But I have spent years keeping lab notebooks in academia and industry. And the lawyers everywhere I've worked have always walked me through the process of documenting that notebook, dating each page, never deleting anything, only crossing it out, making copies (lab notebooks used to come with a sheet of carbon and every other page was for duplicates), and having pages you were particularly interested in witnessed and notarized. Otherwise you could spend years in court trying to prove that you simply hadn't backdated a notebook or falsified it in some way. Heck, the whole Baltimore fraud case was based on whether the lab notebooks were falsified or not.
So I don't think putting something on a blog is going to meet the legal standard. What's to keep someone from inserting a fake prior entry? How would you prove that they didn't? That's why prior art has to be published. Usually on paper. Not impossible to fake, but much much harder.
There's probably a solution to this, but it isn't as easy as you think. A decent lawyer would tear your RSS blog prior entry claim to bits.
We don't have viable breakeven fusion. We're not likely to get it anytime soon. Maybe in 20 years - same as they said 20 years ago, and 20 years before that. It's not as though He-3 or lack thereof is what's stopping us from having breakeven fusion reactors. Using a mythical fuel for a mythical fusion reactor as a reason to go to the moon makes your argument sound, well, mythical. Spending trillions of dollars to stockpile the mythical fuel for the mythical day in the future that it might be needed is crazy. If it's there, it'll still be there when (if) it's needed. Do we even know that it's there? Can you point me to peer-reviewed research?
And the lunar surface is, for many reasons, a much worse place than space for telescopes of all sorts. Huge temperature extremes, not the most stable environment, lack of pointing control, you lose 50% of your observing time because your telescope is looking sunward and you have to have RPGs because the other 50% of the time you lose your solar power. We don't use a lot of RPGs, they're a pain in the butt. Heavy, expensive, launch issues, radiation issues, reliability issues and it's difficult to get as much power as you get from a solar panel. Solar power is easier and more reliable. I've worked on a couple of projects where, just for fun and to forestall objections we weren't being forward-thinking enough, we ran trades of a moon site. Space won. Putting stuff on the moon isn't any less expensive than putting it at L2 and L2 is better for a lot of other reasons.
TPF-I has been effectively cancelled ("deferred"), in no small part due to its money being reallocated to a Hubble servicing mission and the other manned space flight programs.
Then replace Rodney King with "beating families of Samoans", and Rampart with "paying out $55 million for settlements in cases of excessive force in a five year period", and don't even get started on how they run the county jail.
Only death and taxes are inevitable. NASA had two viable TPF candidates and had spent tens of millions of dollars building up teams and hardware and labs and knowledge. Most of that has disappeared, except for a few papers and a couple of labs. "Deferred" means "cancelled" means "start over from scratch" if it ever gets started up again. Wasted money, mostly.
Because TPF has been cancelled so that the ISS can be finished so we can deorbit it into the ocean, thus honoring our commitments to our international partners (and screwing over our international partners on TPF). The scientists who are interested in trying to find life on other planets like Wes Traub are out there trying to drum up support for TPF so Congress might bring it back.
So maybe it's a slow news day, but maybe some scientists are engaging in public relations.
You shouldn't have to pay, essentially, a tax every year, just to figure out how much taxes you owe.
It's deductible.
I don't disagree with you, it should not be hard, but it is, and I have to live in the world as it is, rather than the world that I wish it to be. Or Canada.
I can do it by hand, I did so for years, but it isn't easy and it isn't fun, and four or five hours of my time, plus the peace of mind, is well worth a hundred bucks.
I've done my taxes for six years in a row now, using tax software that has saved me thousands of dollars. I consider this software worth my roughly $100/yr investment.
Q. How do I get it to run?
A. I send all the forms to my tax accountant, he fills them out, and sends them back to me with a bill usually around $100. This includes the itemized form with charity and medical deductions, home mortgage deduction, home business deductions, and a state version of same. This saves me many hours of work reading tax laws and instructions, frustration, and uncertainty. He has certainly saved me thousands in taxes because he's a professional and knows the rules, and hundreds of dollars in time and frustration. As a result, my results are OS-independent.
Not hard at all. It took me all of 15 minutes to gather all the forms and mail them to him, then sign them and send in the forms when he sends them back. I then happily write him a check and wait for the refund to come.
Space isn't going anywhere anytime soon, so what's the big deal if we bring back stuff from Mars now or in 10 years? Why not scale back a few programs and save some cash now and address scaling it up in the future when the country's budget is a little better?
Because the people who know how to do the Mars missions won't sit around not working for 10 years. All that knowledge, all the wisdom, walks away. It isn't written down (not that it can be in lots of cases), and when (or more likely if) it starts up again, they'll be working on other projects and their loyalties will lie elsewhere.
I personally think every government program should undergo significant funding cuts and those programs will be forced to be more efficient.
Just for example: TPF - cut to zero. nuStar - cut to zero. Dawn - cut to zero. LISA, ConX, JDEM - will be downselected to one and the other two zeroed.
All the money spent on those programs so far is wasted. How efficient is that?
When I graduated 10 years ago, the average time to get a particle physics Ph.D was a bit over 7 years. That's for the people who graduated; over half of my entering class quit without a Ph.D. I doubt that the amount of time it takes to get one has decreased in a decade.
A lot of it depends on how quickly you prepare your dissertation.
BS. I doubt that the variation on "how quickly you prepare your dissertation" is more than six months. The years add up because your experiment doesn't get funded, or your advisor likes having you around to design electronics. Hardly anyone spends more time preparing their dissertation than needed. Most spend less, because after seven years, they want to get the hell out (and start the 10 years of postdoc'ing).
Complete with big red stop button, front panel register switches, core memory, banks of spinning 9 track tapes, and card reader input. Back when computers really let you know they were computing. After I showed competency with that, then I got to move up to the CDC 6600.
Do you complain about the WSJ lacking diversity, printing only far right conservative columnists? Why must the NYT be the bastion of diversity? Besides, they print Brooks and Tierney (and Safire for 30 years). Arguably they print more conservative columnists than liberal ones. And here "liberal" means Kristof and Friedman, who are more centrist or at worst left-centrist than liberal. "Diversity" seems to be code for "no liberals."
Re:Nothing wrong with revisiting the decision
on
Hope for Hubble
·
· Score: 1
And you'll have to wait for Darwin, because the Hubble will suck all the money out of TPF-I and TPF-C.
I may not have got it all right on the first go around, but you can rest assured, i got it right after the testing and before it was deployed...
Like you tested this post to make sure you got the grammar correct?
And if you can't test it in a 0-g vacuum, or after 7 years of solar radiation, and you only get one chance to deploy on a mission that no one has ever done before? Or if testing it under those conditions doubles the mission cost, thus meaning that the mission likely won't fly?
Pilots have checklists because pilots before you crashed and died. Investigate and add another item to the checklist.
No one has ever landed a probe on Titan before. Planes still crash into the ground at high rates of speed despite all the checklists.
It is hard, and it is complicated, and it should be easy to see how errors like this can happen, and if, as a "true professional" (compared to all those amateurs who got the probe to Titan after 20 years of planning from pre-phase-A and 7 years of flight to yesterday), you can't see how it can happen, well, I hope those this post flashes across your mind the day that your aircraft goes into that last flat spin.
Can't happen to you, I guess. You're a "true professional". Those guys you know who did screw the pooch? Those guys were just amateurs, by definition.
Give me a break. Even Nike has a flash mp3 player that does shuffle. It even has an arm band, designed specifically for runners.
Yeah, my gf just spent something like $250 getting one of those from Nike with a whole 256M of memory (and a pedometer). We spent an hour setting up the lousy (compared to iTunes) jukebox/download software.
She's boxing it up tonight to send back and placing her order for the Shuffle.
People (especially ladies) like the flat screens because of their super slim depth, massive picture size, and amazing light-weight.
Show me a 60" CRT -- and if you can even find one, find a rec-room it would fit in, and try and lift it!
I have a 61" Sony rear projection (got it for basically free from a friend who was getting a divorce). It weighs about 400 lbs, it's huge, it took four people to get it into my house. I love it. My girlfriend hates it, as has every other woman who's been in my house.
Guess who's looking at the prices of the LCDs?
I keep telling her to let me wait a year, til the next generation comes out and prices drop, but...
Were you doing SDR in 1997 when Cassini was launched? Were you doing it in 1987 when Cassini was being designed?
All the bits don't come to earth because Cassini doesn't have continuous data transmission to the Earth. That would be extremely expensive. DSN time is charged out the wazoo. I don't know Cassini specs, but most missions plan on recording data and shipping it back to Earth when DSN time is allocated. It isn't continous. DSN has other things to do.
You want to send the raw analog signals ("verbatim"?) back to Earth for signal processing in real time? That doesn't even really make sense.
The academic writers have worked very hard to get where they are, but their career choices have followed a path of risk avoidance.
Lessee, the better part of a decade of grad school, followed by low probability postdocs, fellowships, grant applications, applications for very limited tenure-track jobs, tenure committees, versus just going out and getting a job that pays N times as much? Toss in the two-body problem for kicks.
Speaking as a failed academic, the getting of the job seemed like a lower risk category to me. Academia just seemed like a huge crapshoot.
Slashdot Mirror
Disclaimer: IANAL
But I have spent years keeping lab notebooks in academia and industry. And the lawyers everywhere I've worked have always walked me through the process of documenting that notebook, dating each page, never deleting anything, only crossing it out, making copies (lab notebooks used to come with a sheet of carbon and every other page was for duplicates), and having pages you were particularly interested in witnessed and notarized. Otherwise you could spend years in court trying to prove that you simply hadn't backdated a notebook or falsified it in some way. Heck, the whole Baltimore fraud case was based on whether the lab notebooks were falsified or not.
So I don't think putting something on a blog is going to meet the legal standard. What's to keep someone from inserting a fake prior entry? How would you prove that they didn't? That's why prior art has to be published. Usually on paper. Not impossible to fake, but much much harder.
There's probably a solution to this, but it isn't as easy as you think. A decent lawyer would tear your RSS blog prior entry claim to bits.
Of course, TPF and SIM were cancelled, sorry, "deferred." Got to keep the Hubble, ISS, and manned program going.
We don't have viable breakeven fusion. We're not likely to get it anytime soon. Maybe in 20 years - same as they said 20 years ago, and 20 years before that. It's not as though He-3 or lack thereof is what's stopping us from having breakeven fusion reactors. Using a mythical fuel for a mythical fusion reactor as a reason to go to the moon makes your argument sound, well, mythical. Spending trillions of dollars to stockpile the mythical fuel for the mythical day in the future that it might be needed is crazy. If it's there, it'll still be there when (if) it's needed. Do we even know that it's there? Can you point me to peer-reviewed research?
And the lunar surface is, for many reasons, a much worse place than space for telescopes of all sorts. Huge temperature extremes, not the most stable environment, lack of pointing control, you lose 50% of your observing time because your telescope is looking sunward and you have to have RPGs because the other 50% of the time you lose your solar power. We don't use a lot of RPGs, they're a pain in the butt. Heavy, expensive, launch issues, radiation issues, reliability issues and it's difficult to get as much power as you get from a solar panel. Solar power is easier and more reliable. I've worked on a couple of projects where, just for fun and to forestall objections we weren't being forward-thinking enough, we ran trades of a moon site. Space won. Putting stuff on the moon isn't any less expensive than putting it at L2 and L2 is better for a lot of other reasons.
TPF-I has been effectively cancelled ("deferred"), in no small part due to its money being reallocated to a Hubble servicing mission and the other manned space flight programs.
Then replace Rodney King with "beating families of Samoans", and Rampart with "paying out $55 million for settlements in cases of excessive force in a five year period", and don't even get started on how they run the county jail.
Only death and taxes are inevitable. NASA had two viable TPF candidates and had spent tens of millions of dollars building up teams and hardware and labs and knowledge. Most of that has disappeared, except for a few papers and a couple of labs. "Deferred" means "cancelled" means "start over from scratch" if it ever gets started up again. Wasted money, mostly.
Because TPF has been cancelled so that the ISS can be finished so we can deorbit it into the ocean, thus honoring our commitments to our international partners (and screwing over our international partners on TPF). The scientists who are interested in trying to find life on other planets like Wes Traub are out there trying to drum up support for TPF so Congress might bring it back.
So maybe it's a slow news day, but maybe some scientists are engaging in public relations.
My Apple Airport Extreme router both has a log file and connects to an NTP server. It sure looks like a home router.
Well, duh. The refund isn't that much, and I'd rather get a small refund than owe an unexpected tax payment. But thanks for stating the obvious.
You shouldn't have to pay, essentially, a tax every year, just to figure out how much taxes you owe.
It's deductible.
I don't disagree with you, it should not be hard, but it is, and I have to live in the world as it is, rather than the world that I wish it to be. Or Canada.
I can do it by hand, I did so for years, but it isn't easy and it isn't fun, and four or five hours of my time, plus the peace of mind, is well worth a hundred bucks.
I've done my taxes for six years in a row now, using tax software that has saved me thousands of dollars. I consider this software worth my roughly $100/yr investment.
Q. How do I get it to run?
A. I send all the forms to my tax accountant, he fills them out, and sends them back to me with a bill usually around $100. This includes the itemized form with charity and medical deductions, home mortgage deduction, home business deductions, and a state version of same. This saves me many hours of work reading tax laws and instructions, frustration, and uncertainty. He has certainly saved me thousands in taxes because he's a professional and knows the rules, and hundreds of dollars in time and frustration. As a result, my results are OS-independent.
Not hard at all. It took me all of 15 minutes to gather all the forms and mail them to him, then sign them and send in the forms when he sends them back. I then happily write him a check and wait for the refund to come.
Except for that caffeine part.
That's 10% of the current decreased budget, not 10% increase of what the budget was before it got slashed this year.
Space isn't going anywhere anytime soon, so what's the big deal if we bring back stuff from Mars now or in 10 years? Why not scale back a few programs and save some cash now and address scaling it up in the future when the country's budget is a little better?
Because the people who know how to do the Mars missions won't sit around not working for 10 years. All that knowledge, all the wisdom, walks away. It isn't written down (not that it can be in lots of cases), and when (or more likely if) it starts up again, they'll be working on other projects and their loyalties will lie elsewhere.
I personally think every government program should undergo significant funding cuts and those programs will be forced to be more efficient.
Just for example:
TPF - cut to zero.
nuStar - cut to zero.
Dawn - cut to zero.
LISA, ConX, JDEM - will be downselected to one and the other two zeroed.
All the money spent on those programs so far is wasted. How efficient is that?
When I graduated 10 years ago, the average time to get a particle physics Ph.D was a bit over 7 years. That's for the people who graduated; over half of my entering class quit without a Ph.D. I doubt that the amount of time it takes to get one has decreased in a decade.
A lot of it depends on how quickly you prepare your dissertation.
BS. I doubt that the variation on "how quickly you prepare your dissertation" is more than six months. The years add up because your experiment doesn't get funded, or your advisor likes having you around to design electronics. Hardly anyone spends more time preparing their dissertation than needed. Most spend less, because after seven years, they want to get the hell out (and start the 10 years of postdoc'ing).
Complete with big red stop button, front panel register switches, core memory, banks of spinning 9 track tapes, and card reader input. Back when computers really let you know they were computing. After I showed competency with that, then I got to move up to the CDC 6600.
Do you complain about the WSJ lacking diversity, printing only far right conservative columnists? Why must the NYT be the bastion of diversity? Besides, they print Brooks and Tierney (and Safire for 30 years). Arguably they print more conservative columnists than liberal ones. And here "liberal" means Kristof and Friedman, who are more centrist or at worst left-centrist than liberal. "Diversity" seems to be code for "no liberals."
And you'll have to wait for Darwin, because the Hubble will suck all the money out of TPF-I and TPF-C.
Just keep putting money into that 77 Chevy.
No surprises here - this is pork barrel, nothing else.
"Which planet will they orbit next?"
Well, NASA just landed on Titan. So that seems like a pretty good answer.
I may not have got it all right on the first go around, but you can rest assured, i got it right after the testing and before it was deployed...
Like you tested this post to make sure you got the grammar correct?
And if you can't test it in a 0-g vacuum, or after 7 years of solar radiation, and you only get one chance to deploy on a mission that no one has ever done before? Or if testing it under those conditions doubles the mission cost, thus meaning that the mission likely won't fly?
Pilots have checklists because pilots before you crashed and died. Investigate and add another item to the checklist.
No one has ever landed a probe on Titan before. Planes still crash into the ground at high rates of speed despite all the checklists.
It is hard, and it is complicated, and it should be easy to see how errors like this can happen, and if, as a "true professional" (compared to all those amateurs who got the probe to Titan after 20 years of planning from pre-phase-A and 7 years of flight to yesterday), you can't see how it can happen, well, I hope those this post flashes across your mind the day that your aircraft goes into that last flat spin.
Can't happen to you, I guess. You're a "true professional". Those guys you know who did screw the pooch? Those guys were just amateurs, by definition.
Give me a break. Even Nike has a flash mp3 player that does shuffle. It even has an arm band, designed specifically for runners.
Yeah, my gf just spent something like $250 getting one of those from Nike with a whole 256M of memory (and a pedometer). We spent an hour setting up the lousy (compared to iTunes) jukebox/download software.
She's boxing it up tonight to send back and placing her order for the Shuffle.
People (especially ladies) like the flat screens because of their super slim depth, massive picture size, and amazing light-weight.
Show me a 60" CRT -- and if you can even find one, find a rec-room it would fit in, and try and lift it!
I have a 61" Sony rear projection (got it for basically free from a friend who was getting a divorce). It weighs about 400 lbs, it's huge, it took four people to get it into my house. I love it. My girlfriend hates it, as has every other woman who's been in my house.
Guess who's looking at the prices of the LCDs?
I keep telling her to let me wait a year, til the next generation comes out and prices drop, but...
Were you doing SDR in 1997 when Cassini was launched? Were you doing it in 1987 when Cassini was being designed?
All the bits don't come to earth because Cassini doesn't have continuous data transmission to the Earth. That would be extremely expensive. DSN time is charged out the wazoo. I don't know Cassini specs, but most missions plan on recording data and shipping it back to Earth when DSN time is allocated. It isn't continous. DSN has other things to do.
You want to send the raw analog signals ("verbatim"?) back to Earth for signal processing in real time? That doesn't even really make sense.
The academic writers have worked very hard to get where they are, but their career choices have followed a path of risk avoidance.
Lessee, the better part of a decade of grad school, followed by low probability postdocs, fellowships, grant applications, applications for very limited tenure-track jobs, tenure committees, versus just going out and getting a job that pays N times as much? Toss in the two-body problem for kicks.
Speaking as a failed academic, the getting of the job seemed like a lower risk category to me. Academia just seemed like a huge crapshoot.