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

Open Notepad and type in this phrase, without the quote marks and with no carriage return: "Bush hid the facts". Now save it and open it again.

Seriously, try this before you click through this link.

27B Stroke 6: Fun MS bug.

I do NOT plan to get in the habit of regularly reposting Stratfor's emails, but this one is extremely relevant to conversations we've been having on this site for a long time. (BTW, I'm not really sure if thats the first time that idea appeared here or if I'm really responsible for originating it. Its just the earliest link that I have. I think I was thinking that a long time before I said it. I said it when it became so obvious it seemed like review.)

Once again, let me start with one of the last sentances: Finally, the ability of grassroots cells to network across international boundaries, and even across oceans, presents the possibility that al Qaeda 4.0 cells could, now or in the future, pose a significant threat even without a central leadership structure -- meaning, a structure that can be identified, monitored and attacked

Stratfor: Terrorism Intelligence Report - June 7, 2006

Al Qaeda: The Next Phase of Evolution?

By Fred Burton

Canadian authorities recently arrested 17 men, accusing them of
planning terrorist attacks, after some members of the group bought
what they believed to be some 3 tons of ammonium nitrate
fertilizer, which can be used to make explosives. The men allegedly
were planning attacks against symbolic targets in Toronto and
Ottawa in a plot that reportedly included bombings, armed assaults
and beheadings.

One of the things that make this case interesting is that the group
-- now dubbed by the media as the "Canada 17" -- reportedly had
connections to alleged jihadists in other countries, whose earlier
arrests were widely reported. Those connections included two men
from the United States -- Ehsanul Islam Sadequee and Syed Haris
Ahmed -- who reportedly traveled from Georgia in March 2005 to meet
with Islamist extremists in Toronto. Authorities have said they
conspired to attend a militant training camp in Pakistan and
discussed potential terrorist targets in the United States. There
also is said to be a connection to a prominent computer hacker in
Britain, who was arrested in October and charged with conspiring to
commit murder and cause an explosion.

The June 2 arrests certainly underscore the possibility that
Canada , which has a long history of liberal immigration and asylum
policies, has been used by jihadists as a sanctuary for raising
funds and planning attacks. But the most intriguing aspect of the
Canada case is that it seems to encapsulate a trend that has been
slowly evolving for some time. If the allegations in the Canada 17
case are at least mostly true, it might represent the emergence of
a new operational model for jihadists -- an "al Qaeda 4.0," if you
will.

In other words, the world might be witnessing the emergence of a
grassroots jihadist network that both exists in and h... [ Read More (2.4k in body) ]

Stratfor agrees that Al'Q is a scene. Calls it Al'Q 4.0.

New policies on prisoners being drawn up by the Pentagon will reportedly omit a key tenet of the Geneva Convention that explicitly bans "humiliating and degrading treatment."

You can actually SEE the power corrupting us. Here is the LaTimes link.

Pentagon to omit Geneva ban from new army manual: report - Yahoo! News

Stratfor: Geopolitical Intelligence Report - May 16, 2006

Civil Liberties and National Security

By George Friedman

USA Today published a story last week stating that U.S. telephone
companies (Qwest excepted) had been handing over to the National
Security Agency (NSA) logs of phone calls made by American
citizens. This has, as one might expect, generated a fair bit of
controversy -- with opinions ranging from "It's not only legal but
a great idea" to "This proves that Bush arranged 9/11 so he could
create a police state." A fine time is being had by all. Therefore,
it would seem appropriate to pause and consider the matter.

Let's begin with an obvious question: How in God's name did USA
Today find out about a program that had to have been among the most
closely held secrets in the intelligence community -- not only
because it would be embarrassing if discovered, but also because
the entire program could work only if no one knew it was under way?
No criticism of USA Today, but we would assume that the newspaper
wasn't running covert operations against the NSA. Therefore,
someone gave them the story, and whoever gave them the story had to
be cleared to know about it. That means that someone with a high
security clearance leaked an NSA secret.

Americans have become so numbed to leaks at this point that no one
really has discussed the implications of what we are seeing: The
intelligence community is hemorrhaging classified information. It's
possible that this leak came from one of the few congressmen or
senators or staffers on oversight committees who had been briefed
on this material -- but either way, we are seeing an extraordinary
breakdown among those with access to classified material.

The reason for this latest disclosure is obviously the nomination
of Gen. Michael Hayden to be the head of the CIA. Before his
appointment as deputy director of national intelligence, Hayden had
been the head of the NSA, where he oversaw the collection and
data-mining project involving private phone calls. Hayden's
nomination to the CIA has come under heavy criticism from Democrats
and Republicans, who argue that he is an inappropriate choice for
director. The release of the data-mining story to USA Today
obviously was intended as a means of shooting down his nomination
-- which it might. But what is important here is not the fate of
Hayden, but the fact that the Bush administration clearly has lost
all control of the intelligence community -- extended to include
congressional oversight processes. That is not a trivial point.

At the heart of the argument is not the current breakdown in
Washington, but the more significant question of why the NSA was
running such a collection program and whether the program
represented a serious threat to l... [ Read More (2.0k in body) ]

Civil Liberties and National Security

The tin foil hat crowd has always assumed that the NSA was either directly monitoring domestic communications in the US, or at least that a foreign ally was doing it and sharing the results with them. This never really bothered me, because I assumed that the NSA wouldn't care about anything I would ever do. The NSA is mostly concerned with warfare, in which the rules of civil society don't really apply, and the only rules that matter are the ones prohibiting genocide and sadistic treatment of people. If I was ever interested in commiting espionage on behalf of a nation state, I would assume that all the rules were off and I would act accordingly.

The problem is that terrorism breaks down the barriers between what was once the domain of war and the domain of law enforcement. In the wake of 9/11 we have vigorously engaged in information sharing between domestic law enforcement and intelligence. So, wereas we might not have a problem with the NSA spying domestically in the context where they are really only looking for Soviet Spies, our feeling might be different if they are really looking for anything illegal, and sharing that information with local authorities. What we have now is somewhere in the middle, and its likely to erode further.

The minute someone says that we could have caught such and such a child abuser or murderer if the NSA had only shared the information with the police, its over. They'll start sharing it, and they'll share more and more, and you'll have the surveillance state.

Some people embrace this. They figure it is inevitable. It probably is. And they figure they aren't going to break the law, so why should they worry. I think our system often produces the wrong laws, and too many of them, and whats more, the aura of omnipresent suspicion and fear that accompanies the knowledge of the panopticon of the police state sucks the life right out of a culture. Its no longer reasonable to conceive of such a place as a "free country."

Whats worse, it is inevitable as these loopholes widen and the information sharing spreads that these systems will be used for political and economic manipulation, criminally.

This is the challenge our generation faces. How can you avoid creating a police state in an environment litered with terrorists and murderers and child abusers when omnipotent technology is at hand and it can help fight them? Is it even possible?

Its not about the surveillance...

SITTING in a culture dish, a layer of chicken heart cells beats in synchrony. But this muscle layer was not sliced from an intact heart, nor even grown laboriously in the lab. Instead, it was "printed", using a technology that could be the future of tissue engineering.

New Scientist News - Print me a heart and a set of arteries

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
Researchers (Hayes, Bloom) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music. In another genre, the Beatles seemed to burst onto the scene with a string of #1 hits and an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964. But they had been playing small clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg since 1957, and while they had mass appeal early on, their first great critical success, Sgt. Peppers, was released in 1967. Samuel Johnson thought it took longer than ten years: "Excellence in any department can be attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price." And Chaucer complained "the lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne."

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years

The News Corp.'s purchase of MySpace is looking like that rarest of rarities in the media world -- a much-ballyhooed acquisition where it turns out that the buyer underpaid.

Interesting perspective.

News Corp. (hearts) MySpace | FORTUNE

In an internal memo last October, Ray Ozzie, chief technical officer, who joined Microsoft last year, wrote, "Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges and it causes end-user and administrator frustration."

The trouble with Microsoft.

Windows Is So Slow, but Why? - New York Times