Privatizing the ISS a wasteful idea. Even if it weren’t, it’s not clear how a privatized space station could operate. Frank Slazar, the vice president of space systems for the Aerospace Industries Association, pointed out to the Post that the international agreements the US signed regarding the creation of the ISS would render making it a commercial outpost tricky. Andrew Rush, chief executive of 3-D printing company Made In Space, said plainly that the ISS isn’t built for profit seeking.

The Trump administration wants to turn the International Space Station into a kind of orbiting real estate venture run not by the government, but by private industry.

The White House plans to stop funding the station after 2024, ending direct federal support of the orbiting laboratory. But it does not intend to abandon the orbiting laboratory altogether and is working on a transition plan that could turn the station over to the private sector, according to an internal NASA document obtained by The Washington Post.

“The decision to end direct federal support for the ISS in 2025 does not imply that the platform itself will be deorbited at that time — it is possible that industry could continue to operate certain elements or capabilities of the ISS as part of a future commercial platform,” the document states. “NASA will expand international and commercial partnerships over the next seven years in order to ensure continued human access to and presence in low Earth orbit.”

“The ISS is built for science and human exploration, it’s not built for profit seeking,” said Andrew Rush, the chief executive of Made In Space, a company that uses 3-D printing to manufacture objects on the space station.

Boeing, which has been involved with the station since 1995, operates the station for NASA, which costs the agency $3 billion to $4 billion annually. Last month, as reports circulated about NASA pulling the plug on the station, Mark Mulqueen, Boeing’s space station program manager, said “walking away from the International Space Station now would be a mistake, threatening American leadership and hurting the commercial market as well as the scientific community.”

In a statement on Sunday, he said that "handing over a rare national asset to commercial enterprises before the private sector is ready to support it could have disastrous consequences for American leadership in space and for the chances of building space-focused private enterprise."

Calilasseia wrote:The Orange Scrotum's latest wheeze?

Wait for it ... Privatising the international Space Station.

Privatizing the ISS a wasteful idea. Even if it weren’t, it’s not clear how a privatized space station could operate. Frank Slazar, the vice president of space systems for the Aerospace Industries Association, pointed out to the Post that the international agreements the US signed regarding the creation of the ISS would render making it a commercial outpost tricky. Andrew Rush, chief executive of 3-D printing company Made In Space, said plainly that the ISS isn’t built for profit seeking.

More on this deranged excuse for an idea here ...

The Trump administration wants to turn the International Space Station into a kind of orbiting real estate venture run not by the government, but by private industry.

The White House plans to stop funding the station after 2024, ending direct federal support of the orbiting laboratory. But it does not intend to abandon the orbiting laboratory altogether and is working on a transition plan that could turn the station over to the private sector, according to an internal NASA document obtained by The Washington Post.

“The decision to end direct federal support for the ISS in 2025 does not imply that the platform itself will be deorbited at that time — it is possible that industry could continue to operate certain elements or capabilities of the ISS as part of a future commercial platform,” the document states. “NASA will expand international and commercial partnerships over the next seven years in order to ensure continued human access to and presence in low Earth orbit.”

More on the lunacy as follows:

“The ISS is built for science and human exploration, it’s not built for profit seeking,” said Andrew Rush, the chief executive of Made In Space, a company that uses 3-D printing to manufacture objects on the space station.

Later on, we have this:

Boeing, which has been involved with the station since 1995, operates the station for NASA, which costs the agency $3 billion to $4 billion annually. Last month, as reports circulated about NASA pulling the plug on the station, Mark Mulqueen, Boeing’s space station program manager, said “walking away from the International Space Station now would be a mistake, threatening American leadership and hurting the commercial market as well as the scientific community.”

In a statement on Sunday, he said that "handing over a rare national asset to commercial enterprises before the private sector is ready to support it could have disastrous consequences for American leadership in space and for the chances of building space-focused private enterprise."

You know that privatising the ISS is a bad idea, if fucking Boeing thinks so - especially as they'd be first in line for the contracts, given that they've been operating it on behalf of NASA for several years now.

Here’s the Problem With the Story Connecting Russia to Donald Trump’s Email Server

On Monday night, Slate’s Franklin Foer published a story that’s been circulating through the dark web and various newsrooms since summertime, an enormous, eyebrow-raising claim that Donald Trump uses a secret server to communicate with Russia. That claim resulted in an explosive night of Twitter confusion and misinformation.

The gist of the Slate article is dramatic — incredible, even: Cybersecurity researchers found that the Trump Organization used a secret box configured to communicate exclusively with Alfa Bank, Russia’s largest privately-held commercial bank. This is a story that any reporter in our election cycle would drool over, and drool Foer did:

The researchers quickly dismissed their initial fear that the logs represented a malware attack. The communication wasn’t the work of bots. The irregular pattern of server look-ups actually resembled the pattern of human conversation — conversations that began during office hours in New York and continued during office hours in Moscow. It dawned on the researchers that this wasn’t an attack, but a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump Organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank.

These claims are based entirely on “DNS logs,” digital records of when one server looks up how to contact another across the internet. The logs, first gathered by an anonymous researcher going by the moniker “Tea Leaves” (an irony that should be lost on no one) and shared with a small group of academics, were provided to The Intercept and a handful of other news organizations. The New York Times, the Washington Post, Reuters, the Daily Beast, and Vice all examined these materials to at least some extent and did not publish the claims.

You can think of DNS like a phone book that maps people’s names to their phone numbers. For example, every time Alice wants to call Bob, she first looks up Bob’s phone number in the phone book, and then she dials the number into her phone. However, it’s possible that Alice might look up Bob’s phone number and not call him on the phone. It’s even possible that she might look up Bob’s phone number over and over on a regular basis, over the course of months, without actually calling him. The DNS look-ups that The Intercept and others (including Slate) reviewed are similar to records of Alice looking up Bob’s phone number in the phone book, but to call that evidence of sinister collusion between the two is, politely, a stretch. These DNS records alone simply cannot prove that any specific messages were sent at those times. In fact, they can’t really prove anything at all, and certainly not “communication” between Trump and Alfa. This cannot be overstated: No one, not Tea Leaves, not his academic peers, and not Franklin Foer, can show that a single message was exchanged between Trump and Alfa.

https://theintercept.com/2016/11/01/her ... il-server/

Alan C wrote:Also, what's happening with those Russian sanctions the Trump is refusing to ok despite near unanimous bipartisan support. Is there any pushback from Congress?

Donald Trump’s alleged affair with a former Playboy model more than a decade ago reportedly came to an end over guilt and some questionable comments made by the would-be Republican president.

Karen McDougal, 1998’s Playmate of the Year, had a nine-month-long affair with the New York billionaire that ended around April 2007 after she began feeling guilty about the tryst, according to the New Yorker’s report published Friday morning citing multiple unnamed sources. Another factor in the alleged relationship ending, according to the report, was that Trump said a friend of hers liked “the big black dick” when a relationship with an African-American man was brought up in conversation.

Trump is said to have made the comment, which offended both women, while McDougal and her friend rode in his limousine to a Miss Universe pageant. Trump reportedly also discussed how attractive McDougal's friend was and the size of her breasts.

McDougal is said to have told Trump that her mother disapproved of him, to which Trump called McDougal’s mother an “old hag.”

WASHINGTON — The special counsel investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election charged 13 Russian nationals and three Russian organizations on Friday with illegally trying to disrupt the American political process, including efforts designed to boost the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump and hurt that of his opponent, Hillary Clinton.

The indictment represents the first charges by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, for meddling in the 2016 presidential election — the fundamental crime that he was assigned to investigate.

In a 37-page indictment filed in United States District Court, Mr. Mueller said that the 13 individuals have conspired since 2014 to violate laws that prohibit foreigners from spending money to influence federal elections in the United States.

The indictment charges that the foreigners falsely posed as American citizens, stole identities and otherwise engaged in fraud and deceit in an effort to influence the U.S. political process, including the 2016 presidential race.

Seabass wrote:Another affair during his current marriage, this time with a Playboy model:

TRUMP TALKED ABOUT ‘BIG BLACK DICK’ AND OFFENDED PLAYBOY MODEL, ENDING AFFAIR, REPORT CLAIMS

Donald Trump’s alleged affair with a former Playboy model more than a decade ago reportedly came to an end over guilt and some questionable comments made by the would-be Republican president.

Karen McDougal, 1998’s Playmate of the Year, had a nine-month-long affair with the New York billionaire that ended around April 2007 after she began feeling guilty about the tryst, according to the New Yorker’s report published Friday morning citing multiple unnamed sources. Another factor in the alleged relationship ending, according to the report, was that Trump said a friend of hers liked “the big black dick” when a relationship with an African-American man was brought up in conversation.

Trump is said to have made the comment, which offended both women, while McDougal and her friend rode in his limousine to a Miss Universe pageant. Trump reportedly also discussed how attractive McDougal's friend was and the size of her breasts.

McDougal is said to have told Trump that her mother disapproved of him, to which Trump called McDougal’s mother an “old hag.”

continued...