Is it Over Rover?

Is it Over Rover?
2004-04-06

Rover Daily
Update Spirit Sol 91: "Spirit woke up on sol 91, which ended at 6:38
p.m. PDT on April 5, 2004, as if it were any other martian day, but this
one was special. Finishing 90 sols of surface operations since landing
day marked completion of the last of the official success criteria for
Spirit's prime mission. The rover team at JPL had checked off the
next-to-last box for mission success two days earlier, when a drive of
50.2 meters (165 feet) took Spirit's total travel distance over the
600-meter (1,969 feet) mark."

This might hint at further cutbacks in rover coverage. From the once
daily hour long press conference to "daily" 2 minute mission controller
updates, which now seem to get regularly skipped, we are down to the
still daily written summary:

Rover Daily
Updates

I wonder how long those will last now. NASA people seem to be in a big hurry to declare the mission over so they can go home. Unfortunate really, since
in the beginning when the press was anxious to cover more territory they
were told that there was no hurry. The 90 day number was just the
MINIMUM life expectancy of the hardware. Now they are changing their
tune. The hardware is fine. Seems it is the personnel that is worn
out. Or maybe it has just exceeded the American publics attention span.
Ever shorter.

But no worry, USG will be happy to spend millions more to launch follow-on
rovers to cover the ground that these could have, but didn't.

Clinton and Computers

From Clinton Web Site:
2003-04-16

Update: 2004-01-29

I did the entry below when I had little more than a hunch that

Bill Clinton was computer illiterate ("Clinton's Gift to Internet Age - Only 2 E-Mails").
The picture, and some other hints here and there had given it away. But now that he is no longer in office
the secret is out. But why should this be covered up? I would guess that many people in politics rarely if
ever use a computer. It would be nice to think that they at least know how to, but simply don't take the time.
The reality though is that until the next generation of politicians we are lucky to be dealing with people who can
even type.

One of the handy ways to avoid discussing the issues is to compare the candidates reading habits ("My candidate
reads seven books a day. Before breakfast!"), academic records, or past jobs. The Dems get better treatment though.
We rarely learn much about them until AFTER they leave office. Clinton's book will no doubt tell us little we don't
already know, it will most likely but full of invention. Using legal pads and a ghost writer who is desperately
trying to coax the material out of him for pre-election release, we hear that the going is slow. In addition to
typing, constructing revisionist history is something Bill expects others to do for him.

"Late one afternoon, Chelsea, home for Christmas from Stanford University, brought a few friends by the Oval Office
to visit with the President. I had been
trying for weeks to get the Oval Office laptop up and running. Bewilderedly, I looked on as Chelsea and her friends
proceeded to school both the President
and me on how technology really works."

Director of Production for Presidential Events JOSHUA KING (by door) describes waiting "back stage" for the
President.

---

Apparently Chelsea's efforts were unsuccessful. (NB: The incorrect caption as it appears on the web page.)

The fact that Clinton would sit with a non-functional laptop on his desk "for weeks" would tend to confirm the
stories that he was not computer literate, and
in fact could not handle ordinary typing tasks.

Of course I doubt that most modern presidents have been computer savvy either, but then, not since Kennedy has the
presidential hype machine done so much to
create a mythology of Presidential intelligence. It's about time a lot of these myths were put to rest along with
the rest of the Clinton legacy.

PS: I hope at some point they informed Bill about the appropriate orientation for the mouse. Could this be why
Bill and Hillary's books are so far behind
schedule?

High Alert

An ongoing digest of incompetence in high places

2004-01-22

• 
  Boston Globe carries the following headline:
  Infiltration of files seen as extensive...
  Senate panel's GOP staff pried on Democrats
  After reading through the long article speculating about GOP spying on Democrats we find this:
  "A technician hired by the new judiciary chairman, Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, apparently made a mistake that allowed anyone to access newly created accounts on a Judiciary Committee server shared by both parties -- even though the accounts were supposed to restrict access only to those with the right password."
  (Link)
  

2003-10-30

• Today a Capitol building was closed for two hours due to an "alert".
  
• People were "evacuated" from the building, but many people didn't receive the
  alert.
  
• The alert was sent to building occupants via FAX!
  
• The alert included a lookout for a white man of average height carrying a gun.
  
• It turned out that 2 WOMEN on congressional staff entered the building with Halloween
  costumes
  which included a toy gun
  
• 
  A report was made public today by
  The Center for Public Integrity
  
• href="http://video.c-span.org:8080/ramgen/archive/iraq/iraq103003_integrity.rm"target="_blank">Here
  is a video from CSPAN
  
• A Brooklyn cop is being investigated for Internet postings in which he brags about beating suspects,
  writing phony tickets and ignoring calls to his precinct. (href="http://www.newsday.com/news/local/newyork/nyc-blog1223,0,3411589,print.story?coll=ny-nynews-headlines">LINK)
  
  
• Los Alamos National Laboratory employees and managers have been placed on paid investigative leave as a
  result of security problems that surfaced at the lab earlier this month, a lab spokesman confirmed Friday. (LINK)