Finally got the finished film online Milan. 90 minutes long! Grab some popcorn!

The night before the 1986 explosion, Boisjoly and four others argued that joints in the shuttle’s boosters couldn’t withstand a cold-weather launch.

By Ralph Vartabedian, Los Angeles Times

February 7, 2012
The 1986 explosion that destroyed the space shuttle Challenger and killed seven astronauts shocked the nation, but for one rocket engineer the tragedy became a personal burden and created a lifelong quest to challenge the bureaucratic ethics that had caused the tragedy.

Roger Boisjoly was an engineer at solid rocket booster manufacturer Morton Thiokol and had begun warning as early as 1985 that the joints in the boosters could fail in cold weather, leading to a catastrophic failure of the casing. Then on the eve of the Jan. 28, 1986, launch, Boisjoly and four other space shuttle engineers argued late into the night against the launch.

In cold temperatures, o-rings in the joints might not seal, they said, and could allow flames to reach the rocket’s metal casing. Their pleas and technical theories were rejected by senior managers at the company and NASA, who told them they had failed to prove their case and that the shuttle would be launched in freezing temperatures the next morning. It was among the great engineering miscalculations in history.

Labor Activist Li Qiang wants you to know that the iPhone 4 in his pocket is not an endorsement of Apple’s policies, just an acknowledgment that the company is doing a better job of monitoring factory conditions than its peers. The founder of leading advocacy group China Labor Watch (CLW) told us that, though the Cupertino company does more-thorough inspections than competitors, it is responsible for poor working conditions at its suppliers’ factories and needs to invest some of its record-breaking profits in improving them. ‘Although I know that the iPhone 4 is made at sweat shop factories in China, I still think that this is the only choice, because Apple is actually one of the best. Actually before I made a decision, I compared Apple with other cell phone companies, such as Nokia,’ he said through a translator. ‘And the conditions in those factories are worse than the ones of Apple.’

Eavesdrop is an application for listening in on TCP conversations on the network your computer is attached to.

You can’t trust internet companies to keep your data safe from governments.