Manned spaceflight pork and a pointless mission to an asteroid.
The money would be much better spent on unmanned robotic probes to Europa and other places of interest.
> including the destruction of a defunct Chinese weather satellite in 2007
Which was highly irresponsible and obnoxious on their part because to sprayed deadly space debris all over the place....
Even with pessimistic estimates for the terms of the Drake equation, the galaxy should be teeming with intelligent life, some much older than Man. If warp drive was possible, the galaxy would be single race's playground. But there is no evidence of that
Dark energy for instance. Then the Type 1A supernovas at extreme distances were found to be fainter than predicted, so all of a sudden someone decided that some mysterious force was ripping the universe apart. This was immediately taken as gospel.
But shouldn't more mundane, but much less fun, explanations be thoroughly exhausted first? Maybe these types of super novas were inherently less luminous 10+ billion years ago? Maybe there is some intervening material that has made them appear less luminous (I think that this has been discounted)? Maybe they are further away than we think (i.e. the redshift was different in the past)....
Now Geologist/Paleontologists take this to the opposite extreme and they never seem to adopt a new theory unless dragged kicking and screaming. I'll bet there are still Ivy League rockhounds who still think the Cretaceous era was terminated by climate change. It took decades of overwhelming evidence to get most of them to change their hidebound ideas on this.
Occam's razor, in the modern sense, is dead in cosmology. The most sensationalized and outlandish theories seem to be more fashionable than more mundane explanations, but what really galls me that that the acceptance of these theories happens way before the investigations have finished.
And you are an eloquent logician.
When there is no way to experimentally verify such a theory, then it starts to shade into religious arguments.
But not to worry, there will yet-another-un-testable Crackpot Cosmo "theory" next week about, I don't know, say, parallel universes.
This is all elixir to all you propeller heads who want to believe that, say, warp drives can be created, but there is actual evidence that warp drive cannot be created and it is called the Fermi Paradox.
Wrong. HR departments do not layoff themselves. They just keep getting bigger and bigger and more annoying and more annoying. They will keep dreaming up way to make themselves relevant such as politically-correct training programs or other such garbage.
Too late....
Let's close that barn door after the cows have left. Innovation has evaporated at MS and they lost too many opportunities. Game over. They will have a long agonizing death living off companies that are hooked to their database and office products....
And I am sure that the deluxe douche bags in management who came up with Stack Ranking will have dreamed up some other way to demoralize the employees. Using Dilbert weasel words like synergy is a sure indication that the DBs are still running the show.
The management is so bad at MS that I wonder if they have a Dead Sea effect. First there was "Stack Ranking", then the stifling of innovation, loss of market share, and now the looming huge layoffs in the next 6 months.
You have to believe that all the best people have left or will leave shortly leaving just the salt. This will further stifle innovation...
MS already has a hideous management technique called "stack ranking" that killed morale (http://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2012/07/03/the-terrible-management-technique-that-cost-microsoft-its-creativity/).
Now some idiot in management decides to float the story about 5K jobs going away in 6 months and couch it in Dilbert weasel words. So everyone who is not demoralized enough by stack ranking will be terrified by this announcement.
Words like "synergies and strategic alignment" and right sizing are right out of the Dilbert Mission Statement generator (which used to be on the Dilbert web site). Nothing can be as demoralizing as being managed by exec's so stupid that they have never read Dilbert.
How come everyone forgets that Atta and his buddies did not trust cellphones as far back as 911. Now I am sure they are even more paranoid about their use.
Not true. It is Obama who tried to kill planetary science such as Mars missions and gut unmanned missions to fund the pork-y manned missions. There has never been a Administration that has been this hostile to unmanned missions.
It with be infinitely easier to sample the plumes than try to drill through that rock-hard ice. Look what it took to get the Curiosity rover to drill 2.5 inches into rocks on Mars.
The Europa Clipper will orbit Jupiter, periodically dipping in close to Europa's surface. This is will minimize the probes exposure to radiation.
This is an important point that was missed.
Slashdot Mirror
Living in a cave on the moon? Why?
Manned spaceflight pork and a pointless mission to an asteroid. The money would be much better spent on unmanned robotic probes to Europa and other places of interest.
> including the destruction of a defunct Chinese weather satellite in 2007 Which was highly irresponsible and obnoxious on their part because to sprayed deadly space debris all over the place....
Even with pessimistic estimates for the terms of the Drake equation, the galaxy should be teeming with intelligent life, some much older than Man. If warp drive was possible, the galaxy would be single race's playground. But there is no evidence of that
Will they continue to? This will be interesting.... And how the heck did Russia end up with the block boxes?
Dark energy for instance. Then the Type 1A supernovas at extreme distances were found to be fainter than predicted, so all of a sudden someone decided that some mysterious force was ripping the universe apart. This was immediately taken as gospel. But shouldn't more mundane, but much less fun, explanations be thoroughly exhausted first? Maybe these types of super novas were inherently less luminous 10+ billion years ago? Maybe there is some intervening material that has made them appear less luminous (I think that this has been discounted)? Maybe they are further away than we think (i.e. the redshift was different in the past).... Now Geologist/Paleontologists take this to the opposite extreme and they never seem to adopt a new theory unless dragged kicking and screaming. I'll bet there are still Ivy League rockhounds who still think the Cretaceous era was terminated by climate change. It took decades of overwhelming evidence to get most of them to change their hidebound ideas on this.
That was already tried by JPL/NASA, but the penetrators failed.
Occam's razor, in the modern sense, is dead in cosmology. The most sensationalized and outlandish theories seem to be more fashionable than more mundane explanations, but what really galls me that that the acceptance of these theories happens way before the investigations have finished.
And you are an eloquent logician. When there is no way to experimentally verify such a theory, then it starts to shade into religious arguments. But not to worry, there will yet-another-un-testable Crackpot Cosmo "theory" next week about, I don't know, say, parallel universes. This is all elixir to all you propeller heads who want to believe that, say, warp drives can be created, but there is actual evidence that warp drive cannot be created and it is called the Fermi Paradox.
It is mere speculation unless it is testable. How do you test this theory?
Wrong. HR departments do not layoff themselves. They just keep getting bigger and bigger and more annoying and more annoying. They will keep dreaming up way to make themselves relevant such as politically-correct training programs or other such garbage.
All the good senior engineers will have their resumes out already....
Too late.... Let's close that barn door after the cows have left. Innovation has evaporated at MS and they lost too many opportunities. Game over. They will have a long agonizing death living off companies that are hooked to their database and office products.... And I am sure that the deluxe douche bags in management who came up with Stack Ranking will have dreamed up some other way to demoralize the employees. Using Dilbert weasel words like synergy is a sure indication that the DBs are still running the show.
Anyone else sick of these fantasies? What ever happened to Occam's Razor?
The management is so bad at MS that I wonder if they have a Dead Sea effect. First there was "Stack Ranking", then the stifling of innovation, loss of market share, and now the looming huge layoffs in the next 6 months. You have to believe that all the best people have left or will leave shortly leaving just the salt. This will further stifle innovation...
MS already has a hideous management technique called "stack ranking" that killed morale (http://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2012/07/03/the-terrible-management-technique-that-cost-microsoft-its-creativity/). Now some idiot in management decides to float the story about 5K jobs going away in 6 months and couch it in Dilbert weasel words. So everyone who is not demoralized enough by stack ranking will be terrified by this announcement.
Words like "synergies and strategic alignment" and right sizing are right out of the Dilbert Mission Statement generator (which used to be on the Dilbert web site). Nothing can be as demoralizing as being managed by exec's so stupid that they have never read Dilbert.
O is just doing what his controllers tell him to do. You don't think he really runs the country between his golfing vacations do you?
It is called "The Dead Sea Effect"
How come everyone forgets that Atta and his buddies did not trust cellphones as far back as 911. Now I am sure they are even more paranoid about their use.
Seems unlikely for most humans
Not true. It is Obama who tried to kill planetary science such as Mars missions and gut unmanned missions to fund the pork-y manned missions. There has never been a Administration that has been this hostile to unmanned missions.
Why do these crackpot-darkmatter-theories-du-jour all smell like mysticism?
It with be infinitely easier to sample the plumes than try to drill through that rock-hard ice. Look what it took to get the Curiosity rover to drill 2.5 inches into rocks on Mars.
The Europa Clipper will orbit Jupiter, periodically dipping in close to Europa's surface. This is will minimize the probes exposure to radiation. This is an important point that was missed.