Let me get my Tony Robbins on and say: You have the power to make it how you want it -- your employment is a business deal between you and your employer. And you don't have to be a slave, make it better for yourself, because no one else can do it quite like you, and no one else will do it for you, but you.

I'm hired as a "web developer" by title, and last November, my team lost our sysadmin (he quit -- well actually got a job that paid twice as much or so he claimed). We work with production systems which must serve our customers 24/7, so that guy played a pretty critical role in our department. The company decided to not hire another one, and use a consultant. Seeing I was the only guy on the team who had experience with both production systems and linux, I became the de facto guy to look after the systems. That meant carrying a pager and being called on to work on systems at their beck and call, not to mention I'm still around available as a developer. In other words: I have written enough crappy code that half my life is dedicated to maintaining it, and that world doesn't stop spinning. (that and I work for a smaller company so, having tasks bleed is part for a course)

My job description didn't include anything about carrying a pager sending me dreaded Nagios messages in the middle of the night, nor did I intend for it to... When I had started the job 2.5 years before I made sure to critically evaluate what the other developers on the team had to say about their hours, and made it clear with my boss what my role would be. At first, I was pretty steamed, my hire letter specifically said that I "could schedule no appointment to discuss compensation", and I was expected to do it. I felt punished for competence: You are able to do this, so you must do this as well -- without recompense.

But I turned it around. I started saving extra money to sock away for a rainy day -- specifically to save up to the point where I could tell my boss with authority: to make a deal or I have to hit the road. You can do the same thing: save money, or find another job offer.

Then I broke my contract, asked directly for a raise, and said that my job description had gone severely out of bounds from where it started and that I needed to be justly compensated for it and would like to have my job title, job description and financial compensation adjusted to match. It took 3 months for the company to come back to me. I had to reiterate this to my boss 3 times as well, once a month I did. I had formulated my plans for negotiating, but, I had no chance to negotiate. They came back to me and said "congratulations you got the biggest raise, percent wise in company history! but our HR consulting firm shows that web developers don't make a lot of money..." hand shake, end of story -- I wasn't satisfied.

I went home, did my homework, compared what the HR consulting firm had to say with what the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics ( www.bls.gov ) had to say compared, and compared my roles with what they had listed (and stats work the same way they always do: I have my biases and clearly I saw that I was worth more than they said!). I went back to my boss the next morning and told him straight up: "Your HR consulting firm, and my HR consulting firm, don't match up... The thing is: I do actually want my job, and I do want to help and I want the deal to be good for both parties. I think I can offer you a better deal as a consultant". Maybe you can't afford to do that, but, I am a single guy and I would've wanted to.

There was no way they wanted that, I had proved my worth, AND I had shown that I put a value on myself and my time. They wanted to have me as a regular salaried employee -- I can only guess their reasons, but I'm sure it has to do with being ready and able to take on new tasks instead of getting a bill for everything they ask you to do [however a power negotiating tool, no?].

So in short: I got what I wanted, more money and now I flex my time and my place at my job (what he couldn't make in financial compensation i was determined to get other wise). Now -- I'm happy to work over 40 hours a week when it fits my schedule. I had to breech my contract, and I had no union on my side -- I only had me. Is what I'm schpieling over-zealous pride? Probably!! But, the point is: I'm not different or better than you, maybe I'm worse than you and I don't like to use strict; with perl code and you actually hate me when you've had my old job -- but the bottom line is if you want to do better for yourself, you CAN do better for yourself, you just have to do it.

(p.s. also I am a firm believer that many people's careers are born of passion: there are many 'geeks' [of many varieties] I know who love what they do so much they can't help but do it, on hours or off, and I believe that should be recognized over the robot who shows up for 8 hours a day [cause there are those guys too])
(p.p.s. editing perl is boring with strict, grab life by the cajones)

The output of DVD player code does not determine whether or not you go to jail.

That may be true, but 3.4 hours is much more time than a standard deorbit, and they are decelerating that entire time.

So let's see...

Hubble's orbit is at 560 km (approx).
Height of the atmosphere is 100 km, officially recognized. It actually tapers off asymptotically to nothingness; there may be a stray nitrogen molecule or two even at the Hubble's height.

The standard deorbit maneuver (to take off that tiny 500 ft/s) is performed about an hour before landing. They hit the atmosphere about 30 minutes before landing, so a very tiny deorbit burn will drop them 460 km (on a shallow parabolic path) in a mere 30 minutes. The remaining 30 minutes is filled with hellfire and gliding to the runway.

30 minutes into your proposed 2 ft/s/s OMS burn, they will have only removed about 1100 ft/s. Of course, since that's over double their deorbit burn, they will be falling much faster (steeper parabola), and it will take less than the 30 minutes to hit the atmosphere, at which point they will still have a tangential velocity of 23,506 ft/s = 7.1 km/s.

The hideous numerical integration calculation required to find out exactly when they encounter atmospheric effects with a constant burn is left as an exercise for the reader.

So yes, they might have enough OMS fuel on board to slowly burn away 7.5 km/s, if they were way out in the middle of the solar system somewhere. At 560 km off the surface, though, they need a whole lot more thrust to remove all that in the short time before they hit atmo.

"We dinnae have the POW'R, Captain!"

Yeah, even with all that ejected, they still wouldn't be able to get to 7.5 km/s delta-v.

The fuel required to do that weighs about the same as 4 fully loaded shuttle orbiters.

Why don't you read it that way now? I saw none of the snarkiness you implied in the article. It doubt it was written with a smirk, but it could be interpreted that way if read with one.

Perhaps your cynicism has made it impossible for you to read that and say "wow, that is a fascinating science," and believe that Schlosser thinks that way, too.

I haven't read the rest of the book, so maybe it is cynical in context. But that excerpt contains none of the "OMG CHEMICALS!!!1!!one!!" that you seem to think it implies.

Low Earth Orbit velocity is approximately 7.8 km/s. The Hubble's orbit is slightly higher, with a slower velocity of 7.5 km/s.

The delta-v capability of a space shuttle after successfully completing a launch is approximately 600 mph (0.27 km/s), depending on the weight of the payload it's carrying. Dumping all their non-essential items out the airlock before the burn might gain them something, but not nearly enough. Remember that it takes two extra rockets and a full bolt-on fuel tank to achieve that 7.8 km/s in the first place (actually 9.3 km/s with atmospheric effects).

Even if a second rocket with a payload of nothing but fuel was launched to rendezvous with the shuttle, it would still not be enough to slow down the shuttle to zero tangential velocity. Nothing as big as the Stage 1 tank has ever been boosted into orbit in a single launch. It would take many launches and lots of complicated orbital rendezvous maneuvers to refuel the shuttle enough on-orbit to achieve a 7.5 km/s burn.

And even then, Main Engine Cutoff (MECO) during launch is at T+8 minutes; the shuttle engines can't burn a full tank of fuel much faster than that (they throttle down right at the end to keep the acceleration to 3g or less, but before that it's balls-to-the-wall). I'm not sure how long it would take the orbiter to reach the atmosphere during the deorbit maneuver--the shuttle would start to fall to the Earth immediately, in an arc that would end up perfectly vertical with respect to the ground--but 8 minutes seems like a long time. If the shuttle hit the atmosphere before the full 7.5 km/s delta-v was achieved, it would still have some tangential velocity, making for a bumpy ride, and the possibility of heating effects on unprotected surfaces.

In any case, there isn't nearly enough fuel up there to do this, and any secondary launch to bring them fuel may as well just bring a rescue capsule for the astronauts.

Thanks for the fun thought experiment, though.

I don't understand this mindset.

Sit your average consumer down in a rental car where every single knob, button, and dial on the dashboard audio and environmental controls are completely different, and they will have no trouble taking a moment to work out how to turn on the AC and find something on XM radio. Even the displays in the dashboard are completely non-standard, and it often takes me a minute to work out which dial is the speedometer and which is the gas gauge. No one screams that every company must build their cars with exactly the same user interface. They just expect differences and deal with it.

But place this same consumer in front of a computer where a single icon has changed color and they flip out. They complain that it's too different, that they will never be able to find what they need.

Is this a function of the Microsoft monoculture, or is it based on the level of complexity of the system? Honest question.

I wouldn't be surprised. This article is very old and exists all over the internet.

I have no idea where it originated, but I would love to find out.

We tried saying that to the internet service providers, too, and they responded by throttling bittorrent and changing their contracts.

It has been done. There is a search bar right there next to the address bar in all modern browsers.

Search engines are the next layer of routing protocol. They are so high level that the hierarchy system seems quaint (web directories are *so* 1996), and has been replaced instead with a sophisticated popularity/usefulness algorithm, navigated by semantic expressions, not addresses. This is the evolution of the internet toward (dare I say) the cloud, where entry and exit locations are meaningless, and everything is interconnected not just by links but by semantic similarity. Two pages may be "next to" each other in Google's rankings, even though the servers are in Shanghai and Sheboygan.

The early internet used (and still does, to a certain extent) a "location" metaphor for finding information, based on the idea that the information was on a server that physically existed in space, and we think of domain names and IP addresses as places. But as the internet grows more interconnected with things like aggregators, with more high-level routing protocols like search engines tossed on top, the "where" of information starts to matter less and less, and the location metaphor breaks down. People trying to grasp these decidedly unintuitive concepts make up buzzwords like "cloud" and "virtual" and "mesh" to try and make sense of an information system that is several orders of magnitude removed from our evolutionary experience, as navigation on the internet moves from a physical location metaphor to a semantic navigation system.

Given the topic of this article, your sig just got rather scary.

I am actually disappointed that Google settled at all. I was hoping this issue would end up going to trial, where we could have had a frank examination of the absurd copyright system. If the purpose of copyright is to provide incentive to creators, than orphaned works should logically fall into the public domain, since their creators no longer need incentive from them. This is actually no different than the property model we use for copyright: abandoned property (such as a shipwreck) no longer has ownership and can usually be claimed by someone else.

But instead, Google opted to settle. This was the smart business move, since they can now move forward with their database, and it may yet prove valuable as a public perception precedent, but it did nothing to solve the underlying problem of unfair copyright enforcement.

The people complaining are the university libraries, who previously had the monopoly on this material. These books will not only be available in Google's database, they will also be available in dead tree format at your friendly neighborhood library.

Google is not creating a monopoly, they're breaking one up.

That may be true, but the hope is that this settlement can be pointed to in future cases, streamlining the process of getting a license. A new company XYZ, Inc. can negotiate a license from the publishers more easily by pointing to Google's license as a template, allowing XYZ, Inc. to go scan orphaned works. Or university libraries, who have paper copies of the books in question, can more easily negotiate licenses to scan them and make them available on the university website.

Google is big enough, with enough muscle, that they can push the legal system in this country pretty hard. Considering where they stand on copyright and making information available to the unwashed masses, I would say only good can come out of their efforts in the long run.

While I am typically a CLI mplayer guy (even if opening a movie from a graphical file manager to fullscreen), I have to say that SMPlayer is a fantastic front end GUI. I recommend SMPlayer to even my most clueless Windows user friends.