I think he was able to leave China because they didn't want him. They presumably had already extracted whatever information they could (if there was any). At that point he was just a liability. They didn't want to "cooperate" with the US, but at the same time didn't see any advantage in creating an incident. They had not reason not to let him go.
Russia presumably did want him in the hopes (true or not) that he had useful intelligence information with him. They probably decided that he made a useful political playing chip as well.
The US bungled this really badly. By to aggressively trying to retrieve Snowdon they made it clear that his allegations were largely true and attracted a huge amount of media attention. Something along the lines of "A low level NSA employee has defected to Russia. We can't comment on whether or not he had any sensitive information. He had been showing signs or stress recently. We are negotiating with the Russians for his return", followed by the traditional "no comment" on any of the issues Snowdon raised would probably have worked a lot better.
Of course even better would to not have had the NSA act in a way that if caught would do substantial damage to US interests .
Its not just cars - the F35 fighter plane has touch screen controls!
If you think manipulating a touch screen on a bumpy road is bad, imagine trying to do it while making 6-G turns in a fighter. In turbulence I sometimes have trouble hanging onto physical knobs on my 50 year old Beechcraft.
At SLAC we have installed real physical knobs to control the accelerator and they work. Operators can look at displays and have the tactile feedback of moving a control. It speeds up machine tuning.
Touch screens are a way to save money, but in most cases do not improve the user interface.
(Damn kids,, don't know how to design a UI like they did in my day....and the music they listen to.....grumble).
Is it a race between a Corvette and a Taurus, or is it a comparison of two different designs of battleships? I don't think the problem with the F35 is that it is a bad plane, but that it may not be a good weapon for 21st century wars.
It might be a great weapon if China decides to invade Taiwan with thousand of troop ships, but that doesn't seem likely. Far more likely that China would use a combination of economic pressure, support of internal rebellions, cyber warfare, and possibly drones if they wanted control of Taiwan. Iraq has shown that while a technological advanced country can easily defeat the armed forces of a less advanced, less powerful country, the real difficulty is to actually extract any sort of lasting value from that victory.
Improved weapons would not have improve the US position in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, or the Ukraine. War is different in the 21st century.
Its not really an "asteroid", its a rock and not a very big one. We are talking about moving something the size of your living room, not a dinosaur-killer certainly not Ceres. . We have lots of fragments from meteors already.
Its OK, but it seems like a lot of work to move the entire rock here rather than just collect interesting samples and bring them back.
As the article said, it doesn't seem to really develop much interesting technology.
There is some Pt in asteroids, but no where near enough to pay for this type of effort.
I recently switched to Win 8, and the problem is not so much that it is worse that win7 but that it is different . I know how to do everything I want in win7, now I need to learn new ways to do the same things. Since I still need win 7 at work, I need to remember the old ones as well. This takes time and slows down my work. In return for that time I get.....well pretty much nothing. I haven't found any way in which the win8 interface is better than win7, its just different.
For the folks that say I should "learn new things" - I'm happy to learn new INTERESTING things, but figuring out where in various menus and "charms" Microsoft has hidden functionality is just not interesting, it is a pure waste of time.
Oh, and win 8 is really ugly with no aero - feels like windowing from 10 years ago. Doesn't hurt productivity, but it is UGLY.
It takes me 20-30 minutes to get to work by car depending on traffic. It takes an hour, with 2 changes to get there by public transit. I sometimes have to work late hours without warning - if I'm too late for the last shuttle from my workplace, I'm stuck with a $50 taxi ride.
I work at a national lab. With overhead I cost the taxpayers something like $150/hour. Would you prefer I spend an extra hour a day working or sitting on a crowded bus? I pay taxes that help support public transportation, it just doesn't happen to serve my needs.
Companies like Google that provide comfortable group transportation where people can work while they commute are the target of protests. Is the wealthy that are class sensitive, or it it the poor?
That said, a bubble car wouldn't work anyway. Since I can't use it for long trips, I would be using up another very scarce parking space where I live. Its not at all clear that owning a commute car and a normal car is an environmental win over just owning an econo-box that serves all my driving needs.
I rarely see this sort of behavior among friends because anyone who acted in a misogynistic fashion would no longer by my friend. Anyone engaging in sexist behavior at work would be fired. I expect that there are a number of people in my situation who may be aware that the problem exists but who don't see it in person, and therefor really aren't in a good position to do much about it (other than dropping friends, and firing employees who behave that way) .
There is clearly a big problem - a quick glance at many of the posts here makes that clear. OTOH, I think it is very counterproductive to suggest that ALL or even a majority of men treat women badly. There are lots of men who are decent human beings, and lumping them in with sexist assholes, and suggesting that they are lying or naive when they say that there is minimal sexism in their environment will cause them to dismiss all claims.
The same is true of racism - many white Americans really don't see much racism - they are there when a black man gets stop / frisked, or detained for "driving while black".
Don't dismiss people as saying "lala I'm not involved", when they are involved by the act of refusing to associate with people who are sexist, and by maintaining a non-sexist work atmosphere. Their success in fighting sexism is that it no longer exists in their environment. Someone stuck in a sexist environment may not realize that these places exist, but they do. They aren't perfect, but they are places where women can work without being harassed, or otherwise discriminated against.
I believe you that you have problems at your work. That shouldn't happen. One thing you can do though is to take your talent to a place where you will be treated well. Where I work (a DOE lab) there really is very little visible sexism. We have female scientists and managers, and until recently a female director. We encourage young women to start careers here through a variety of mentoring programs, though sadly not very many stay (for reasons that I think are unrelated to sexism). I'm not saying that I've never heard a sexist comment, but its really rare (I can think of only a few examples in 25 years), and the people who made them have been appropriately reprimanded.
I'm not saying that you *should* leave your work or that it is in any way your fault or responsibility. Its just that people can only fix things within their own sphere of influence. I can do my best to make sure women are treated well here, but there really is very little I can to to see that that happens at other companies.
There is probably a tendency for men and women who do not like sexist environments to move to better ones and that can lead to a large disparity between "good" and "bad" work environments.The people in each may have trouble believing that the other exists. In a similar way, people who are not sexist will not associate with people who are, with the unfortunate result that the lose influence over them. My friends are not visibly sexist because I won't associate with people who are.
I think there are a lot of people who are doing the right things in environments where women are treated well. By self selection they wind up having very little contact with places where women are treated badly.
From what I've seen "law", "theory", "rule", "principal", "equation", "rule" etc are not used as rigorous terms in the scientific community. As another poster points out, Ohm's law is far less widely correct than the "theory" of gravity. Remember these are scientists, not lawyers. It is understood that any "law", "theory", etc may be invalidated by the next experiment. Its also understood that "theories" generally come with all sorts of caveats:
The gravitational force between to bodies goes as GM1M2/r^2..... in the limit of non-relativistically weak gravity, in flat space time, over non-cosmological distances. It is understood that this has not been verified when r is small (sub millimeter), and some theories predict non 1/r^2 behavior at short distances. It is expected but not verified that M is always positive, but has not been tested for antimatter.
Similarly the "law" of conservation of energy became the law of conservation of mass-energy (or really 4-momentum), which needs to be clarified in curved space-time. It is widely believed to be correct, but a violation of this or any other conservation "law" would be extremely interesting and is not considered impossible, though very unlikely.
Evolution is a very complex topic. There is a huge amount of evidence to support the general concept of mutation and natural selection, but lots of missing pieces in the details. People should not "believe" in evolution. They should accept that it is a model that is widely supported and has good predictive power. Like any other theory it could be disproved by new evidence. It also does not rule out other forms of species change from Lamarkian evolution to genetic engineering.
Thank you. That is for standard bamboo which is about 30X weaker than graphite reinforced epoxy. I hope that isn't what they are thinking of using as a replacement.....
If it is, then they are being silly if they are considering it for anything other than decorative or special purpose (like damping) applications.
Any list of the relative properties of carbon reinforced epoxy and epoxy impregnated bamboo? Density, strength, elastic modulus, impact strength etc?
People use carbon fiber where its high strength / weight and stiffness / weight improve the overall performance and efficiency of a vehicle. Is bamboo as good?
SiC FETS and IGBTs have been around for a while from Cree and other vendors.
I'm really surprised that they can get a 10% improvement in overall efficiency from this. I would have thought that the switching electronics was already in the 90% efficiency range, and SiC isn't going to reduce the losses to 0.
The article says that the switchers are 20% of the LOSSES, not 20% of the power. I hope they losses are not 50% (!!!!!)
Maybe they meant that the switching LOSSES would be reduced by 10% - that I believe. That's a nice improvement, but a BIG difference from a 10% mileage improvement.
It was actually done much earlier but generating matter by scattering off of virtual photons. The SLAC experiment was actually looking for (and found) nonlinear interactions in photon / photon collisions. (as were predicted by QED).
The electric motor really doesn't change the difficulty of flying. In a small training aircraft, engine management is a very minor part of the workload.
Even daytime VFR flight rules in the US require 30 minutes of fuel beyond your expected destination. So the 45 minutes to 1 hour turns into 15-30 minutes of usable flight time. At 100mph cruise, and counting the extra fuel burn for climb, it probably has a 30 mile useful range.
BTW - why ducted fans? For low subsonic speeds, unducted props are more efficient, thats why they are used on virtually every low subsonic aircraft. (everything from a piper cub to a commercial twin-turboprop. There are some nice features that they list, but giving up efficiency on such a marginal aircraft seems like pure marketing.
They say 2 seats, but what is the useful load? Can it carry 2 standard adults and their usual flying gear?
And the mechanical properties, like yield strength, and modulus in some useful units like psi or Pascalls or something, not comparing it to "bone". At one point they say 1/3 the strength of steel, but steel varies by huge amounts depending on the alloy. And was that number with reinforcement or not??
Otherwise its: we have a new plastic. We won't tell you what it is or what its properties are, except that its thermosetting (like a million other plastics) and it doesn't survive mildly acidic water.
Without trying to predict what Snowdon would have done in that situation, I think the mistake the NSA made was in thinking that even the foreign intelligence part of this could have been kept secret indefinitely. The Dr Strangelove quote of "you can't fault the entire system because of a single screw-up" is really appropriate. Knowledge of this program was so damaging to US business interests that the risk of an information release was too high.
Snowdon may have acted out of (misplaced or not) morality, but when you have a secret that could move many billions of dollars from US to foreign industries, some people would have purely financial motivations to see that it was leaked.
The job of the NSA is spying on foreign governments, I have no particular problem with that . The problem is that they did so in a way that substantially destroyed faith in US industry if / when it was discovered. All of the arguments the US government has made against using Chinese networking hardware now reflect back. If we try to claim that "everyone does it", then people will go with the cheapest vendor, and that isn't US.
The NSA did something that if revealed would badly damage US industry. The NSA then failed to properly protect that data. Snowdon is irrelevant - with such devastating information, any proper security system had to take into account that an employee might try to release it for any of a wide variety of reasons, rational or not.
The problem is that even if this is a lie, the NSA has done enough that it will likely be believed. Once some lines have been crossed, its difficult to claim that others have not been. There are lots of companies with a huge financial interest in damaging the reputation of US equipment, so one can expect a constant flow of stories - some true some not.
Yes the NSA has done grave damage to US tech industry. They likely have also drastically weakened our national defense by creating / allowing / obscuring weaknesses in our cyber defense. I don't think it was intentional, just people applying 20th century ideas to 21st century conflicts. The sort of thinking that causes great nations to become quaint has-been's.
A reasonable definition of space would be based on orbital velocity, not location. Virgin galactic is selling a few minutes of zero-g, similar to, but considerably longer (and much more expensive) than the commercial vomit-comet flights. You could do something similar by dropping a capsule from a high altitude balloon.
Its true that they are in an area of very low air pressure, but that isn't particularly interesting to passenger .
Its fine if people want to pay for this, and if calling it "space" will give them bragging rights, its OK with me. It isn't really space travel.
The only reason I care is that this can confuse the general public into thinking that say Space-X and Virgin Galactic are doing anything remotely comparable, or thinking that an orbital virgin -galactic upgrade is a minor change, not a completely new and spectacularly more difficult problem.
Slashdot Mirror
I think he was able to leave China because they didn't want him. They presumably had already extracted whatever information they could (if there was any). At that point he was just a liability. They didn't want to "cooperate" with the US, but at the same time didn't see any advantage in creating an incident. They had not reason not to let him go.
Russia presumably did want him in the hopes (true or not) that he had useful intelligence information with him. They probably decided that he made a useful political playing chip as well.
The US bungled this really badly. By to aggressively trying to retrieve Snowdon they made it clear that his allegations were largely true and attracted a huge amount of media attention. Something along the lines of "A low level NSA employee has defected to Russia. We can't comment on whether or not he had any sensitive information. He had been showing signs or stress recently. We are negotiating with the Russians for his return", followed by the traditional "no comment" on any of the issues Snowdon raised would probably have worked a lot better.
Of course even better would to not have had the NSA act in a way that if caught would do substantial damage to US interests .
Its not just cars - the F35 fighter plane has touch screen controls!
If you think manipulating a touch screen on a bumpy road is bad, imagine trying to do it while making 6-G turns in a fighter. In turbulence I sometimes have trouble hanging onto physical knobs on my 50 year old Beechcraft.
At SLAC we have installed real physical knobs to control the accelerator and they work. Operators can look at displays and have the tactile feedback of moving a control. It speeds up machine tuning.
Touch screens are a way to save money, but in most cases do not improve the user interface.
(Damn kids,, don't know how to design a UI like they did in my day....and the music they listen to.....grumble).
Is it a race between a Corvette and a Taurus, or is it a comparison of two different designs of battleships? I don't think the problem with the F35 is that it is a bad plane, but that it may not be a good weapon for 21st century wars.
It might be a great weapon if China decides to invade Taiwan with thousand of troop ships, but that doesn't seem likely. Far more likely that China would use a combination of economic pressure, support of internal rebellions, cyber warfare, and possibly drones if they wanted control of Taiwan. Iraq has shown that while a technological advanced country can easily defeat the armed forces of a less advanced, less powerful country, the real difficulty is to actually extract any sort of lasting value from that victory.
Improved weapons would not have improve the US position in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, or the Ukraine. War is different in the 21st century.
Its not really an "asteroid", its a rock and not a very big one. We are talking about moving something the size of your living room, not a dinosaur-killer certainly not Ceres. . We have lots of fragments from meteors already.
Its OK, but it seems like a lot of work to move the entire rock here rather than just collect interesting samples and bring them back.
As the article said, it doesn't seem to really develop much interesting technology.
There is some Pt in asteroids, but no where near enough to pay for this type of effort.
IF (current poster is not an idiot)
AND
(current post appears to support a stupid idea),
THEN
(post is SNARK).
So what they really need is a stupidity detector - which might be a great invention except that it would be on all of the time.
Wish I had mod points, I think this is the key:
I recently switched to Win 8, and the problem is not so much that it is worse that win7 but that it is different . I know how to do everything I want in win7, now I need to learn new ways to do the same things. Since I still need win 7 at work, I need to remember the old ones as well. This takes time and slows down my work. In return for that time I get.....well pretty much nothing. I haven't found any way in which the win8 interface is better than win7, its just different.
For the folks that say I should "learn new things" - I'm happy to learn new INTERESTING things, but figuring out where in various menus and "charms" Microsoft has hidden functionality is just not interesting, it is a pure waste of time.
Oh, and win 8 is really ugly with no aero - feels like windowing from 10 years ago. Doesn't hurt productivity, but it is UGLY.
It takes me 20-30 minutes to get to work by car depending on traffic. It takes an hour, with 2 changes to get there by public transit. I sometimes have to work late hours without warning - if I'm too late for the last shuttle from my workplace, I'm stuck with a $50 taxi ride.
I work at a national lab. With overhead I cost the taxpayers something like $150/hour. Would you prefer I spend an extra hour a day working or sitting on a crowded bus? I pay taxes that help support public transportation, it just doesn't happen to serve my needs.
Companies like Google that provide comfortable group transportation where people can work while they commute are the target of protests. Is the wealthy that are class sensitive, or it it the poor?
That said, a bubble car wouldn't work anyway. Since I can't use it for long trips, I would be using up another very scarce parking space where I live. Its not at all clear that owning a commute car and a normal car is an environmental win over just owning an econo-box that serves all my driving needs.
I rarely see this sort of behavior among friends because anyone who acted in a misogynistic fashion would no longer by my friend. Anyone engaging in sexist behavior at work would be fired. I expect that there are a number of people in my situation who may be aware that the problem exists but who don't see it in person, and therefor really aren't in a good position to do much about it (other than dropping friends, and firing employees who behave that way) .
There is clearly a big problem - a quick glance at many of the posts here makes that clear. OTOH, I think it is very counterproductive to suggest that ALL or even a majority of men treat women badly. There are lots of men who are decent human beings, and lumping them in with sexist assholes, and suggesting that they are lying or naive when they say that there is minimal sexism in their environment will cause them to dismiss all claims.
The same is true of racism - many white Americans really don't see much racism - they are there when a black man gets stop / frisked, or detained for "driving while black".
Don't dismiss people as saying "lala I'm not involved", when they are involved by the act of refusing to associate with people who are sexist, and by maintaining a non-sexist work atmosphere. Their success in fighting sexism is that it no longer exists in their environment. Someone stuck in a sexist environment may not realize that these places exist, but they do. They aren't perfect, but they are places where women can work without being harassed, or otherwise discriminated against.
I believe you that you have problems at your work. That shouldn't happen. One thing you can do though is to take your talent to a place where you will be treated well. Where I work (a DOE lab) there really is very little visible sexism. We have female scientists and managers, and until recently a female director. We encourage young women to start careers here through a variety of mentoring programs, though sadly not very many stay (for reasons that I think are unrelated to sexism). I'm not saying that I've never heard a sexist comment, but its really rare (I can think of only a few examples in 25 years), and the people who made them have been appropriately reprimanded.
I'm not saying that you *should* leave your work or that it is in any way your fault or responsibility. Its just that people can only fix things within their own sphere of influence. I can do my best to make sure women are treated well here, but there really is very little I can to to see that that happens at other companies.
There is probably a tendency for men and women who do not like sexist environments to move to better ones and that can lead to a large disparity between "good" and "bad" work environments.The people in each may have trouble believing that the other exists. In a similar way, people who are not sexist will not associate with people who are, with the unfortunate result that the lose influence over them. My friends are not visibly sexist because I won't associate with people who are.
I think there are a lot of people who are doing the right things in environments where women are treated well. By self selection they wind up having very little contact with places where women are treated badly.
From what I've seen "law", "theory", "rule", "principal", "equation", "rule" etc are not used as rigorous terms in the scientific community. As another poster points out, Ohm's law is far less widely correct than the "theory" of gravity. Remember these are scientists, not lawyers. It is understood that any "law", "theory", etc may be invalidated by the next experiment. Its also understood that "theories" generally come with all sorts of caveats:
The gravitational force between to bodies goes as GM1M2/r^2..... in the limit of non-relativistically weak gravity, in flat space time, over non-cosmological distances. It is understood that this has not been verified when r is small (sub millimeter), and some theories predict non 1/r^2 behavior at short distances. It is expected but not verified that M is always positive, but has not been tested for antimatter.
Similarly the "law" of conservation of energy became the law of conservation of mass-energy (or really 4-momentum), which needs to be clarified in curved space-time. It is widely believed to be correct, but a violation of this or any other conservation "law" would be extremely interesting and is not considered impossible, though very unlikely.
Evolution is a very complex topic. There is a huge amount of evidence to support the general concept of mutation and natural selection, but lots of missing pieces in the details. People should not "believe" in evolution. They should accept that it is a model that is widely supported and has good predictive power. Like any other theory it could be disproved by new evidence. It also does not rule out other forms of species change from Lamarkian evolution to genetic engineering.
Perhaps people are thinking of it as a "baby sitter" monitor not a "baby" monitor.
Thank you. That is for standard bamboo which is about 30X weaker than graphite reinforced epoxy. I hope that isn't what they are thinking of using as a replacement.....
If it is, then they are being silly if they are considering it for anything other than decorative or special purpose (like damping) applications.
Any list of the relative properties of carbon reinforced epoxy and epoxy impregnated bamboo? Density, strength, elastic modulus, impact strength etc?
People use carbon fiber where its high strength / weight and stiffness / weight improve the overall performance and efficiency of a vehicle. Is bamboo as good?
SiC FETS and IGBTs have been around for a while from Cree and other vendors.
I'm really surprised that they can get a 10% improvement in overall efficiency from this. I would have thought that the switching electronics was already in the 90% efficiency range, and SiC isn't going to reduce the losses to 0.
The article says that the switchers are 20% of the LOSSES, not 20% of the power. I hope they losses are not 50% (!!!!!)
Maybe they meant that the switching LOSSES would be reduced by 10% - that I believe. That's a nice improvement, but a BIG difference from a 10% mileage improvement.
Pretty easy:
1) avoid medechlorians, JarJar and Ewoks.
2) Avoid really stupid looking special effects
3). Avoid really bad dialog
4). Avoid truly stupid plots.
5). Avoid completely transparent toy marketing.
Then the movie will make a billion dollars, as will the next two. Its really not that hard.
Yes. Having fines go to local law enforcement really is the root of the problem.
Also see
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/e...
It was actually done much earlier but generating matter by scattering off of virtual photons. The SLAC experiment was actually looking for (and found) nonlinear interactions in photon / photon collisions. (as were predicted by QED).
The electric motor really doesn't change the difficulty of flying. In a small training aircraft, engine management is a very minor part of the workload.
Even daytime VFR flight rules in the US require 30 minutes of fuel beyond your expected destination. So the 45 minutes to 1 hour turns into 15-30 minutes of usable flight time. At 100mph cruise, and counting the extra fuel burn for climb, it probably has a 30 mile useful range.
BTW - why ducted fans? For low subsonic speeds, unducted props are more efficient, thats why they are used on virtually every low subsonic aircraft. (everything from a piper cub to a commercial twin-turboprop. There are some nice features that they list, but giving up efficiency on such a marginal aircraft seems like pure marketing.
They say 2 seats, but what is the useful load? Can it carry 2 standard adults and their usual flying gear?
And the mechanical properties, like yield strength, and modulus in some useful units like psi or Pascalls or something, not comparing it to "bone". At one point they say 1/3 the strength of steel, but steel varies by huge amounts depending on the alloy. And was that number with reinforcement or not??
Otherwise its:
we have a new plastic. We won't tell you what it is or what its properties are, except that its thermosetting (like a million other plastics) and it doesn't survive mildly acidic water.
Without trying to predict what Snowdon would have done in that situation, I think the mistake the NSA made was in thinking that even the foreign intelligence part of this could have been kept secret indefinitely. The Dr Strangelove quote of "you can't fault the entire system because of a single screw-up" is really appropriate. Knowledge of this program was so damaging to US business interests that the risk of an information release was too high.
Snowdon may have acted out of (misplaced or not) morality, but when you have a secret that could move many billions of dollars from US to foreign industries, some people would have purely financial motivations to see that it was leaked.
The job of the NSA is spying on foreign governments, I have no particular problem with that . The problem is that they did so in a way that substantially destroyed faith in US industry if / when it was discovered. All of the arguments the US government has made against using Chinese networking hardware now reflect back. If we try to claim that "everyone does it", then people will go with the cheapest vendor, and that isn't US.
The NSA did something that if revealed would badly damage US industry. The NSA then failed to properly protect that data. Snowdon is irrelevant - with such devastating information, any proper security system had to take into account that an employee might try to release it for any of a wide variety of reasons, rational or not.
The problem is that even if this is a lie, the NSA has done enough that it will likely be believed. Once some lines have been crossed, its difficult to claim that others have not been. There are lots of companies with a huge financial interest in damaging the reputation of US equipment, so one can expect a constant flow of stories - some true some not.
Yes the NSA has done grave damage to US tech industry. They likely have also drastically weakened our national defense by creating / allowing / obscuring weaknesses in our cyber defense. I don't think it was intentional, just people applying 20th century ideas to 21st century conflicts. The sort of thinking that causes great nations to become quaint has-been's.
Fair enough. I'm happy to count kinetic and potential energy, and them by my definition you are in space.
If you argue that then sitting on Mercury isn't "space", I'll point out that you will have to have been in "space" to have gotten there.
I agree that its nothing like going to orbit and doesn't really advance technology.
Its just a stunt, but if people want to pay for it, I'm OK with them wasting their money. A few hours in a Mig 29 sounds like more fun though.
A reasonable definition of space would be based on orbital velocity, not location. Virgin galactic is selling a few minutes of zero-g, similar to, but considerably longer (and much more expensive) than the commercial vomit-comet flights. You could do something similar by dropping a capsule from a high altitude balloon.
Its true that they are in an area of very low air pressure, but that isn't particularly interesting to passenger .
Its fine if people want to pay for this, and if calling it "space" will give them bragging rights, its OK with me. It isn't really space travel.
The only reason I care is that this can confuse the general public into thinking that say Space-X and Virgin Galactic are doing anything remotely comparable, or thinking that an orbital virgin -galactic upgrade is a minor change, not a completely new and spectacularly more difficult problem.