Blue Origin's Stay of SpaceX's Moon Lander Contract Gets One-Week Extension Thanks to...PDF Files (mashable.com) 80
Earlier this month Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin sued NASA over a moon lander contract awarded to SpaceX.
Now Mashable reports that "America's next trip to the moon may suddenly be delayed a bit thanks to...PDFs?" A U.S. federal judge has granted the Department of Justice a week-long extension in its lawsuit with Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin. The reason? Large PDF files...
According to the DOJ, there is more than 7 GB of data related to the case. However, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims' online system allows for only files of up to 50 MB in size to be uploaded. This all amounts to "several hundred" PDFs, including other file formats that would be converted to PDFs. The DOJ says it also sought to convert multiple separate documents into individual PDF batches but explained that those larger files could cause the upload system to crash. "We have tried several different ways to create 50-megabyte files for more efficient filing, all without success thus far," the DOJ said.
Instead of using the online file system, the U.S. government will transfer the documents for the case to DVDs.
Futurism reports the situation was exacerbated "because the agency staff that could have fixed the issue were at the 36th Annual Space Symposium last week."
On Twitter, space reporter Joey Roullete notes the judge's ruling means an additional one-week stay before the awarding of SpaceX's contract..
Or, as Mashable puts it, "Space exploration is currently on hold thanks to a lawsuit and a slew of pesky PDF files."
Now Mashable reports that "America's next trip to the moon may suddenly be delayed a bit thanks to...PDFs?" A U.S. federal judge has granted the Department of Justice a week-long extension in its lawsuit with Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin. The reason? Large PDF files...
According to the DOJ, there is more than 7 GB of data related to the case. However, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims' online system allows for only files of up to 50 MB in size to be uploaded. This all amounts to "several hundred" PDFs, including other file formats that would be converted to PDFs. The DOJ says it also sought to convert multiple separate documents into individual PDF batches but explained that those larger files could cause the upload system to crash. "We have tried several different ways to create 50-megabyte files for more efficient filing, all without success thus far," the DOJ said.
Instead of using the online file system, the U.S. government will transfer the documents for the case to DVDs.
Futurism reports the situation was exacerbated "because the agency staff that could have fixed the issue were at the 36th Annual Space Symposium last week."
On Twitter, space reporter Joey Roullete notes the judge's ruling means an additional one-week stay before the awarding of SpaceX's contract..
Or, as Mashable puts it, "Space exploration is currently on hold thanks to a lawsuit and a slew of pesky PDF files."
Or, put another way (Score:1)
Or, as Mashable puts it, "Space exploration is currently on hold thanks to a lawsuit and a slew of pesky PDF files."
See, I would've said something like:
"Space exploration is currently on hold thanks to a lawsuit by a phallic-like rocket manufacturing firm headed by a short CEO and a slew of pesky PDF files."
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Phallic rocket or not, that's hardly the real issue. All rockets are arguably phallic shaped.
The problem is that this kind of crappy manoeuvre by Blue Origin is hurting everyone - it's letting the US slip behind in space, it's holding back other commercial companies from progressing, and it's also damaging Blue Origin, because what engineer or technician wants to go work for a company that has a reputation of being a bunch of pricks with a prick shaped product and a prick in charge?
They are already losing
Re: Or, put another way (Score:5, Insightful)
That's just it it isn't really. Starship development isn't on hold. Officially SpaceX x can't bill nasa for starship human lander. But development of that part is all design work now anyways. Construction and design is proceeding. Unlike blue origin which requires governmentoney. Musk is building starship for other goals the lunar lander is just one of them as a step to Mars.
Re: Or, put another way (Score:2)
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Did it really put anyone on hold? I doubt Blue Origin & cohorts are suspending work they'd otherwise be doing because of the lawsuit (as opposed to because they lost the bid), and I doubt anyone else cares.
This is a bureaucratic headache for NASA, and wasted taxpayer money, nothing more.(Assuming Blue Origin and their traditional aerospace cohorts don't manage to buy off the right people).
Seems to me the only thing it really serves to do is to make the relationship between Blue Origin and NASA more adv
Re: Or, put another way (Score:2)
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Agreed. In fact, from some of Musk's interview comments it sounds like right now even the engineering teams are pretty much focused on just the next immediate milestones in Starship functionality. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the Lunar Starship was actually considered a distraction at this point, and they'd be just as glad to not need to be showing progress toward those milestones until after they start delivering payloads to orbit.
Especially since in at least one interview Musk suggested that they m
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"The problem is that this kind of crappy manoeuvre by Blue Origin is hurting everyone"
There's plenty I don't like about Elon but SpaceX is the demonstrated leader in private commercial spaceflight.
No one else is close and this is a bullshit move by Bezos.
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curious.
bezos can already do this project with some chump change.
so why limit ones ambitions with limitations that nasa would have
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Credibility? Paying customers?
Right now Blue Origin's only business is a sub-orbital novelty ride, and hopefully selling BE-4 rocket engines in the near future.
Even if they get New Glenn off the ground in the next few years, it will probably have a horrible time competing on cost with Starship, and any delays will only give Starship that much more of a head start to mature and lower prices even further. And without having a pre-existing cozy relationship with NASA, why would anyone care they exist?
Having
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It's not space exploration, it's upper atmosphere tourism for the wealthy. Now it is the litigation model of upper atmosphere tourism for the wealthy. This is just about the opposite of "space exploration".
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This is about Blue Moon, not New Shephard. And in fairness, since the lander is traveling to lunar orbit as cargo, and never has to deal with the inefficiencies of atmosphere, the rocketry demands are going to be closer to what Shephard is doing than any Earth-to-orbit rocket.
Still, give me the modified Earth-based super-heavy rocket any day. With that you've got the tools to begin lunar development, rather than just cramming a few people into a sardine can for a few days of lunar exploration. We put bo
Sue Blue Blue Origin (Score:2)
Can we as taxpayers so Blue Origin for this frivolous bullshit? It's wasting our money.
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I didn't mention Tesla this time, did I? But thanks for co-shilling .. all publicity is good publicity, right?
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I'm pretty sure you can sue, but it might be dismissed as frivolous.
You can sue for nearly anything. Winning against a competent defense is something else.
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I believe there is a way to counter sue though to recoup legal costs but it's not a default part of the legal system that a plaintiff in a suit pays these costs on a failed suit and I also do not believe the DOJ files these suits. I suspect there is some reason for the latter that might be covered in the constitution or a similar document.
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as a lawyer, I can't imagine a judge *not* issuing sanctions for suing the plaintiff for the defendant's troubles in getting something filed . . .
PDFs? How about small file upload restrictions (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:PDFs? How about small file upload restrictions (Score:5, Insightful)
Video, yes. But that's text.
I know I invariably sound like an old fool when I point out that it used to be possible to store a whole lot of documents - complete with formatting and all, not just plain-text - on a single floppy. But really it's true: the better technology gets, the more it's used to get sloppy and waste resources.
The size PDFs get these days is just ridiculous, yet it doesn't have to be that way: the format isn't inherently that wasteful, and carefully made PDFs can be made quite compact.
Almost surely photos / scans of text (Score:5, Insightful)
PDFs of textual information (formatted or not), is space-efficient. It's basically zipped text with some formatting bytes. 2KB compressed to around 400 bytes per page.
On the other hand, a SCAN of a page is around 20 MB, and compress to maybe between 400 KB - 4 MB.
So a scan of a page of text is roughly 100-1000 times the size of the original text. Huge PDFs come from putting a printed page through a scanner (producing a high-res photo of the page), as opposed to "print to PDF", which puts the actual text into the page.
The real "format problem" is "PDFs containing scanned pictures of pages".
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I am surprised neither of you mention it but they say converted to PDF. It seems like they have a requirement for PDFs perhaps to provide better access to a range of mobile applications which may include even notation software. Since they mention converted, the file size may be an attempt to limit processing costs which we can assume the DOJ pays.
Your points are still valid but I doubt this convertor is really doing scans and the problems they have are likely with the convertor, so if all the data was alrea
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A docx file is already compressed as a zip file. You can prove it by changing the extension to .zip and opening it with your tool of preference.
What they really should do is use Acrobat's "Save As" => "Reduced size PDF" and change all the images in the PDF to no more than 300 dpi, or even 200 dpi. Many scan to PDF utilities save the document as 600 dpi or higher and make the PDF much bigger than needed for readability.
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On the other hand, a SCAN of a page is around 20 MB, and compress to maybe between 400 KB - 4 MB.
What compressor are you using? Even G4 should be more efficient than that, and JBIG2 or JB2 are even better. I'd expect something like 30 kB per scanned page.
Re: Almost surely photos / scans of text (Score:2)
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Well, a carefully made pdf *is* a text file, or at least that's true of a postscript file, and I assume it's true of a pdf.
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Unfortunately it's not that simple. Yes it is text at core, but many PDF generators create hugely inefficient files, include a metric ton of fonts and other shit that's not necessary, etc.
I've seen a PDF once where each letter was individually placed on the page with absolute positioning. The resulting file was huge.
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Indeed. Html can store formatted text about 100 times more concisely than PDFs typically do.
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Unfortunately it's not that simple. Yes it is text at core, but many PDF generators create hugely inefficient files, include a metric ton of fonts and other shit that's not necessary, etc....
Yes, that's it: may be efficient in principle, but in the actual world, many pdf files are amazingly huge.
I have often taken Powerpoint presentations and found that "save as pdf" turns them from 3M files into 20M files.
(yeah, that's right: I'm sometimes one of "those guys" who sometimes make presentations to management using powerpoint.)
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Sorry, but Pdfs are full of unnecessary crap..
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The format itself does not mandate any "crap".
It is up to whatever application that creates it what the file contains, so it is not PDF itself that is causing "a lot of crap".
Do not blame the file format for what is put in the files.
And the reason I know this is that in a previous job, I created an application that created PDF files using PostScript source run through Adobe Distiller. The conversion to PDF did not add "a lot of crap"
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Then again, which more compact format ensures that the output is exactly the same across all display platforms, including print?
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When I ran a PC Support company, in the mid-1980s, I had a special "Swiss Army Knife" 3.5" floppy disc.
It was bootable, had a full operating system, Norton (for sorting out disc problems), an editor (WordStar), a virus checker (I think), and miscellaneous other useful files.
All in 1.44mb.
Now get off my lawn, you're taking up too much space!
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The thing is, PDF makes it ridiculously easy to contain all sorts of information in a format that's well defined.
You can store text documents, images, scans, and other formats in PDF and pretty much any PDF reader implementing the standard can render it out.
You can't say that for any other format - DOC for Microsoft Office was the same from 1997 through 2007 or 2011 when it moved to DOCX, and nothing other than Word can open it properly. But then you could also have ODF which may be questionable on non-nati
Solution is Justice System Advancement (Score:2)
DVDs? (Score:5, Funny)
So the solution to transferring 2010-sized files to a server with 2000 size limitations is to use a late 90's media format?
Ever heard of USB sticks? Oh yeah, the DOJ's computers probably don't have USB ports, and they don't make RS232 thumbdrives...
Our tax dollars at work folks...
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So the solution to transferring 2010-sized files to a server with 2000 size limitations is to use a late 90's media format?
The next alternate backup solution is to print everything out -- including videos, as flip-books.
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Pssha. Printers are for peons. In Japan the elite use Fax machines.
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I don't see how your proposal is any better than DVDs. it's actually slightly worse, since appropriately chosen DVDs are write only and can't be altered.
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This is a brilliant point, the file type chosen might be to preserve the write onlyness of the data.
Re:DVDs? (Score:4, Informative)
Damned straight they better not have thumb drives. Huge security issue. DVD's can be write-once archival media: perfect for this situation.
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p>Ever heard of USB sticks? Oh yeah, the DOJ's computers probably don't have USB ports, and they don't make RS232 thumbdrives...
My annual security briefing is very vigorous about telling me to never ever ever put strange USB devices into my port. "Just put it on a USB stick" is not always the right solution.
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They ordered large USB drives from Amazon, but the inventory was comingled with knockoff parts that were only 128KB.
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DVDs are write-once. They don't allow the data to be rewritten. If the documents cannot be uploaded through the secure portal to ensure "chain of evidence", they need to be on a medium that cannot be modified in transit.
PDF are compressible (Score:1)
Given the court is probably looking for documents that fit on a physical piece of paper, you can get that down to ~100kB per document even if it is a diagram. For text, you can simply use the text format, we used to fit massive amounts of data in just a few kB back in the day, PostScript was designed to describe your document.
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PDFs can be concise in theory.
But in practice...
Re: PDF are compressible (Score:1)
I agree, but whenever I come across a 8192x4096 50MB PDF image (like our architect loves to do), I run it through a converter and it spits out a few kB document, not sure why they canâ(TM)t do this.
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Re: PDF are compressible (Score:2)
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Hilarious. A few thousand meters into the upper atmosphere and we're exploring space?
This guy explored space from his chair
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
This fascination with rockets is childish and delusional. It's like a magic phrase that gets your limp nerd dicks throbbing.
Ridiculous.
Blue Origin has make the stunning accomplishment of 300% higher access to the atmosphere than a big balloon can.
Meanwhile SpaceX is delivering Astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station.
The ole PDF Bomb: cat /dev/random lawsuit.pdf (Score:4, Interesting)
These PDFs are either pure unopen-able garbage or 4000dpi image scans. Just print it out and scan the pages back in at 4000dpi.
Better yet, take a PDF and append 7GB of random data.
This is just a stalling tactic by Bezos.
If these PDFs are really 7GB of legal text, I am going to be impressed.
It seem as if the PDF could be printed and scanned back in at a low-res. :)
As Musk tweeted, Bezos retired so he could sue SpaceX and Microsoft.
This is just a tactic to slow one of the most innovative American companies down. If you can't win, stall.
I encourage you all to watch this rant from Mr. Monroe about how Congress and NHTSA are piling on Tesla over fires.
https://youtu.be/8hcB1Z6-A7Q [youtu.be]
He recently reviewed Ford's Blue Cruise hands-free driving system and compared it to Tesla's Beta 9. You'll never guess which on totally crushed the other.
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These PDFs are either pure unopen-able garbage or 4000dpi image scans. Just print it out and scan the pages back in at 4000dpi.
Better yet, take a PDF and append 7GB of random data.
This is just a stalling tactic by ...
without going into particular agendas, i'm going with his. 7gb of text data is just not rational, you can't even read that in a lifetime, let alone consider all that information to decide on a case. this is either pure gibberish or deliberate inflated formatting.
the court should not even accept such evidence. it's amazing that they do not have sensible document format requirements and quotas in place that would have made this a non-issue.
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7gb of text data is just not rational, you can't even read that in a lifetime
It would be tedious, but it could be done. The average 250-page book has about 500,000 characters. Divide that into the 7 billion characters gives you 14,000 books. If your read one book at day, it would take you a little over 38 years to read them all. Citation [quora.com]
However, as you pointed out, 7GB of data is probably included to just overwhelm the appeal process. If all the government documents were included only by reference, and all the video was referenced and only the applicable 2 minutes were included
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but isn't the whole point of that information to be digested by a justice panel. these are regular people with good training in that particular task indeed, but there are practical limits. i see that what you suggest can easily happen but it goes way beyond practical limits, and i simply can't believe that all that information is being looked at at all, so why submit it in the first place? i guess this an issue of protection of civil rights colliding with basic practicality and, ofc, just exposing the whole
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Re: The ole PDF Bomb: cat /dev/random lawsuit.pdf (Score:2)
Not buying it (Score:2)
I am really beginning to dispise (Score:3)
SneakerNet Anyone? (Score:2)
According to Google Maps [google.com], these two buildings are 11 minutes apart by public bus, with a bus leaving every 15 minutes.
And the DoJ just got a one-week stay because they weren't able to have someone put their documents on a laptop or pen-drive and walk/bus/car them over to USCFC? The article clearly states that the issue was with the limitations on uploads by the public
7GB, seriously DOJ?!? (Score:1)
Court system online portal size limits for PDF doc (Score:4, Informative)
I read all the comments so far and nobody has mentioned the fact that they have any experience at all with filing court documents online and dealing with the size restrictions that exist in most of the state court software created by Tyler software and with also the federal court filing system that is part of the Pacer federal system and more specifically the CM/ECF.
Size Limits in Online Court Document Portals
For example the limit for uploading a single document that is a PDF convert a document is usually 25 megabytes per document with a total limit of 35 megabytes for the entire envelope that is being filed which might include more than one document. Recently just in the last few years these limits have been increased so that the size of the envelope is now 50 megabytes maximum with some kind of a larger size per PDF document.
Text PDF versus Scanned Image PDF
Now the additional problem that happens with text documents that are filed with the courts is that instead of these documents which are produced in the original word processing application and save this PDF most of the time they are actually printed out on a physical piece of paper and then all that paper is scanned at fast speed by a scanner which saves the image of the text into the PDF document and afterwards a separate software processes used to perform optical character recognition to bring back the meaning of the text into the PDF document to allow searching and indexing.
So what happens instead is that instead of having a PDF document that's just a couple of kilobytes for dozens of pages that are saved as compressible text with information on the layout you end up with these massively huge multi megabyte PDF documents that have images of the pages that were scanned with the recognized text by the OCR process put into the same PDF document to allow reading. This also creates the problem of having huge file sizes for the PDF document with the scanned images and the OCR process is not perfect and quite frankly creates a lot of mistakes and errors where the actual text that is selectable and searchable might be incorrect especially if I'm usual formatting was used for certain parts of the text.
Coincidentally I personally had to deal with the same problem that the department of Justice had to deal with on the size limit of each document in the size limit of the envelope being filed for the court case and no matter how much size reduction I did on the PDF file and how much I compressed the images down to 150 DPI or even as lowest 100 or 75 DPI I couldn't fit all of the information in one document in one envelope filing and had to split it up.
Updating References After Document Splits
The additional difficulty that this creates and splitting up a large court filing across many documents is that if you are using references two parts of your own document or other documents that you're filing as exhibits and those are now split among multiple documents for a single document or exhibit you need to go backwards through your court filing and the original document that sets out the argument and update all the references to everything else that you just uploaded with the correct Bates identification for documents if they were part of the discovery process including the page numbers and paragraph numbers all of the piece of information that you are referring to in your footnotes and referencing in your exhibits. And since you had to split everything up into tiny little pieces this becomes a monumental process of identifying the document, the page, and the paragraph across dozens or hundreds of documents that you had to split up.
No USB Media DVD-ROM Only
Also when dealing with the court systems when you exchange documents back and forth with them they do not allow you to use USB sticks or hard disks that are USB connected because most of the court document computers are locked down with security to prevent viruses from being introduced into the systems. So the local rules by the c
Adobe Acrobat software crashes (Score:2)
I almost forgot to mention another part that I had a problem with when I was dealing with large document Court filing limits and when I was assembling large PDF documents from multiple sources. The Adobe Acrobat software at software is the preferred software for the creation, manipulation, management, optimization, and optical character recognition for documents that will be saved in the PDF format.
One thing that happens in court cases is that the documents that are presented to you from the courts are save
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As someone who deals with ECF on a daily basis (well, at least when the feds aren't keeping bankruptcy attorneys unemployed with covid relief programs . . .), I'll put in my two bits.
ECF is a disaster. It is horrible. I can *see* the idiotic design decisions that went into how it functions and prompts users. You can actually get four or five "hit enter to continue" pages in a row as it follow its tree.
That said, it beats every other system I've seen, save one. The Nevada Supreme Court, at least when I
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The additional difficulty that this creates and splitting up a large court filing across many documents is that if you are using references two parts of your own document or other documents that you're filing as exhibits and those are now split among multiple documents for a single document or exhibit you need to go backwards through your court filing and the original document that sets out the argument and update all the references to everything else that you just uploaded with the correct Bates identification for documents if they were part of the discovery process including the page numbers and paragraph numbers all of the piece of information that you are referring to in your footnotes and referencing in your exhibits. And since you had to split everything up into tiny little pieces this becomes a monumental process of identifying the document, the page, and the paragraph across dozens or hundreds of documents that you had to split up.
If that's not automated by the document prep software, you're in desperate need of an upgrade. If anyone is doing that nonsense manually, ever, it's no wonder lawyers over-bill. That should be an anchor set with a couple of clicks which generates the correct reference from document metadata and machine-generated paragraph numbers.
Haystacking strikes again. (Score:2)
This is an old legal tactic from discovery proceedings - each side is compelled to show the other all the evidence they intend to show, so they hand over mountains of stuff that is barely germane to the question at hand hoping to distract from the few things in that mountain that are important, or that they really hope the other side doesn't find in the amount of time given by the judge for discovery - the needle in the haystack.
My guess is that whoever is running this thing on the Blue Origin side knew tha
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The classic case we were told of in law school was Control Data suing IBM.
IBM had a habit of taking requests for "any and all documents relating to" something quite liberally, responding with trainloads of documents.
And when I say "trainloads", I mean that *literally*.
But this time, the attorney was familiar with he tactic, and bought a DEC minicomputer and hired an army of paralegals to index documents.
And IBM ended up being informed that the document levels were going *down* as the plaintiff continued to
Privitization (Score:2)
This is what you get when you privatize institutions like space exploration (or any government institution like NASA). When you get corporate clowns like Musk and Bezos to run it, you get back-room deals, lawsuits and bickering over money. It gets shady really quickly.
Station wagon full of DVDs (Score:1)
We think of the Internet as fast but it is hard to compete with the speed of a station wagon full of DVDs to move large volumes of data.
Brevity is the soul of wit (Score:1)
I had a professor in college who said that he wouldn't read past the 30th page of a masters thesis and not past the 100th page of a doctoral thesis. His reasoning was that there was no practical value to being wordy. He said that he once told a shocked doctoral candidate flat out that his thesis was too long and wouldn't read it until he edited it down to under 100 pages.