Interesting- you seem to have lived what I've often considered a simple solution to the problems of the penal system in general. Most criminals (non-insane/exceptionally violent) do not need to be incarcerated, fed & clothed for years when a simple removal of privacy could do the trick.
Topically, I think that the most basic loss-of-privacy punishment would be 24/7 tracking of an un-removable GPS device, graduating up to complete loss of privacy (ie, cameras throughout the home, broadcasting on the internet for any to see). You can't get away with much if anyone can check on you at anytime. Plus it would have the added benefit that most offenders in for shorter sentences would remain productive citizens, renting living space and feeding themselves, rather than getting room & board for free from society (albeit with certain other pound-me-in-the-ass disadvantages).
Your argument sounds suspiciously like the one I've heard regarding growing up in a small town vs. the city; namely that in a small town "everyone knows what everyone's doing so the kids don't get into trouble." Problem is that statistics quite clearly show that there is far, far more teen drinking and sex in rural areas, simply because there's nothing else to do. The "everyone knows" argument does nothing whatsoever to prevent these activities.
There's also a difference between your parents calling a friends parents to make sure you're there and being able to track you to 10' every minute of the day...
...and yet people still line up to protest launches with RTG's on board.
To answer the GP: the main public aversion to sending nuclear power systems into space is the word "nuclear". 'Cuz it's gonna eat their children or something, dammit.
The benefit of human space exploration (to the moon, mars, or other object) is at least twofold. One, human intelligence is far, far greater than machine intelligence, as has been stated elsewhere in this thread. Two, when you're already bringing along "tons and tons of support equipment", it's easy to bring back significant samples (hundreds of kilos).
The Russians are planning a sample return mission to Phobos. They are planning on bringing about 20g of sample. Now imagine you had a manned mission doing the same- if they came back with less than 20kg I'd be surprised (Apollo 11, a "flag and footprints" mission, brought back over 21kg of lunar samples).
I've always maintained that Lawyers are the larval stage of Politicians... not all of them make it, but it's where they all want to be when they grow up.
I have also maintained that in any sane society lawyers would be barred from holding public office- it's in lawyers best interests that law be so complex the lay person cannot understand it. They should be allowed in advisory roles only...
Batteries are bombs? Quick! Alert Homeland Security! Ban all batteries in all devices everywhere! Won't somebody please think of the Terrorists, er the Children!
Solid motors can quite certainly explode, in fact it is their preferred method of failing. From the wikipedia article on Solid Rocket Boosters: "SRB failure rates are about 1%. They usually fail in sudden, catastrophic explosions due to case overpressurization."
... If you open the top end, then the propellant will vent equally from top and bottom, yielding zero net impulse. I don't know if the shuttle SRBs have this (if they do, "thermal curtain failure" won't help Max after all). I doubt the Ares does, given that the crew is sitting on top of the solid rocket stack.
In fact the SRB's on the shuttle have exactly this feature, and were used in the Challenger disaster when the SRB's appeared to be heading towards land. I would expect that the Ares stack does in fact have this feature, to be used after a successful abort (ie, the Orion gets outta dodge, the SRB doesn't explode, so you blow the range safety. Probably be pretty hard on the intertank and 2nd stage, but hey, that's the price you pay.
Um, I thought the *British* brought English to North America. And a German coined the term "America" in reference to North and South America.
But you're completely right, as a Canadian, we too have absolutely no interest in being referred to as "Americans", but that's because we don't want anyone thinking that we come from THAT country, as stupid and messed up as it is. We are, however, reasonably pleased with being North Americans, but that term doesn't get used often...
NASA planned on continuing use of Skylab, in fact one of the first missions for the Space Shuttle was to boost Skylab into a much higher orbit. That mission would have been No. 2 or 3, if I recall correctly, before the Shuttle was "certified" for anything other that testing. Unfortunately, as you said, atmospheric drag was higher than expected and the thing crashed before the first flight of the Shuttle, due to delays in the Shuttle program.
It's really a pity, too- either original plan would have saved Skylab- original expectations were that it would have stayed in orbit past the actual launch of the Shuttle, and original plans for first flight of the Shuttle would have had first launch before the actual destruction of Skylab... It would have given the US a space station/shuttle combination that had an appreciable fraction of the size of the ISS in the 1980's.
Just as we get to the first flights of Orion, which will almost certainly slip past 1Q2016, we'll deorbit one of the primary reasons we're building Orion.
I always thought that the 5 year gap of no manned craft for the US sounded dumb, I guess they always had this at the back of their minds and just want to get rid of the thing. I'd get Ares V on tap, send up a big (ion?) booster, and either move it to a more equatorial orbit, so it can be used as an assembly point for lunar/martian missions, or let it go on autopilot through the Van Allen belts and push it into high earth orbit for future use. Hell at that point you could zip it out to a Lagrange point for storage.
Having operated FLIR gear, there is no way the umbrella would be "completely transparent" to IR. Perhaps there will be a new technology in the future, such as sub-millimeter radar that could give the resolution you're implying, but current IR gear cannot. You would simply see that there was a heat source under the umbrella making it warmer than the background. The drug deal taking place under it would be undetectable.
You have to be a troll. You can't seriously be claiming that a scale, mistakenly setting 100 at Human body temperature (whoops, now it's 98.6, and that's an average), and 0 at the coldest one can get water to while diluting it with whatever 17th century materials was at hand (whoops we invented antifreeze), makes more sense than Celsius?
Your entire argument comes down to the fact you're used to it, and that the weather on earth can reach 100. If you can't reach 100, well what possible use is it?
Also, the night before the Challenger launch, the prevailing winds were just right and pushed the venting from the external tank (chilled by the fuel at cryonics temperatures) so that it cascaded down and across that exact SRB joint. This reduced the temperature of the O-Ring even further than just the weather effects.
Much like most modern air disasters, the Challenger was a series of faults/problems, any of which if changed, would probably have saved the launch.
Actually, the original plan was to recover the Hubble at the end of it's life and give it to the Smithsonian. In the end, they did decide that the risk was to great, so the idea was scrapped.
Another shuttle plan that didn't quite work out either was to boost Skylab into a higher orbit and use it as a primary destination for the shuttle. Unfortunately, schedule slippage delayed the first flights of the shuttle, and Skylab's orbit decayed faster than expected...
I'm also from Edmonton, and let me tell you, thanks to "teh awesomeness" that is Daylight Savings, we have enough natural light to read outside at about 10:30 this time of year, so there's little need for extensive indoor lighting, except in a basement or interior room...
They also helpfully choose what the price end-users pay is. You get to set your "Suggested Retail Price", but Amazon gets to choose what %-off sticker they apply to it. Then* they pay you the 30% of whatever discounted price they decided on.
I appreciate your post- especially the "And I still try to stay the hell off the roads." As a cyclist and a driver, I'm always amazed at how certain bikers go way out of their ways to ride *in* traffic.
On my regular commute to work, I drive several kilometers on a road that is 4 lanes, undivided. On either side of the road, there is a wide side road, separated from the main road by a curb. So do most cyclists ride on the side road? Nope, there they are, right in the middle of traffic, putting themselves in at least ten times the danger of collision. It astonishes me that anyone can be so mindlessly inconsiderate.
When I cycle to work, I don't even ride on the side road, I go a block north or south and ride on the residential street instead, so I'm not breathing the exhaust and listening to the road noise.
In my experience, I've run into inconsiderate bikers and* drivers; and I stand by my opinion that the bottom 1/3 (in skill/ability) of both should be banned from the road.
You're coming across as completely irrational and foaming at the mouth as the hypothetical people you're attacking. To claim that an iPhone "doesn't actually *do* anything" is hyperbole, plain and simple. *You* may not like it, *you* may like other phone's interfaces, but many many others do not agree with you.
You might find people would listen to you more without the spittle in their faces from the foaming anti-fanboism you're spewing...
I know I agree with you completely. After hearing all the hype from E3, I finally watched the Microsoft videos for Natal, and couldn't believe that they thought this was a good idea to hype. It's an interesting product, definitely, but when I see the "happy family" with their improbably large living room (that is equally improbably empty of furniture), gorilla arming a driving game or leaping up to jab in space for a wheel change... Even the creepy kid demo looked like it would be irritating to stand and pretend play with for any length of time.
To me, motion control stuff like this will always be a niche product that will have very limited application in everyday gaming. It will do well in certain areas, with games that are specifically designed for them (rather than tacked on), and with a certain segment of the population that like prancing about while gaming. Not me, that's for sure. Question is, how big is that segment? The Wii seems to indicate that it is a fair size, but I wonder how much of that is due to the Wii being inexpensive and novel; what happens when the novelty wears off?
Well, knowing how real-world work goes, most of those vents and whot-not would inevitably end up on the junction between two sections (or more likely, four), which would carve out a larger hunk of cells.
P & GP posts raise a good issue though; for large size sheets of PV material, there needs to be the ability to cut holes and trim edges with a minimal loss of production. A perfect system would have many small cells/zones that would minimize or reroute circuitry for this. In reading TFA I couldn't help but imagine the spot on a roof that would take 83% of a panel, if you couldn't cut or otherwise reshape it...
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Interesting- you seem to have lived what I've often considered a simple solution to the problems of the penal system in general. Most criminals (non-insane/exceptionally violent) do not need to be incarcerated, fed & clothed for years when a simple removal of privacy could do the trick.
Topically, I think that the most basic loss-of-privacy punishment would be 24/7 tracking of an un-removable GPS device, graduating up to complete loss of privacy (ie, cameras throughout the home, broadcasting on the internet for any to see). You can't get away with much if anyone can check on you at anytime. Plus it would have the added benefit that most offenders in for shorter sentences would remain productive citizens, renting living space and feeding themselves, rather than getting room & board for free from society (albeit with certain other pound-me-in-the-ass disadvantages).
Your argument sounds suspiciously like the one I've heard regarding growing up in a small town vs. the city; namely that in a small town "everyone knows what everyone's doing so the kids don't get into trouble." Problem is that statistics quite clearly show that there is far, far more teen drinking and sex in rural areas, simply because there's nothing else to do. The "everyone knows" argument does nothing whatsoever to prevent these activities.
There's also a difference between your parents calling a friends parents to make sure you're there and being able to track you to 10' every minute of the day...
By using Acme Brand Ass-Wax, of course! "Nothing better than Acme, for all the ass that's fit to wax!"
The only thing the war on drugs accomplishes is making criminals extremely wealthy.
I dunno, I think the lawyers and the owners in the prison-industrial complex get pretty wealthy as well...
...and yet people still line up to protest launches with RTG's on board.
To answer the GP: the main public aversion to sending nuclear power systems into space is the word "nuclear". 'Cuz it's gonna eat their children or something, dammit.
The benefit of human space exploration (to the moon, mars, or other object) is at least twofold. One, human intelligence is far, far greater than machine intelligence, as has been stated elsewhere in this thread. Two, when you're already bringing along "tons and tons of support equipment", it's easy to bring back significant samples (hundreds of kilos).
The Russians are planning a sample return mission to Phobos. They are planning on bringing about 20g of sample. Now imagine you had a manned mission doing the same- if they came back with less than 20kg I'd be surprised (Apollo 11, a "flag and footprints" mission, brought back over 21kg of lunar samples).
I've always maintained that Lawyers are the larval stage of Politicians... not all of them make it, but it's where they all want to be when they grow up.
I have also maintained that in any sane society lawyers would be barred from holding public office- it's in lawyers best interests that law be so complex the lay person cannot understand it. They should be allowed in advisory roles only...
Batteries are bombs? Quick! Alert Homeland Security! Ban all batteries in all devices everywhere! Won't somebody please think of the Terrorists, er the Children!
Solid motors can quite certainly explode, in fact it is their preferred method of failing. From the wikipedia article on Solid Rocket Boosters: "SRB failure rates are about 1%. They usually fail in sudden, catastrophic explosions due to case overpressurization."
... If you open the top end, then the propellant will vent equally from top and bottom, yielding zero net impulse. I don't know if the shuttle SRBs have this (if they do, "thermal curtain failure" won't help Max after all). I doubt the Ares does, given that the crew is sitting on top of the solid rocket stack.
In fact the SRB's on the shuttle have exactly this feature, and were used in the Challenger disaster when the SRB's appeared to be heading towards land. I would expect that the Ares stack does in fact have this feature, to be used after a successful abort (ie, the Orion gets outta dodge, the SRB doesn't explode, so you blow the range safety. Probably be pretty hard on the intertank and 2nd stage, but hey, that's the price you pay.
Um, I thought the *British* brought English to North America. And a German coined the term "America" in reference to North and South America.
But you're completely right, as a Canadian, we too have absolutely no interest in being referred to as "Americans", but that's because we don't want anyone thinking that we come from THAT country, as stupid and messed up as it is. We are, however, reasonably pleased with being North Americans, but that term doesn't get used often...
NASA planned on continuing use of Skylab, in fact one of the first missions for the Space Shuttle was to boost Skylab into a much higher orbit. That mission would have been No. 2 or 3, if I recall correctly, before the Shuttle was "certified" for anything other that testing. Unfortunately, as you said, atmospheric drag was higher than expected and the thing crashed before the first flight of the Shuttle, due to delays in the Shuttle program.
It's really a pity, too- either original plan would have saved Skylab- original expectations were that it would have stayed in orbit past the actual launch of the Shuttle, and original plans for first flight of the Shuttle would have had first launch before the actual destruction of Skylab... It would have given the US a space station/shuttle combination that had an appreciable fraction of the size of the ISS in the 1980's.
Just as we get to the first flights of Orion, which will almost certainly slip past 1Q2016, we'll deorbit one of the primary reasons we're building Orion.
I always thought that the 5 year gap of no manned craft for the US sounded dumb, I guess they always had this at the back of their minds and just want to get rid of the thing. I'd get Ares V on tap, send up a big (ion?) booster, and either move it to a more equatorial orbit, so it can be used as an assembly point for lunar/martian missions, or let it go on autopilot through the Van Allen belts and push it into high earth orbit for future use. Hell at that point you could zip it out to a Lagrange point for storage.
Having operated FLIR gear, there is no way the umbrella would be "completely transparent" to IR. Perhaps there will be a new technology in the future, such as sub-millimeter radar that could give the resolution you're implying, but current IR gear cannot. You would simply see that there was a heat source under the umbrella making it warmer than the background. The drug deal taking place under it would be undetectable.
You have to be a troll. You can't seriously be claiming that a scale, mistakenly setting 100 at Human body temperature (whoops, now it's 98.6, and that's an average), and 0 at the coldest one can get water to while diluting it with whatever 17th century materials was at hand (whoops we invented antifreeze), makes more sense than Celsius?
Your entire argument comes down to the fact you're used to it, and that the weather on earth can reach 100. If you can't reach 100, well what possible use is it?
Also, the night before the Challenger launch, the prevailing winds were just right and pushed the venting from the external tank (chilled by the fuel at cryonics temperatures) so that it cascaded down and across that exact SRB joint. This reduced the temperature of the O-Ring even further than just the weather effects.
Much like most modern air disasters, the Challenger was a series of faults/problems, any of which if changed, would probably have saved the launch.
Actually, the original plan was to recover the Hubble at the end of it's life and give it to the Smithsonian. In the end, they did decide that the risk was to great, so the idea was scrapped. Another shuttle plan that didn't quite work out either was to boost Skylab into a higher orbit and use it as a primary destination for the shuttle. Unfortunately, schedule slippage delayed the first flights of the shuttle, and Skylab's orbit decayed faster than expected...
I'm also from Edmonton, and let me tell you, thanks to "teh awesomeness" that is Daylight Savings, we have enough natural light to read outside at about 10:30 this time of year, so there's little need for extensive indoor lighting, except in a basement or interior room...
They also helpfully choose what the price end-users pay is. You get to set your "Suggested Retail Price", but Amazon gets to choose what %-off sticker they apply to it. Then* they pay you the 30% of whatever discounted price they decided on.
I appreciate your post- especially the "And I still try to stay the hell off the roads." As a cyclist and a driver, I'm always amazed at how certain bikers go way out of their ways to ride *in* traffic.
On my regular commute to work, I drive several kilometers on a road that is 4 lanes, undivided. On either side of the road, there is a wide side road, separated from the main road by a curb. So do most cyclists ride on the side road? Nope, there they are, right in the middle of traffic, putting themselves in at least ten times the danger of collision. It astonishes me that anyone can be so mindlessly inconsiderate.
When I cycle to work, I don't even ride on the side road, I go a block north or south and ride on the residential street instead, so I'm not breathing the exhaust and listening to the road noise.
In my experience, I've run into inconsiderate bikers and* drivers; and I stand by my opinion that the bottom 1/3 (in skill/ability) of both should be banned from the road.
Superman, is that you?
You might find people would listen to you more without the spittle in their faces from the foaming anti-fanboism you're spewing...
Well, they do when they're buying drugs...
oh wait, maybe that's just me. >.>
I know I agree with you completely. After hearing all the hype from E3, I finally watched the Microsoft videos for Natal, and couldn't believe that they thought this was a good idea to hype. It's an interesting product, definitely, but when I see the "happy family" with their improbably large living room (that is equally improbably empty of furniture), gorilla arming a driving game or leaping up to jab in space for a wheel change... Even the creepy kid demo looked like it would be irritating to stand and pretend play with for any length of time. To me, motion control stuff like this will always be a niche product that will have very limited application in everyday gaming. It will do well in certain areas, with games that are specifically designed for them (rather than tacked on), and with a certain segment of the population that like prancing about while gaming. Not me, that's for sure. Question is, how big is that segment? The Wii seems to indicate that it is a fair size, but I wonder how much of that is due to the Wii being inexpensive and novel; what happens when the novelty wears off?
Well, knowing how real-world work goes, most of those vents and whot-not would inevitably end up on the junction between two sections (or more likely, four), which would carve out a larger hunk of cells. P & GP posts raise a good issue though; for large size sheets of PV material, there needs to be the ability to cut holes and trim edges with a minimal loss of production. A perfect system would have many small cells/zones that would minimize or reroute circuitry for this. In reading TFA I couldn't help but imagine the spot on a roof that would take 83% of a panel, if you couldn't cut or otherwise reshape it...