on how much a life is worth, which makes it possible to assign a "cost" to lives for purposes of doing risk calculations. In a myriad of ways, our own actions - personally - prove that we do not consider lives to be infinitely valuable (indeed, it is impractical for any of us act as if they were).
The key issue here is setting the "cost" of life high enough that nobody can fault you for the decisions you make based on that "cost". The key issues in the Ford case were that: 1) the car that started it all was struct by a van going 50 miles/hour (the target car was stationary IIRC). Explosion under those conditions is pretty likely no matter what, and 2) the Ford engineers, who had seen this risk analysis and knew of the design flaws, still considered the car safe enough that they were using it to drive themselves and their families.
This doesn't mean that Ford was blameless; they could, for instance, have offered the _option_ of either of a couple of possible upgrade devices to customers who wanted them, at a reasonable cost, and let the customers make the decision. However, there are mitigating points, as mentioned above.
The Ford Pinto was one of the case studies used in an Engineering Ethics course I took.
The Bomb: Not a disaster, thankfully. (Score:2)
I'm skeptical of this argument, for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, the principles of the fission bomb (and of more advanced nuclear weapons) follow directly from basic physics. You can make a pretty good argument for its development being inevitable - look at all the things we'd have to *not* know about to not be able to build one or figure out how to build one. The question then becomes, "was its development and management handled in the least disastrous possible way". It would have eventually shown up no matter what.
Secondly, nuclear weapons are one reason why there *hasn't* yet been a World War III. The consequences of a nuclear war are great enough that, while we may be crazy enough to have one, we're certainly more reluctant to have a nuclear war than a conventional war. As an all-out war would be fought with nuclear weapons, we are reluctant to press nations with nuclear capability to the point where they will _use_ these weapons.
This made the US reluctant to start a war with the USSR, but made the USSR reluctant to start a war with the US. Or even have too big a skirmish.
In summary, while it was a tightrope walk, I think that the inevitable development of nuclear weapons was handled adequately by the world. It certainly could have come out much worse - and there's no way short of abolishing basic science research that it could have been avoided.
Re:Wired also got the Hancock tower wrong (Score:2)
Re:The 68K and the '88 (Score:2)
Re:IBM-PC disasters... (Score:2)
Re:Y2K (Score:2)
Ah, but how much would it have cost if they'd done it right to begin with? I don't have any documentation to link to but I read that it may have cost more to be "Y2K" compliant right away then to leave it to be fixed later.
That would be an interesting study, if not down fully already. What was the savings for leaving a problem to be fixed later?
-BrentRe:Some inaccuracies, other disasters (Score:2)
The really notable thing about the Hindenberg is that it was the first "disaster" reported live on the radio by a hysterical, babbling reporter. Mass media was new in those days, it didn't take much to get people going (e.g. the "War of the Worlds" fiasco).
And the real tragedy of the Hindenberg, in my opinion, is that whenever you suggest using hydrogen powered vehicles of any kind, people look at you like you're crazy. "My god man, don't you know that hydrogen is *dangerous*?" Sure: it's explosive. Just like gasoline, except that when you burn it you just get water vapor.
The Finlandia House (Score:3)
The Finlandia House [finlandia.hel.fi] in Helsinki is covered with big bricks made of Italian Carrara marble. It is a beautiful building, a masterpiece by Alvar Aalto [alvaraalto.fi].
However, over the years the bricks started bending and falling because the marble couldn't take the weather and air pollution. As the building is the most important congress center of Finland, the problem had to be solved and so the city started searching for a better material that would last. Lots of money was used and they found a few materials that would solve the problem. This only took many years, lots of meetings and money. But finally it was time to choose and solve the problem.
The City Council chose the same Italian Carrara marble again.
Re:DDT (Score:2)
A friend of mine still uses DDT. When he heard that it was going to be taken off the market, he bought mass quantities.
Re:Yes! Metric! (Score:2)
Who has made an effort to see that the average person can learn the metric system effortlessly? Certainly not the government. Some sports have; I ran track and cross country in high school and learned metric distances fairly well - the 5K, 1600m, and 3200m runs helped with that. The soft drink industry has - do you want a 1 liter, 2 liter, or 3 liter bottle of soda? Time is already metric, of course. I would think that dieters would readily convert to metric - would you rather weigh 300 pounds, or 136 kilograms?
Some inaccuracies, other disasters (Score:2)
And the Hindenberg "disaster" wasn't that bad -- most aboard actually survived, and zeppelins had been flying for years without incident before that. It just happened that there was a reporter present (and we know how often the news media get it right). There were numerous other air disasters they could have mentioned (like the DC-10 incident where an engine fell off, destroying hydraulic lines in the process. Turned out they'd been using a fork-lift to remove/replace the engine for servicing, messing up the mounting bolts).
And, Windows aside, perhaps the biggest computer-related screw up was the messed up deal between IBM and Motorola that ended up with IBM using the Intel 8088 instead of the Moto 68008 chip in IBM's first PC. (Accounts differ, one version has it that Moto refused to license the design to a second source, which IBM wanted.)
Re:What's its name? (Score:2)
Way ahead of its time in many ways, at least in initial design. Reports vary about how well the final product matched the initial design (mostly due to lack of start-up funds). The movie paints the established auto industry as the bad guys in this, they didn't want the competition. How accurate that is I don't know.
(That movie and story always reminds me of Gary Hudson and his repeated attempts (Phoenix, Roton, etc) at bringing a small reusable spaceship to market.)
On Cold Fusion (Score:2)
I'm actually surprised that Fleichmann & Pons are still alive and haven't died in some sketchy "Hunting accident" or something
Pete
Re:On Cold Fusion (Score:2)
Not the best example, but I have to support my paranoid delusions somehow.
Pete
Y2K excuse (Score:2)
They screwed up on the Comet, too! (Score:2)
Re:On Cold Fusion (Score:2)
Actually we are a net importer of oil, and coal we use internally, and I don't believe we export a great amount of it. So free/cheap energy would help our trade deficits and be a large boost to the economy in general.
I really think that pons and fleischman are just wrong. There was too much independent evidence that it didn't work. They setup is fairly simple to reproduce. If they really had something, someone would be using it.
I guess the short form of this is, no I don't think there is a government conspiracy here. Plenty of other places, but not here.
Re:Several of these "Screw ups" are poorly explain (Score:2)
As for UC having to pay a fine, I cry no tears for them. Six thousand dead should be a heavy weight on someones soul. Since corporations have no soul, they have to pay in valuta, money.
Cold Fusion - Please supply links or citations to all these marvelous validations of cold fusion. I would love for cold fusion to be true, but I don't believe it. And I've never heard from anyone credible anything to support pons and fleischman.
Re:On Cold Fusion (Score:2)
LMAO
Hmmm, but I don't buy it, if it was Israel that had all the oil, maybe. Were fairly buddy-buddy with them. The main reason that we care what happens to the middle east is Oil. If the bottom dropped out of it tomorrow, most of the economies there would crash into the basement. With no money to provide maintenance/parts/new equipment it would seem like the rest or the region would quickly fall behind Israel in military power.
Re:20th Century vs. 1900s (Score:2)
Anyway, Millennium is that show with Lance Hendrickson.
Re:Tu-144 Concordski (Score:3)
1. Pull Pin
2. Throw twenty-five miles
3. Duck and Cover.
Re:Some inaccuracies, other disasters (Score:2)
If you want a screwup air disaster, then the winner has to the 747 piloted by Captain Jacob Veldhuyzen van Zanten, who decided to take off on a fog covered runway without launch clearance and without waiting for another 747 to clear the runway.
This accident is still the classical case of how mismanagement in the cockpit, and sloppy procedures, will result in disaster.
Re:DDT -- WRONG! (Score:2)
Also DDT is an estrogenic drug - it can mimic the effects of female sex hormones in males. Estrogenics cause many problems, including falling sperm counts in humans.
Re:DDT -- WRONG! (Score:2)
Re:Some inaccuracies, other disasters (Score:2)
I'm not aware of any airship accident which killed all on board. The Hindenburg had 97 people on board, 36 of who died. R101 (The other famous airship accident) had 54 people on board of who 48 died, however many airship accidents results in no injuries or deaths, for example the R33 accident of April 16 1925. The disadvantages of hydrogen are more than compensated for by the advatantages of having a basically stable platform.
I'd say that airships had no worse a record than similar airplanes of the age, and a modern helium powered airship has the potential to be significantly safer than a modern aircraft.
Re:The Bomb: Not a disaster, thankfully. (Score:2)
Er, because it makes sense to have a Plan B in case Plan A (relying on the basic sanity of other nuclear states) doesn't work?
/.
Re:some they missed (Score:2)
BEGIN QUOTE
Then came the kicker: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
Huh?
Preliminary discussions of how the ARPANET would be designed began in 1967, and a request for proposals went out the following year. In 1969, the Defense Department commissioned the ARPANET.
Gore was 21-years-old at the time. He wasn't even done with law school at Vanderbilt University. It would be eight more years before Gore would be elected to the US House of Representatives as a freshman Democrat with scant experience in passing legislation, let alone ambitious proposals.
By that time, file copying -- via the UUCP protocol -- was beginning. Email was flourishing. The culture of the Internet was starting to develop through the Jargon File and the SF-Lovers mailing list.
END QUOTE
So please allow me to rephrase: Al Gore claimed to have 'taken the initiative in creating the internet' that started _growing_ (it wasn't "created", it grew) before he was out of school.
Forgive my ranting.
Re:some they missed (Score:2)
More info see:
Internet Pioneers [internet-history.org]
Wired News [wired.com]
The Slashdot story [slashdot.org]
This doesn't mean I'm voting for Gore btw, no political endorsements
Some general comments on this story: I don't think it's a well-done story, in that it only covers the last century; on the other hand it doesn't pretend to be the whole millenium but actually is just the century. I think they leave out lots of critical disasters, like the great depression, but put things that had almost no impact on societys (N-Rays??? Who cares?) They also leave out the invention of nuclear weapons, World War II and the Holocaust (How do you miss that?) and add things like wrong way corrigan, which are more humorous than they are true failures. All in all a halfhearted attempt, but not a bad read.
Re:Tu-144 Concordski (Score:3)
More info on the Tu-144 "Konkordsky":
The 144LL Initiative [nasa.gov]
More 144LL [nasa.gov]
Tu 144 specs [russian.ee]
A guide to Russian Airplanes [www.bird.ch]
Re:The actual "punctuation error" in that probe (Score:2)
Ah, that's good to know. I'll have to tackle my programming prof if I ever see him again; he never mentioned which mission suffered because of the FORTRAN stupidity.
The actual "punctuation error" in that probe (Score:3)
IIRC, the punctuation mistake they're talking about was an instance of the now-infamous DO LOOP constructs in FORTRAN. You can alternate between a period and a comma, and the result is two
With the comma, you actually get a loop. With the period, you get a funky-looking initialization statement and some useless labels. When I was a freshman in college, my introductory CS professor showed us this piece of code, explained the screwup, and added, "We lost a rocket in the 60's because of this."
(I've never formally studied FORTRAN. If I've messed up the explanation above, oh well, mea culpa.)
Japanese fuel proc. plant criticality incident? (Score:2)
A representative post as to "why this ought to count as one of the more colossal blunders of the century":
Follow-up: Unlike the "maybe the experimenter got careless with his math and used the wrong shape of vessel" theory espoused by this post, ISTR that it was eventually determined that the root cause was an in-duh-vidual adding thirty-five pounds of uranium to the acid solution, rather than the 5ish-pounds he was supposed to use.
That's beyond "carelessly bad math" (which in this situation still would qualify it as a Fuckup of Pretty Big Proportions) and well into the realm of "A Fuckup of Such Grand Proportion That Deming, the Man Who Taught Total Quality Management and Process Engineering to the Japanese, Is Probably Still Rolling In His Grave Three Months Later".
The Inevitable.. (Score:3)
..
"We must move forward, not backward, upward not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom."
Re:Tu-144 Concordski (Score:2)
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Tu-144 Concordski (Score:4)
My other nomination is the Honest John, a short range missile developed for the U.S. military in the 1950s. Although a very capable weapon when carrying a conventional warhead, in 1954 the Pentagon insisted on deploying a nuclear-tipped version with a warhead of over 100 kiloton yield. Unfortunately, with a warhead that size, the blast radius of the missile exceeded its range.
So, any other nominations?
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Tu-144 was a sound design. (Score:2)
The fact that Tu-144 was a sound design has been recently verified by NASA's use of the Tu-144 as a testbed for 21st century US supersonic transport aircraft. The link is here. [nasa.gov] The Tu-144LL is flying today for NASA service, and $350 millions of taxpayer money is used for this project.
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BluetoothCentral.com [bluetoothcentral.com]
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming in January 2000.
Re:Wierd Rumor I Heard About the Vincennes (Score:3)
This blunder has been haunting the US military for a long time. Not wanting to miss the chance of shooting down an F-14 and get a nice, shiny medal, a trigger-happy commander on USS Vincennes shot down the Iranian airliner with a Standard missile, killing 290 people. One of my friends, an Iranian grad student here in the US, happens to be a distant relative of someone killed aboard the plane.
Loading an aircraft full of dead people and let it be shot down? Give me a break.
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BluetoothCentral.com [bluetoothcentral.com]
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming in January 2000.
Tu-4 Bull - Wrong! (Score:3)
Some clever industrialist (probably not Stalin himself) saw that the best starting point would probably be duplicating a successful long range bomber design, and the Soviets duplicated the B-29, as you correctly pointed out, to the smallest screw. Rumor has it that a hole in the tail section, caused by a flak hit, was exactly duplicated by the Soviets in hundreds of Tu-4s produced.
Now you might argue that the B-29 and hence Tu-4 was outdated by 1947, but the very valuable expertise gained by Tu-4 project allowed the Russians to design and built very capable bomber aircraft that scared the US military throughout the Cold War. After the Tu-4, Soviet aircraft industry produced many very good designs that held up very successfully against their Western counterparts.
Note to nitpickers: Yes, I know Ilya Muromets has been designed by Sikorsky, who later immigrated to the US. It's a Russian design nevertheless.
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BluetoothCentral.com [bluetoothcentral.com]
A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming in January 2000.
Corrigan was a hacker... (Score:2)
Challenger inaccuracies (Score:2)
Cold weather did not made the O rings brittle, it made them less malleable. And the O rings were fine until the boosters starting to flex during launch. Check out What Do You Care What Other People Think? [fatbrain.com], by Richard Feynman, which contains (among other things) Dr. Feynman's account of his experience on the NASA comittee charged with finding out why Challenger exploded.
Union Carbide (Score:2)
The main problem was that the systems as well as the backups failed simultaneously. A failed storage tank, failed backup tank, failed cooler occurred simultneously.
Worse was that the company management tried to claim that the company was *not* responsible for what happened.
Also the company has not paid a major portion of the damages yet, nor has it provided for the rehabilitation of the victims, as required by the court judgement.
Note: The only unconfirmed point is regarding the damages.
PS, I'm in Chem Engg in India and we have to study this disaster, so take a smaller pinch of salt.
Re:Y2K (Score:2)
It has cost over a trillion dollars in the US alone. All in one-time expenditures... pretty incredible.
Er, well... (Was: E-NOUGH!!!) (Score:2)
If you turned Roman numerals into something like this:
C = century
M = millennium
When 1999 = MCMXCIX
and 2000 = MM
and 2001 = MMI which looks like just another year
in the millennium
Doesn't it look like MM = millennium * 2, or as in second millennium? (Of course, it would be the beginning of the *third* millennium) So... you can't really use Roman numerals to say that, because it doesn't look right. It seems like it's gonna be impossible to convince those non-believers that it starts on 2001. Sorry, Arthur.
The real reason for Y2K avoidance spending (Score:2)
Re:Tu-144 Concordski (Score:2)
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Re:DDT (Score:2)
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Re:Union Carbide (Score:2)
The Indian government is responsible for what happened. Under India's home-rule laws, Union Carbide was required to appoint Indian managers for its plants, and was unable to do anything meaningful about the neglected maintenance. The Indian manager at Bhopal neglected to do the required maintenance at the plant, and the rest is history. Union Carbide bears no more moral responsibility for the deaths and injuries at Bhopal than Ford bears for the slave-labor conditions at its plants in Germany from 1941-44. Their control had been usurped by a government bent on its own goals. Your government, BTW, which has also written the plant history you're being taught in class.
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Still more inaccuracies! (Score:4)
IIRC, transport aircraft now have indicators to flag these failures to the flight crew.
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Several of these "Screw ups" are poorly explained (Score:5)
Union Carbide plamed for India's poorly educated workers refusing to follow safety proceedures and guidelines. UC paid dearly and mostly kept thier mouths shut.
Challenger:
Several Engineers had tried to stop the use of the material in the O-rings. Several Engineers had tried to stop the launch that morning. Some NASA bearucrat pushed the launch through for internal political reasons.
Another Shoot Down:
All of the bodies recovered from the water had been dead for more than 24 hours. Very little blood was present in the water. Suspected to be a ploy by the Iranian goverment to turn up the international Heat on the US. The approach of the "Irianian Jetliner" was wavetop and full throttle -- very un-jetliner behavior. It also failed repeatedly to respond to hails.
Cold Fussion:
To date, the results of Fleischmann and Pons have been replicated by 20-30 researchers -- Including Chemists at Texas A&M and Arizona State. There's something else going on here.
Y2K Bug:
I agree with the previous post about the cost of the Y2K bug.
Re:That's not just humor... (Score:2)
The Vincennes tragedy (Score:4)
WW2? (Score:2)
Too many space probes, but... (Score:2)
Re:They screwed up on the Comet, too! (Score:2)
While Britain became world experts in metal fatigue from the resultant investigation, we also lost the jet airliner industry. Oh well. We know we were first...
tragedies!=screwups- is this a tad tasteless? (Score:2)
But seriously...to label the Challenger, the Hindenburg, world wars, and the like simply "screwups" like WinCE and DIVX just kinda leaves a bad taste in my mouth. These were catastrophes. People died, their loved ones grieved.
Wired--come on. I think we can call the N-rays and cold fusion true flops, and "Wrong-way Corrigan" and Juan Pablo Davila were just kind of funny...but everything else were tragedies, and to call them mere foul-ups is, IMNSHO, a disgrace.
Just my $.02. Fire away.
One they forgot (Score:2)
DDT (Score:4)
This one was so bad, it almost single-handedly started the environmental movement, as its evils were rooted out in Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring".
Y2K (Score:2)
Granted, some of that money goes to employees, who then recycle it back into the economy, but most of it is in the form of lost productivity and revenue, which isn't recoverable. The Y2K bug has already taken its toll, and definitely should have been on the list (under "1970s", perhaps?).
Here's my list (Score:3)
2) big baggie droopy drawers... for christ sake, just pull em up, you look like a damn idiot. PULL YOUR FUCKING PANTS UP YOU FOOLS
3) Packard Bell computers... heh...I don't even have to expound on this one
4) RITA - (Regional income tax authority) I know, this one is personal, but these fuckers have their heads so far up my ass it's pathetic.
5) Country music - Christ on a moped, It's so far beyond me how anyone can listen to this pathetic souless crap. Get a life you losers.
Re:"Wrong Way" Corrigan (Off Topic) (Score:2)