On Mon, Jul 09, 2001 at 11:12:50AM -0700, Wolfgang Rupprecht wrote:
> 
> gantose@grc.nasa.gov (Dave Gantose) writes:
> > I would love to have two separate sockets, but this is a Space Station
> > project and the single socket has been dictated to us from on high :(
> 
> Wasn't that fact that management was making engineering decisions also
> what caused the infamous Challenger explosion?

No, mostly that was piss poor writing on the part of the engineer who
wrote the memo describing the problem. Said memo is now part of the
materials used in college-level writing classes (for engineers and
other non-{english-major,poetry,theater,communications} types). 

You know, writing a two page memo that mentions something at the *bottom*
of the *second* page along the lines of "might cause a critical launch
failure" really isn't very good communication. OTOH, a two page memo
that starts out mentioning something like "a launch in sub-32 degree
weather will probably cause the shuttle to explode during launch" really
gets the point across so much better.

(Sorry for the post, I'm sitting here waiting on a tar from one disk
to another to finish. I've got a drive going south on me as we speak.
Uh, like, lucky for me my box paniced this morning alerting me to the
bad blocks. Uh, mmmmm.)
-- 
"A method for inducing cats to exercise consists of directing a beam of
invisible light produced by a hand-held laser apparatus onto the floor ...
in the vicinity of the cat, then moving the laser ... in an irregular way
fascinating to cats,..." -- US patent 5443036, "Method of exercising a cat"