Slashdot Mirror
Philatelists Push Petition For Pluto Probe Postage
Hugh Pickens writes "Space.com reports that an online petition directed at the USPS and its Citizen Stamp Advisory Committee (CSAC) hopes to collect 100,000 signatures or more by March 13, the 82nd anniversary of the announcement of Pluto's discovery as the New Horizons robotic spacecraft gets closer to flyby Pluto and its moons in 2015. 'This is a chance for us all to celebrate what American space exploration can achieve though hard work, technical excellence, the spirit of scientific inquiry, and the uniquely human drive to explore,' reads the petition. Whether or not the New Horizons team is successful in getting the USPS to honor their spacecraft's mission, the probe will have delivered a stamp to Pluto. New Horizons includes nine stowaways including one of the 1991 'Not Yet Explored' Pluto stamps together with other mementos including a Florida quarter, a small container with an ounce of the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto, and a small segment of 2004 Ansari X Prize winner SpaceShipOne, the first privately-funded crewed spacecraft. 'Why nine mementos? I bet you can guess,' says Dr. Alan Stern, New Horizons' Principal Investigator adding why he wanted to send one of the Pluto stamps on the mission. 'Pluto may not have been explored when that stamp set came out, but we were going to conquer that,' says Stern. 'I wanted to fly it as a sort of 'in your face' thing.'"
Why would anyone replace the perfectly good "pertaining" with "for" in that subject?
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
Please do not forget that Pluto has been and always will be a planet and yes I'm aware of the current definition.
Regards
Slashdotgirl
The more I know, the less I know
Don't practice your alliteration on me!
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Philatelists Push Petition For Pluto...
I'm not sure what oral sex has to do with Pluto...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Slashdot story about stamps?!
DROS - Open-Source Robot Software
Why should New Horizons get a stamp, and why not Cassini-Huygens, the Galileo probe, the Magellan orbiter, or MESENGER? The others all completed their missions and studied real planets, while New Horizons has not arrived at the minor planet Pluto yet. Get over it, Pluto fanboys, your boring little ice ball is not a planet!!!
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
In 2015 we will be more aware that we don't have flying cars nor MrFusion than that we got near Pluto. When Doc Brown appears in his Delorean will be badly disappointed.
As if Tombaugh cares. This is your taxpayer dollars at work serving a Stone Age vision that Tombaugh isn't dead and gone, instead he's up in the sky with a magical sky fairy looking down at Pluto and thinking "It's nice they gave me such a resting place."
There's no afterlife, so enjoy the life you got, and encourage people not to waste public money doing anything pointless with you after you die.
You sick deviants.
UNSUBSCRIBE
The American Association Against Abusively Applied Acronyms has a problem with the title of this submission.
The probe will be pretty much to Pluto by then, and it will be the 85th anniversary of the {dwarf}-planet's discovery. A nice round number that people normally reserve such celebrations for.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
My personal use of stamps is down about 50%, as more of my bills are paid electronically. As more and more data replaces first class letters, postage stamps will soon be a relic. So what can replace them as a way to publicly commemorate an event? I recognize the Post Office will not vanish entirely, since we still need to deliver physical items sometimes, but those rarely use regular stamps.
Rats, my snail mail is slow enough already (three weeks for a package from NJ to MD, by way of side trips to Florida and Virginia--maybe they got a slingshot gravity boost down there?). If my mail has to go to Pluto, I'll have to get relativistic to live long enough for my snail mail to get to me.
Don't worry, the post office killed off the stamp collecting hobby years ago. And the US mint is threatening to do the same to (commemorative) coin collecting.
The post office kept making stamps for the silliest things and so the hobby died due to over-saturation. Perhaps we need to realize that not -everything- needs to be commemorated in coin or stamp format and keep it for the big things that happen.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Keep it down with the "P"s, willya? My shirt is soaked, I had to wipe my face, and I had to disinfect my keyboard.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
..., after all, everybody knows philately will get you nowhere!
Is the "drive to explore" uniquely human?
I don't know.
My chickens are pretty inquisitive.
Wow, spelled that right first time.
What if something goes wrong? Stamp will be egg on face.
Table-ized A.I.
..."fellatists".
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
Hugh Pickens,
gets closer to flyby Pluto and its moons in 2015
As Pluto isn't even considered a planet anymore, you have no excuse to call Pluto's satellites moons. They are truly just satellites.
And on a more pedantic note, while I'm at it, flyby is not a verb. Editors, HELLO???
Mod parent up!
Canada lets you make your own stamps. Didn't see anything about not being allowed to ship to the States.
http://www.canadapost.ca/cpo/mc/personal/productsservices/atoz/picturepostage.jsf
Get it for Android, Blackbery, or iPhone too.
The Post Office is losing money, do we really want to do this? I have a radical proposal. How about the Post Office printing just one stamp for each denomination. Once a stamp design is decided, NEVER change it. This printing up new stamps to satisfy stamp collectors is lunacy. If the stamp collectors want new stamps to collect why don't they hire a printing company to issue stamps just for their personal hobby. Yes, they will tell you that their hobby adds to the revenue of the Post Office. Does the money brought in actually pay for the cost of designing new stamps? You have to pay for artists to design the stamp and then have to retool the printing press to produce the stamp and then distribute and possibly advertise the new stamp.
The same is true for coin collectors.
"...the uniquely human drive to explore." There is absolutely nothing unique about this. A great deal of the animal life that exists spends the majority of their time doing what could be interpreted exploring. From ants foraging for food to monkeys waving their arms running around in the jungle, nearly every animal explores. It is a fundamental behavior to many forms of life. Humans are actually much less likely to explore than other animals, since we live in dwellings with monotonously repetitive lives on a planet that we have mapped in its entirety. Either the writer of this sentence either hadn't thought about this, or they were using a thesaurus to inject their dribble with more interesting words.