This is the Web Page for space.launch.info, a newsletter to inform visitors to Titusville Florida, and the surrounding Space Coast about the Space Shuttle launch they hope to witness while they are here. Feel free to check out the information here, and at the Space Launch Viewing FAQ Page, where more information is located.

While at Cape Canaveral for the Shuttle Lauch we ran into The Cheshire Catalyst, an old school phreak who was the last editor of TAP, the first phone phreak zine. In recent years he has been helping the general public enjoy shuttle launches by publishing this extremely useful information guide, printing launch zines, and assisting the HAMs in rebroadcasting NASA chatter with a longer range repeater. He was also personally responsible for the fact that the area code there is 321, as in 3-2-1-Liftoff. Very cool character.

There are plenty of launches to go see, including another shuttle launch in August, and if you're going this guide will come in very handy. BTW, he is absolutely correct that if you go to Kennedy Space Center you must see an IMAX movie. We're talking wall sized movies filmed in 3-D from the perspective of Astronauts. Its the closest you can get to actual space travel without getting an advanced degree in Aerospace Engineering, logging thousands of hours piloting various combat aircraft, and going through years of training where you learn to do the work of a plumber and an electrician in an extremely uncomfortable and combersome suit in an environment where the word "down" doesn't actually mean anything but the word "oops" means anything from "oops" I lost a billion dollars to "oops," everybody is dead.

Watching a lauch, btw, is highly recommended. We drove a long way, didn't get to sleep much, spent a lot of money, got screwed by our hotel, got frustrated and cranky, got rained out for two days, and spent hours baking under the summer sun, and the launch only lasts like 5 minutes. But TV cameras cannot convey how bright the engines are, how loud it is, or, ultimately, how exciting it is to see it happen first hand. When you see that machine streaking across the sky you know those guys are bad ass.

SpaceLaunchInfo.com - Home Page

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The CIA has disbanded a unit set up in the 1990s to oversee the spy agency's hunt for Osama bin Laden and transferred its duties to broader operations that track Islamist militant groups, a U.S. intelligence official said on Tuesday.

what ??
but he's responsible for the greatest peace time atrocity in American history

CIA disbands bin Laden unit�|�Reuters.com

Like billions of other people around the world, 25-year-old Phra Prawit is avidly following the World Cup - and especially his favourite team, France.

On the other side of Bangkok, 28-year-old England fan Pramaha Preecha is equally addicted to the beautiful game.

But Prawit, Preecha and their football-mad friends have a problem: they are Buddhist monks and have to be awake at 5am every morning to collect alms from the local community.

BBC NEWS | World | Asia-Pacific | Thai monks mix Buddha with Beckham

It is better to be a half-formed and rough idea than a brilliant cliché. Such preference for the imperfect new defines America. As we Americans celebrate the birth of our nation, can we put words on the reason we love it? Let me try.

Because Europeans measured what they found here against what they had left behind, newness was the main note of the settled land. In the beginning, religiously enflamed politics had made life intolerable in the old country, a story that achieved its master form with the coming to Virginia and Massachusetts of the English dissidents.

But even the mythic 1492 had carried an implication of the New World's liberating significance, for in addition to sponsoring Christopher Columbus, the monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella chose that year to expel Jews and Muslims from Spain, establishing the totalitarian principle in Europe.

Even as Spaniards then wreaked purposeful and accidental havoc in the New World, they opened an unforeseen escape route from the old.

America, for all of its nascent idealism, began as an instance of brutal European imperialism, with the exterminating of indigenous peoples and the enslavement of Africans as essential elements.

But because that nascent idealism found articulation in the solemn compacts of the early generations - culminating first in the Declaration of Independence that we commemorate on Tuesday, then in the U.S. Constitution, then in the Bill of Rights - American imperialism contained principles of its own self-criticism. Slavery came to be seen as an abomination less in contrast to the practice of other nations than to the establishing theory of this one.

America began, that is, as a half-formed and rough idea, but that idea became the meaning against which all life in the United States has been measured ever since. That idea has been a perpetual source of newness, even as it has become more fully formed and clearly articulated.

And what is that idea? It comes to us by now as the brilliant cliché of the Fourth of July, but with stark simplicity it still defines the ground of our being: "All men are created equal."

That the idea is dynamic, propelling a permanent social transformation, is evident even in the way that word "men" strikes the ear as anachronistic now.

That Jefferson and the others were not thinking of women matters less than the fact that they established a principle that made the full inclusion of women inevitable. And so with those who owned no property, and those who were themselves owned property.

How new is this idea today? Its transforming work continues all around us.

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court faulted the Bush administration for its treatment of detainees in Guantánamo, implicitly affirming that one need not be a U.S. citizen to claim basic rights. The foundational principle extends to enemy combatants. They, too,... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

James Carroll: What we love about America - IHT

We've warned you for a decade. Now the monster has finally arrived: attacks against Open Source developers by patent holders, big and small. One is a lawsuit against Red Hat for the use of the principle of Object Relational Mapping used in Hibernate, a popular component of enterprise Java applications everywhere. The other attack is on an individual Open Source developer for his model railroad software.

The Monster Arrives: Software Patent Lawsuits Against Open Source Developers

The Supreme Court today delivered a sweeping rebuke to the Bush administration, ruling that it exceeded its authority by creating tribunals for terror suspects that fell short of the legal protections that Congress has traditionally required in military courts.

As a result, the court said in a 5-to-3 ruling, the tribunals violated both American military law and the military's obligations under the Geneva Conventions.
...
Justice Stevens declared flatly that "the military commission at issue lacks the power to proceed because its structure and procedure violate" both the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which governs the American military's legal system, and the Third Geneva Convention.The majority opinion rejected the administration's claims that the tribunals were justified both by President Bush's inherent powers as commander in chief and by the resolution passed by Congress authorizing the use of force after the Sept. 11. There is nothing in the resolution's legislative history "even hinting" that such an expansion of the president's powers was considered, he wrote.
...
Cmdr. Charles Swift, the Navy lawyer assigned by the military to represent Mr. Hamdan, called today's ruling "a return to our fundamental values."

"That return marks a high-water point," Commander Swift said at a news conference outside the court. "It shows that we can't be scared out of who we are, and that's a victory, folks."

chalk one up to liberty and the rule of law

Supreme Court Blocks Guant�namo Tribunals - New York Times

"I'll be a couple of minutes late" translates as anything up to 15 minutes after the agreed time. "I'll be 15 minutes late" translates as anything up to half an hour. "I'm running very late" means it might be time to look for more punctual friends.

We have what's called "Vicky time" in our office. On time to her means 15 minutes-30 minutes late. She's also constantly on her phone or blackberry and seriously addicted to it. I adore the woman--she's hysterical and awesome at what she does. But sometimes, I want to rip the cell phone/blackberry out of her hands and throw it into the bottom of Lake Washington.

~Heathyr

recommended if only because Heathyr's comments made me laugh

BBC NEWS | Magazine | Manners on the move

Moose the dog, better known as Eddie in US sitcom Frasier, has died aged 16 in Los Angeles, his trainer has said.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Frasier's dog Eddie dies aged 16

We've all heard of the Great Firewall of China. These guys found a clever way around it:

The Great Firewall of China is an important tool for the Chinese Government in their efforts to censor the Internet. It works, in part, by inspecting web traffic to determine whether or not particular words are present.
...
It turns out [caveat: in the specific cases we’ve closely examined, YMMV] that the keyword detection is not actually being done in large routers on the borders of the Chinese networks, but in nearby subsidiary machines. When these machines detect the keyword, they do not actually prevent the packet containing the keyword from passing through the main router (this would be horribly complicated to achieve and still allow the router to run at the necessary speed). Instead, these subsiduary machines generate a series of TCP reset packets, which are sent to each end of the connection. When the resets arrive, the end-points assume they are genuine requests from the other end to close the connection — and obey. Hence the censorship occurs.

However, because the original packets are passed through the firewall unscathed, if both of the endpoints were to completely ignore the firewall’s reset packets, then the connection will proceed unhindered! We’ve done some real experiments on this — and it works just fine!! Think of it as the Harry Potter approach to the Great Firewall — just shut your eyes and walk onto Platform 9¾.

Ignoring the Great Firewall of China

lovely resource of NASA images
looking at the images I thought of something I read today

from the New Scientist 24/06/06

the "lonely hypothesis" - that there is no rational and good God, and probably no God at all, that humankind is a speck on the edge of a vast, pointless universe - has its own splendour and self-justification. If nothing else will supply meaning in the universe, the existence and achievements of human intellect, creativity and love are quite enough.

GRIN