I've worked with some quiet, competent women and some loudmouthed, entitled, idiotic women. But I've also worked with some quiet, competent men and some loudmouthed, entitled, idiotic men.
Sure, and that's totally fair. The issue comes when, say, 60% of JobsRequiringNavigatingSkills are men and 40% are women, and people say "this is unfair".
To be honest, though, it depends on the job. Men have, typically, much more upper body strength than women, so are more suited to being things like garbage men. Yet nobody's clamoring for equal numbers of women to be garbage *people*.
Yet they are for firefighters, even though firefighting is basically a job where you turn upper body strength into saved lives, simply because they want to be seen as "equal".
People are different and have different things they're good at and bad at. Most HR people are women even though that's a comfortable, high paid, safe job. And I'm okay with that.
Granted this is 100% true, but h.265 (or HEVC) can basically encode twice the bit rate at the same file size compared to h.264. Accordingly, transcoding h.264 into h.265 at 1.5 the bit rate is essentially lossless in terms of visual quality, but the final file will be approximately 75% the original size.
If someone has a bunch of high bit-rate h.264 (aka not stuff downloaded off the web which tends to be really highly compressed anyway), I can see someone wanting to save space and reencode it, especially if it's for something like "all of the X-files" which they're unlikely to want to rewatch anytime soon, and when they don't, won't mind a slight drop in quality.
Self-published author here, I'm on a first-name basis with Hugh Howey, and I know H.M. Ward indirectly through various Facebook groups and shared contacts. I've published about 20 novels so far (#21 coming soon).
I will disagree that "If you're an author and you aren't making money you're marketing yourself wrong or you're writing in a genre that isn't popular.", but I've noticed a lot of trends to success. Not everyone who does these things will do well, but most people who do, do.
The main thing is: you can't just do it with one book. Most people have a good book idea in them, some have two, some have a whole series. I've been publishing since 2012 and, as I said, I've put out 20 novels. That's about 3-5 a year. That's hard.
You hit the nail on the head in terms of genres. Sci-fi/fantasy is where I make my money, along with trashy romance under a pen name. I tick all the boxes you're talking about in terms of genre and I can basically all of this. That's where the money is. I'm not a millionaire, but I hit my first $10,000 month this year, which is nice. Learning a lot about taxes.
Publishing in this way has been my living for a few years now. It makes money. It's a hard job, doing what I do, but it's a good job. These days, Google Play is my largest retailer by *far*, but back in the day... I couldn't have done it without Amazon.
Even today they're a big chunk of my income, even if the GP train is where the money is for me.
It's not scary at all and is in fact completely understandable.
Basically until World War I, for the vast majority of people, you either killed or you died. Even during the 1600's, arguably the beginning of "civilization" as something where violence was not commonplace, people still fought highly ritualized duels, countries still invaded other countries for the express purpose of taking their shit, people took and kept slaves, nations conquered and plundered and stole and all manner of violent actions. The only way, at the time, to stop your shit from being taken, to stop yourself being conquered and enslaved, was through violence.
If you were strong, you survived. If you were weak, or chose to be weak, you died. Those kinds of instincts were bred into us over tens of thousands of years of evolution, ruthlessly and yet apathetically selecting the strongest, most violent, people to carry on their genes. The guy who got to fuck all the women was the guy who could club all the other men on the head the best. Violence, and willingness to use it, until recently, was strongly evolutionarily selected for.
It was really only World War I and II that changed that. We got so fucking good at killing that we decided: hey, maybe lets try another way. Instead of having violence be the domain of all, where our nations raise vast armies of conscripts, let's instead have small, professional armies well supported with things like tanks, aircraft, machine guns, artillery, night vision, etc. They actually work better.
As a consequence of this, the vast majority of our citizens are now peaceful, but our armies are, in terms of overall ability to project force, more powerful than ever. The Roman Legions at their absolute height would get massacred by even the US Coast Guard, let alone the full might of the US Military. It would be a laughable massacre where I would fully expect 0 casualties from the US forces (excluding illnesses, accidents, etc) and 100% casualties from the Roman legions, assuming they fought to the last.
This is a change that's taken place over less than 100 years. That is a tiny blink in an evolutionary time period. We haven't changed and won't change for thousands of years because there's no evolutionary pressure on us to do so.
But, you know, I figure I should end on a slightly more upbeat note.
As much as "to the victor go the spoils" applies... no man rules alone.
A single man, no matter how powerful, no matter how violent or manly or tough, is defeated by many smaller, weaker people. Refer, again, to my example of the modern US Coast Guard versus the ENTIRE Roman Legion.
A single man cannot build an Apache gunship--and that gunship will fuck anyone. A single man cannot build a tank. A single man cannot build the complex logistical network to fuel an aircraft carrier, let alone maintain it, supply it with aircraft, sail it, coordinate strike missions, and generally put warheads on foreheads. A carrier-based strike mission to drop a single 500lb bomb requires the combined efforts of literally hundreds of thousands of people, probably millions. Just to deliver one bomb.
But, like I said, nothing can stand against it.
So. In the small picture, individual might makes right, but in the much larger broader sense, victory belongs to the cooperators.
As long as those cooperators put their collective talents towards fucking shit up.
For example, right now, if an OS update breaks an application, the onus is almost always on the application to update itself to work on the new platform (or throw in the towel).
However, if the law is changed such that upgrading an OS cannot remove functionality, what happens when, for example, Windows 11 arrives and Steam doesn't work on it, and Steam decides, "Well we're not fixing our app, and we're not going to work with you on a workaround, so... good luck getting people to upgrade hahahahahahaha".
It could be limited only to built-in services, but then, what happens when eventually (as is inevitable), Skydrive goes down for good? Skydrive is built into Windows 10 unless removed, and could be considered part of the OS (it's opt-out, rather than opt-in).
If the law changed, would Skydrive be a part of Windows forever and ever, and be essentially immortal?
... but it's actually not that bad. Comparable to Windows 7.
The new backup features are cool. Having volume shadow copies/file history baked in is neat.
The automatic restarting whenever an update comes in pisses me off, but I recognise that this is a necessary feature because so, so many people don't keep their machines up to date and (similar to immunization) that compromises the entire ecosystem.
Given it's basically free for me because I have a whole bunch of Windows 7/8 keys collected over the years, I'm okay with it. It seems good.
Well, I mean, if you're running Windows 10 right now... uhh.
Lemme rephrase. If Ubuntu 18.10 is 64-bit only, is that a problem? What show-stopping problem for a 2006 MacBook is present in 18.04 but fixed in 18.10?
What's wrong with running 18.04 until the hardware dies?
I think that the trouble finding testing hardware is quite telling.
Can end users even buy a new, off-the-shelf 32-bit system these days, except for specialized devices like embedded systems?
Is there anything more than a relatively tiny fraction of the user base that is stuck on 32-bit hardware, that can't use virtual machines to run that software on something that's not a potato?
And I mean, it's not like the old 32-bit versions of OS's are gone. Windows 95 is still around. It didn't go away. I'm willing to bet there are still Windows 95 machines running somewhere in mission critical systems in places around the world.
Yes, there's no security updates, but just unplug it from the internet and you're safe from the vast majority of attacks, and if you're worried about local access to your Windows 95 machine... install a thicker door?
The solution to this seems to be ludicrously simple. Why not simple help and encourage her to get a job, then use part of your combined incomes to hire a maid?
They'll probably do a better job (I'm guessing your girlfriend is not a professional cleaner), she'll be a lot happier, and your house will still be clean and livable. You'll probably also have much more money to throw around, too.
Even if you're 100% not trolling (heh), it's still incredibly insensitive. Would you accept an Atheist posting something like, "Well, they're just hunks of meat and organs now, I don't get why we're spending so much money and effort worrying about something we can't change. They're dead, can't bring 'em back!".
Everyone of every religious creed (and none at all) can be total jerks. Would it be too much to ask to just at least pretend to be sympathetic?
"The lack of evidence for this claim is evidence of a cover-up to hide the evidence of this claim, and is therefore evidence for this claim" is basically the prime argument for every conspiracy theory argument ever.
>Maybe the aliens are in contact with NASA/Government
If so, in't it much simpler for NASA to say to these aliens (who can travel between worlds easily), "Hey, don't fly in THIS specific spot during this specific time, by the way it's optical range for a shitty webcam on a fixed, predictable path, so like, it's really really tiny and SPACE IS BIG GUYS, just seriously avoid this tiny strip and you're fine."
That's like them saying, "Hey aliens, when you're visiting Earth and wandering around totally undisguised, try to avoid the front door NASA headquarters because we are filming a press release there today."
> The aliens might just be humoring the governments they're in contact with, they have no reason to hide from us or fear us
So now they're... just trolling us?
Space is big, so obviously, this is deliberate action. If they wanted to reveal themselves they wouldn't do so via a grainy image from the ISS; they could just appear over New York City and just hover for a while. If they wanted to hide, again, they could simply not be in this one specific spot at this one specific time.
> Space is big, observers are few, and non-official observers are easily discredited if something slips through
It's possible to discredit a few people, but with collaboration it becomes harder. I can concede an occasional independent voice may be silenced, but this kind of thing requires a competence that the US government has shown with literally no other part of its administration.
> The aliens might similarly be in contact with the other space-faring governments on the planet
That assumes that essentially the Chinese (current frenemies of the US), the EU (a group of many man disparate countries with plenty of quasi-rogue-state elements present), the Russians (traditional enemies of the US and relations are quite cold right now), the Indians (who are third-world aligned but lean toward Russia) would all agree to, under no circumstances, no matter how bad it got, no matter what, including things like the total collapse of the USSR which happened not all that long ago, or during heightened tensions such as Russia playing in the Syrian sandpit, or Russia invading Georgia, or Russia carving up the Ukraine, would never ever blab about this, ever.
It's the same problem with fake moon landings. The Russians had roughly equal instruments pointing toward the moon and tracked every US launch made there, and put their best minds to work analyzing it (for military purposes). If the landing was fake, they would laud this over the corrupt capitalist pig-dogs for all eternity, but even they acknowledge the US was really there.
Interesting, since I just learned about this kind of thing...
This is what's called the ad-hoc fallacy. The fallacy is where one party introduces new information for which there is no evidence at all, except that it fits a conclusion that party has already accepted.
For example:
Your neighbour Ted is your best friend, and an honest man. Ted would never steal from you. Yet you come home and find your house is burgled! You find muddy footprints that match Ted's unique shoe-print in your house, and you confide in your wife. "Maybe Ted stole from us..."
"Or maybe," says your wife, "someone stole Ted's shoes."
You peek out the window. Ted's shoes are by the door.
"Maybe," says your wife, "the thief put them back when they were done."
"Why would they do that?"
"Maybe they wanted to frame Ted."
"Why would they want to do *that*? Everyone loves Ted."
"Maybe Ted owes the mafia a gambling debt from college."
Etc etc. The problem is there's an infinite amount of bullshit in the world and only a finite amount of truth.
- NASA has enough money to pay someone to watch the feed, their hand hovering over a giant "SHUT IT ALL DOWN" button. They don't. - NASA knows they might have something to hide, so DOESN'T delay the live stream by one minute in case "Hey, aliens wandered into the frame, let's just static out those seconds and go oops, technical difficulties". - The aliens are smart enough to travel between worlds but aren't smart enough to hide from a camera that NASA could have told them, in advance, that they were pointing in this one place (space is VERY big). - None of the other observation devices pointed randomly at the sky (including people observing the ISS through their amateur telescopes and stuff, as people are want to do) saw this. - The EU, Russians, Chinese and Indians with all their hardware and observation technology (none of whom save possibly the EU have any incentive to cooperate with the US and would, in fact, leap at the chance to discredit and shame them) didn't see it either.
The worst part is the Schroeder's competence that has to take place here. NASA have to be crazy-dedicated and funded in order to successfully cover up something as obvious as alien spacecraft whizzing around within visual range of the ISS, but also dumb enough to let it get exposed so trivially and easily as a public camera with the world watching.
When you start to think about it even a little bit the likelihood that it's real, live, true alien visitors and not just some kind of weird light reflection, space debris, or whatever is vanishingly small.
(...which is exactly what they WOULD say, isn't it...)
It's an unfortunate byproduct of our electoral system that most government departments have trouble seeing beyond the 4 year election cycle, because a whole new group of people could be in power by then and completely reverse the direction they've been taking for this time.
This problem is amplified in the United States, it seems. Countries like Canada, Australia, most of the EU don't have this problem; the political parties are often quite similar in terms of their policies, differing usually only in name and a few minor things.
It's hard to think of a solution that might help the US situation, apart from an agreement between the two major parties that, for major undertakings like the mission to Mars, if the other assumes power then it will continue.
Of course, every politician and their dog will want conditions on that; riders, perks, kick-backs, etc. It's hard to see how it could actually work in practice.
Slashdot Mirror
No, development companies and IT support companies.
I've worked with some quiet, competent women and some loudmouthed, entitled, idiotic women. But I've also worked with some quiet, competent men and some loudmouthed, entitled, idiotic men.
I really don't think it's aligned to gender.
Sure, and that's totally fair. The issue comes when, say, 60% of JobsRequiringNavigatingSkills are men and 40% are women, and people say "this is unfair".
To be honest, though, it depends on the job. Men have, typically, much more upper body strength than women, so are more suited to being things like garbage men. Yet nobody's clamoring for equal numbers of women to be garbage *people*.
Yet they are for firefighters, even though firefighting is basically a job where you turn upper body strength into saved lives, simply because they want to be seen as "equal".
People are different and have different things they're good at and bad at. Most HR people are women even though that's a comfortable, high paid, safe job. And I'm okay with that.
Granted this is 100% true, but h.265 (or HEVC) can basically encode twice the bit rate at the same file size compared to h.264. Accordingly, transcoding h.264 into h.265 at 1.5 the bit rate is essentially lossless in terms of visual quality, but the final file will be approximately 75% the original size.
If someone has a bunch of high bit-rate h.264 (aka not stuff downloaded off the web which tends to be really highly compressed anyway), I can see someone wanting to save space and reencode it, especially if it's for something like "all of the X-files" which they're unlikely to want to rewatch anytime soon, and when they don't, won't mind a slight drop in quality.
Self-published author here, I'm on a first-name basis with Hugh Howey, and I know H.M. Ward indirectly through various Facebook groups and shared contacts. I've published about 20 novels so far (#21 coming soon).
I will disagree that "If you're an author and you aren't making money you're marketing yourself wrong or you're writing in a genre that isn't popular.", but I've noticed a lot of trends to success. Not everyone who does these things will do well, but most people who do, do.
The main thing is: you can't just do it with one book. Most people have a good book idea in them, some have two, some have a whole series. I've been publishing since 2012 and, as I said, I've put out 20 novels. That's about 3-5 a year. That's hard.
You hit the nail on the head in terms of genres. Sci-fi/fantasy is where I make my money, along with trashy romance under a pen name. I tick all the boxes you're talking about in terms of genre and I can basically all of this. That's where the money is. I'm not a millionaire, but I hit my first $10,000 month this year, which is nice. Learning a lot about taxes.
Publishing in this way has been my living for a few years now. It makes money. It's a hard job, doing what I do, but it's a good job. These days, Google Play is my largest retailer by *far*, but back in the day... I couldn't have done it without Amazon.
Even today they're a big chunk of my income, even if the GP train is where the money is for me.
It's not scary at all and is in fact completely understandable.
Basically until World War I, for the vast majority of people, you either killed or you died. Even during the 1600's, arguably the beginning of "civilization" as something where violence was not commonplace, people still fought highly ritualized duels, countries still invaded other countries for the express purpose of taking their shit, people took and kept slaves, nations conquered and plundered and stole and all manner of violent actions. The only way, at the time, to stop your shit from being taken, to stop yourself being conquered and enslaved, was through violence.
If you were strong, you survived. If you were weak, or chose to be weak, you died. Those kinds of instincts were bred into us over tens of thousands of years of evolution, ruthlessly and yet apathetically selecting the strongest, most violent, people to carry on their genes. The guy who got to fuck all the women was the guy who could club all the other men on the head the best. Violence, and willingness to use it, until recently, was strongly evolutionarily selected for.
It was really only World War I and II that changed that. We got so fucking good at killing that we decided: hey, maybe lets try another way. Instead of having violence be the domain of all, where our nations raise vast armies of conscripts, let's instead have small, professional armies well supported with things like tanks, aircraft, machine guns, artillery, night vision, etc. They actually work better.
As a consequence of this, the vast majority of our citizens are now peaceful, but our armies are, in terms of overall ability to project force, more powerful than ever. The Roman Legions at their absolute height would get massacred by even the US Coast Guard, let alone the full might of the US Military. It would be a laughable massacre where I would fully expect 0 casualties from the US forces (excluding illnesses, accidents, etc) and 100% casualties from the Roman legions, assuming they fought to the last.
This is a change that's taken place over less than 100 years. That is a tiny blink in an evolutionary time period. We haven't changed and won't change for thousands of years because there's no evolutionary pressure on us to do so.
But, you know, I figure I should end on a slightly more upbeat note.
As much as "to the victor go the spoils" applies... no man rules alone.
A single man, no matter how powerful, no matter how violent or manly or tough, is defeated by many smaller, weaker people. Refer, again, to my example of the modern US Coast Guard versus the ENTIRE Roman Legion.
A single man cannot build an Apache gunship--and that gunship will fuck anyone. A single man cannot build a tank. A single man cannot build the complex logistical network to fuel an aircraft carrier, let alone maintain it, supply it with aircraft, sail it, coordinate strike missions, and generally put warheads on foreheads. A carrier-based strike mission to drop a single 500lb bomb requires the combined efforts of literally hundreds of thousands of people, probably millions. Just to deliver one bomb.
But, like I said, nothing can stand against it.
So. In the small picture, individual might makes right, but in the much larger broader sense, victory belongs to the cooperators.
As long as those cooperators put their collective talents towards fucking shit up.
And it has all kinds of weird side effects.
For example, right now, if an OS update breaks an application, the onus is almost always on the application to update itself to work on the new platform (or throw in the towel).
However, if the law is changed such that upgrading an OS cannot remove functionality, what happens when, for example, Windows 11 arrives and Steam doesn't work on it, and Steam decides, "Well we're not fixing our app, and we're not going to work with you on a workaround, so... good luck getting people to upgrade hahahahahahaha".
It could be limited only to built-in services, but then, what happens when eventually (as is inevitable), Skydrive goes down for good? Skydrive is built into Windows 10 unless removed, and could be considered part of the OS (it's opt-out, rather than opt-in).
If the law changed, would Skydrive be a part of Windows forever and ever, and be essentially immortal?
Seems like this kind of technology would be very useful for long duration space probes.
... but it's actually not that bad. Comparable to Windows 7.
The new backup features are cool. Having volume shadow copies/file history baked in is neat.
The automatic restarting whenever an update comes in pisses me off, but I recognise that this is a necessary feature because so, so many people don't keep their machines up to date and (similar to immunization) that compromises the entire ecosystem.
Given it's basically free for me because I have a whole bunch of Windows 7/8 keys collected over the years, I'm okay with it. It seems good.
Sure and it is, but how many of them are running Ubuntu?
What show-stopping problem for a 2006 MacBook is present in 18.04 but fixed in 18.10?
What's wrong with running 18.04 until the hardware dies?
Well, I mean, if you're running Windows 10 right now... uhh.
Lemme rephrase. If Ubuntu 18.10 is 64-bit only, is that a problem? What show-stopping problem for a 2006 MacBook is present in 18.04 but fixed in 18.10?
What's wrong with running 18.04 until the hardware dies?
I think that the trouble finding testing hardware is quite telling.
Can end users even buy a new, off-the-shelf 32-bit system these days, except for specialized devices like embedded systems?
Is there anything more than a relatively tiny fraction of the user base that is stuck on 32-bit hardware, that can't use virtual machines to run that software on something that's not a potato?
And I mean, it's not like the old 32-bit versions of OS's are gone. Windows 95 is still around. It didn't go away. I'm willing to bet there are still Windows 95 machines running somewhere in mission critical systems in places around the world.
Yes, there's no security updates, but just unplug it from the internet and you're safe from the vast majority of attacks, and if you're worried about local access to your Windows 95 machine... install a thicker door?
At some point technology has to move on.
The solution to this seems to be ludicrously simple. Why not simple help and encourage her to get a job, then use part of your combined incomes to hire a maid?
They'll probably do a better job (I'm guessing your girlfriend is not a professional cleaner), she'll be a lot happier, and your house will still be clean and livable. You'll probably also have much more money to throw around, too.
Seems like a win in every sense.
Even if you're 100% not trolling (heh), it's still incredibly insensitive. Would you accept an Atheist posting something like, "Well, they're just hunks of meat and organs now, I don't get why we're spending so much money and effort worrying about something we can't change. They're dead, can't bring 'em back!".
Everyone of every religious creed (and none at all) can be total jerks. Would it be too much to ask to just at least pretend to be sympathetic?
Okay, the comments on this thread are a shitshow. So far we have:
- JEWS DID 9/11
- prisoninmate loves ReiserFS
- Hillary will ban Linux
- FreeBSD >>>>>>>>>> Dumbuntu!
"The lack of evidence for this claim is evidence of a cover-up to hide the evidence of this claim, and is therefore evidence for this claim" is basically the prime argument for every conspiracy theory argument ever.
This hurt my feelings, and therefore, you are wrong.
Hahaha!
Yeah, I'm still working on it. :D Thanks for reading though!
>Maybe the aliens are in contact with NASA/Government
If so, in't it much simpler for NASA to say to these aliens (who can travel between worlds easily), "Hey, don't fly in THIS specific spot during this specific time, by the way it's optical range for a shitty webcam on a fixed, predictable path, so like, it's really really tiny and SPACE IS BIG GUYS, just seriously avoid this tiny strip and you're fine."
That's like them saying, "Hey aliens, when you're visiting Earth and wandering around totally undisguised, try to avoid the front door NASA headquarters because we are filming a press release there today."
> The aliens might just be humoring the governments they're in contact with, they have no reason to hide from us or fear us
So now they're... just trolling us?
Space is big, so obviously, this is deliberate action. If they wanted to reveal themselves they wouldn't do so via a grainy image from the ISS; they could just appear over New York City and just hover for a while. If they wanted to hide, again, they could simply not be in this one specific spot at this one specific time.
> Space is big, observers are few, and non-official observers are easily discredited if something slips through
It's possible to discredit a few people, but with collaboration it becomes harder. I can concede an occasional independent voice may be silenced, but this kind of thing requires a competence that the US government has shown with literally no other part of its administration.
> The aliens might similarly be in contact with the other space-faring governments on the planet
That assumes that essentially the Chinese (current frenemies of the US), the EU (a group of many man disparate countries with plenty of quasi-rogue-state elements present), the Russians (traditional enemies of the US and relations are quite cold right now), the Indians (who are third-world aligned but lean toward Russia) would all agree to, under no circumstances, no matter how bad it got, no matter what, including things like the total collapse of the USSR which happened not all that long ago, or during heightened tensions such as Russia playing in the Syrian sandpit, or Russia invading Georgia, or Russia carving up the Ukraine, would never ever blab about this, ever.
It's the same problem with fake moon landings. The Russians had roughly equal instruments pointing toward the moon and tracked every US launch made there, and put their best minds to work analyzing it (for military purposes). If the landing was fake, they would laud this over the corrupt capitalist pig-dogs for all eternity, but even they acknowledge the US was really there.
Oh shit, I'm a fuckwit?
Oh god.
I... I never knew.
Interesting, since I just learned about this kind of thing...
This is what's called the ad-hoc fallacy. The fallacy is where one party introduces new information for which there is no evidence at all, except that it fits a conclusion that party has already accepted.
For example:
Your neighbour Ted is your best friend, and an honest man. Ted would never steal from you. Yet you come home and find your house is burgled! You find muddy footprints that match Ted's unique shoe-print in your house, and you confide in your wife. "Maybe Ted stole from us..."
"Or maybe," says your wife, "someone stole Ted's shoes."
You peek out the window. Ted's shoes are by the door.
"Maybe," says your wife, "the thief put them back when they were done."
"Why would they do that?"
"Maybe they wanted to frame Ted."
"Why would they want to do *that*? Everyone loves Ted."
"Maybe Ted owes the mafia a gambling debt from college."
Etc etc. The problem is there's an infinite amount of bullshit in the world and only a finite amount of truth.
I'm not a writer, I'm a typoist.
All of this assumes:
- NASA has enough money to pay someone to watch the feed, their hand hovering over a giant "SHUT IT ALL DOWN" button. They don't.
- NASA knows they might have something to hide, so DOESN'T delay the live stream by one minute in case "Hey, aliens wandered into the frame, let's just static out those seconds and go oops, technical difficulties".
- The aliens are smart enough to travel between worlds but aren't smart enough to hide from a camera that NASA could have told them, in advance, that they were pointing in this one place (space is VERY big).
- None of the other observation devices pointed randomly at the sky (including people observing the ISS through their amateur telescopes and stuff, as people are want to do) saw this.
- The EU, Russians, Chinese and Indians with all their hardware and observation technology (none of whom save possibly the EU have any incentive to cooperate with the US and would, in fact, leap at the chance to discredit and shame them) didn't see it either.
The worst part is the Schroeder's competence that has to take place here. NASA have to be crazy-dedicated and funded in order to successfully cover up something as obvious as alien spacecraft whizzing around within visual range of the ISS, but also dumb enough to let it get exposed so trivially and easily as a public camera with the world watching.
When you start to think about it even a little bit the likelihood that it's real, live, true alien visitors and not just some kind of weird light reflection, space debris, or whatever is vanishingly small.
(...which is exactly what they WOULD say, isn't it...)
It's an unfortunate byproduct of our electoral system that most government departments have trouble seeing beyond the 4 year election cycle, because a whole new group of people could be in power by then and completely reverse the direction they've been taking for this time.
This problem is amplified in the United States, it seems. Countries like Canada, Australia, most of the EU don't have this problem; the political parties are often quite similar in terms of their policies, differing usually only in name and a few minor things.
It's hard to think of a solution that might help the US situation, apart from an agreement between the two major parties that, for major undertakings like the mission to Mars, if the other assumes power then it will continue.
Of course, every politician and their dog will want conditions on that; riders, perks, kick-backs, etc. It's hard to see how it could actually work in practice.