The Navy recently turned down an appeal from the Defense Department inspector general to award Cmdr. Daly a Purple Heart for the incident. Cmdr. Daly, who retired from the service last year, continues to suffer eye pain and deteriorating vision.
I don't read that to say that Cmdr. Daly is personally appealing.
And I don't think he needs a whole lot of help to make the incident as scary as possible. Being blinded while flying an aircraft == bad. Having diminished vision 7 years after the incident is particularly bad. The reason his purple heart was denied, IIRC, is that the purple heart is reserved for injured combat veterans, and the blinding of the flight crew of a recon aircraft was not considered an act of war.
This is something the Russians have done to surveillance aircraft several times; US and Canadian helicopters in the early 80's, and this incident in 1997-- including painting the Space Shuttle Challenger in orbit in 1984, temporarily blinding the crew and causing equipment malfunctions.
IAAP (I am a pilot), and dealing with impaired vision and flashing bright lights from outside is not something I'd like to deal with on final.
NASA was able to get a really good initial fix on the positions of the rovers using doppler measurements of the tones the spacecraft emitted on descent.
For example, from the journal of Michael Watkins, manager of the navigation team: But we're also still working, and for Opportunity, the Navigation Team wants to get our first solution for the position of Opportunity as quickly as possible to help assess the condition of the rover.
Ten minutes after landing we get it - it's about 10 km further downtrack (to the East on Mars) from the last targeted point (which was about 10 km from the original target), due entirely to low atmospheric density on Mars. This is similar to Spirit, and well within specifications, and it looks from our maps to be an awesome landing site for the scientists. But we'll have to wait and see the first pictures...
This picture shows you the relative accuracy of the navigation. The big blue estimate ellipse is based on doppler data from the approach to Mars. The black ellipse is based on doppler data from the rover's status tones prior to chute deployment. And the white dot is the estimated position based on doppler from surface communications.
Netgear MR814 -- 802.11b access point + 4 port switch + firewall/nat for sale at Amazon for less than $20 after rebate-- in other words, barely any more than the wireless card for your gateway.
There's really no reason to run a general purpose machine for the wireless gateway on an ordinary network. Even if you're going to have a dedicated gateway, you can use a wireless router with the routing functionality turned off.
changing the orbit requires use of the limited amount of fuel onboard the spacecraft.
Hubble doesn't have any propellants/reboost capability-- as it'd contaminate the optics. Reboost only comes from Shuttle. (This is one reason why Hubble is in a maximum-performance-from-KSC 22.5 degree inclination).
So does Hubble, given that there is a large planet in the way of part of it's field of view.
And as we've discussed in another post, the fact that Hubble's orbiting the earth means that it has, over each orbit, capability to observe the entire sky (except where the Sun happens to be relative to earth at a given time of year)-- something that no earth based telescope has.
Maybe you want to learn what you're talking about before you spout crap mmkay?
Why not? The earth only eclipses stuff in a narrow set of planes; for instance, stuff that is in the "northern" or "southern" sky (100 degrees+ over the arctic/antarctic) is never eclipsed by earth. And stuff that is above middle latitudes is only eclipsed for short periods each orbit-- at worst, maybe 20 minutes of that 96 minutes. So it's certainly possible to take 35 observations 2 minutes apart, for instance. If there is not sufficient data in that, there are frequency domain techniques (fourier transforms with adapted windows) that can handle the few missing observations while in eclipse.
The hubble is able to slew independently of its orbital period, as long as it doesn't end up pointing at earth, the moon, or the sun.
Well, two telescopes at the poles does not get you the same amount of coverage as you get from a space telescope.
And who's to say the superb seeing that is available in the antarctic is also available in the far north? It's possible, perhaps even likely, but as yet unconfirmed.
Space based telescopes can do things that terrestial scopes can't-- but we'd be wise to do as much terrestially as we can, so we can make smarter use of the highly expensive space assets. Likewise, there are some types of observation where earth based scopes outperform space telescopes-- due to angular resolution (when observing in wavelengths where atmospheric degradation isn't so significant), operational characteristics (longer exposure times, greater ability to take successive observations), quick response, etc. Certainly, where terrestial telescopes can do the job, they win in price performance.
But I think it's silly to say space based scopes are worthless.
The observing efficiency is less than 50%, but not for the reason you state. The telescope is limited in how quickly it can slew to a new location, and large portions of the sky are eclipsed by earth. It also, of course, cannot point anywhere close to where the sun is.
If Hubble was limited to observing when it was out of the sun, it could only observe a tiny fraction of the time-- less than 20%, I believe, when the earth eclipses the sun from Hubble's vantage point.
It's worth noting that in the antarctic, the viewing conditions are unusual; in the winter, when they propose observing, there are several months of near continuous dark sky, enabling very long term observations that are not possible by any other means. Of course, an antarctic telescope cannot see large portions of the sky.
No, but it naturally circles the earth every 96 minutes or so, so there's no large portion of the sky which is continually in eclipse.
However, the price-performance of an antarctic scope is astounding, and in some ways the absolute performance could considerably surpass Hubble. So I'm all for an antarctic telescope.
When they were planning to do things like study distribution of oxygen isotopes from the sun, and they have nanograms of oxygen... probably exposing the probe to a 20% oxygen earth atmosphere probably isn't good.
Likewise, with a few dozen micrograms of total material, tossing in several kilograms of dirt and doubtlessly several grams of fine dust inside the capsule will make determining what materials are extraterrestial in origin difficult indeed. Determining quantities of any substance which is more than a few parts-per-billion in earth soil or atmosphere is going to be extraordinarily difficult, and any results will be very questionable, unfortunately.
Not exactly the same thing.. The energy of re-entry creates a blanket of charged particles that prevent communications. It's not natural occurance of hot, ionized gases that creates the problem, per se, but the actual energy of the craft heating and ionizing a layer of plasma beneath it. This is the reason why the Shuttle, during re-entry, talks "up" to TDRS satellites instead of down to the ground. UHF comms are not typically established until the shuttle is at a relatively low altitude.
So basically, the time of blackout is not tied to when the craft is in the ionosphere-- but rather when re-entry energies are high (some of which occurs in the ionosphere). A typical blackout for a high energy re-entry would extend from 90 km down to 40km of altitude.
deployed its chute at about 25,000 feet (about 7.6 km).
Ah, but there's more to the design of the craft than just the total amount of parachute braking to accomplish. Genesis was designed with a drogue chute at 33km (108k ft) for stability during the descent. The higher altitude allows the drogue chute to be structurally simpler and lighter, as the peak forces encountered during deployment are less, and serves to stabilize the craft on descent. It would effective to some altitude somewhat lower than that, but at some point the stresses caused by the higher atmospheric pressure would have undesirable effects.
So basically, there's a narrow window after communications would be re-established to get useful telemetry and deploy the chute. And many of the possible failure modes (computer failure, battery failure, pyro failure) would not be addressed by such a "emergency deploy" button.
A good solution to all this might be to just use TDRS at a really low bitrate for sample return missions like this. I hope NASA develops systems to allow that to happen. It would both give us a better idea on why things failed and perhaps allow recovery from some situations like this.
It chooses where to land based on the earth-entry burn. The spacecraft landed within its error ellipse, at the Utah test and training range. So navigation worked pretty well.
Sending radio signals to a probe at orbital velocity in the process of entering the earth's atmosphere is difficult because of the plasma that forms from the entry heat. And deploying the chutes later (at higher atmospheric pressure) likely wouldn't work very well. The Shuttle is one of the few crafts that keeps telemetry data going during entry-- using the Telemetry Data Relay Satellites that NASA has established for this purpose (they talk upwards so that the radio signal doesn't need to go through the plasma). I hope that more sample return missions in the future will use this type of option to get telemetry data back home.
I already said this in a previous followup post. I doubt the OP dropped their cellphone in a vacuum.
When the center of drag forces and the center of gravity of an object don't line up along the axis of the fall, a torque will result. These two things can line up under two circumstances-- when the center of gravity is below the center of drag forces, and when the center of gravity is above. The former is a stable condition, and the latter is unstable as any torque resulting will magnify the error.
This means things on earth, like cellphones, have a tendency to fall with the heavy side down, which the clueless parent of my post said was not the case. So I called him clueless. It almost seems like from your post you're agreeing with me: then it will tend to lead with the end which centre of gravity is towards.
Most cell phones, for example, Nokia's are largely uniform as far as aerodynamics are concerneed.
OK, let's say you're right. Then there's a uniform amount of resistance to the object falling over the surface facing the ground. Let's even be generous and pick a shape that won't induce any torque itself, like a sphere. This can be modelled as a vector, from the aerodynamic center of the object, in the opposite direction of the fall.
Then, when you add up all the mass vectors to figure out the center of mass (where gravity is acting), and you get a different point than the aerodynamic center-- from which the force of gravity is applied. Hence there is a torque applied to the object by these two different force vectors and rotation occurs-- unless they happen to be lined up.
Then you're further ignoring the effects of a tumbling object as it skids along a surface-- it will want to settle into the lower-energy state of having the center of mass as close to the ground as possible.
And there's tons of evidence throughout life that these effects are important-- mass distributions in airplanes and rockets, adding weights to dice to cheat, etc.
It is true if there was no atmosphere, no torque would be applied to a falling object. But on Earth, objects tend to fall and land heavy side down.
Things like to have their center-of-gravity as close to earth as possible. Ever notice that things that are top-heavy are a lot easier to tip over than things that are bottom-heavy? If you drop something that's very top-heavy out of an airplane, it's going to at least initially flip over to be heavy-side-down.
In a short fall, rigid bodies will tend to rotate so the heavy side faces the ground. In a longer fall, aerodynamic forces become more dominant than distribution-of-mass issues.
t's bad precedent IMO. Bad and absurd, and could lead to legitimization of nonsense like this:
Every extradition treaty I'm familiar with limits the set of crimes that extradition can be sought for. For instance, the Australian-American extradition treaty only grants extradition for things committed outside the requesting state when the requested state's laws would provide for jurisdiction in the reverse situation. So even if we somehow made holocaust-denying outside the US an extraditable offense here, it would require the Australians pulling a similar stunt for us to be able to extradite Australian citizens for holocaust-denying.
When the offence for which extradition has been requested has been committed outside the territory of the requesting State -
(a) if the United States of America is the requested State - the executive authority of the United States of America; or
(b) if Australia is the requested State - the Attorney-General of Australia,
shall have the power to grant the extradition if the laws of the requested State provide for jurisdiction over such an offence committed in similar circumstances.
So, the very fact that the extradition was granted means that Australia feels that their law gives them jurisdiction of Americans in similar circumstances.
Well, Australia's government has chosen to enter into a reciprocal extradition agreement with the US; they would expect a US citizen to be extradited to Australia if the circumstances were reversed.
In most cases, the place where victims are located has a lot more incentive and ability to prosecute in most cases. This is why extradition agreements exist. At the same time, extradition agreements are generally purposely limited to 'serious' crimes, to prevent their overuse and miscarriages of justice. Unfortunately, criminal violation of copyright has become a much more broadly appliable statute since information technology has come along, and I think that's where the problem is-- the laws are out of date for the problem.
Think of how difficult it would be for Australia to prosecute an Australian for bank fraud committed against citizens in a foreign country, though-- they would have no power to compel witnesses, to subpoena most of the relevent evidence, etc. Not to mention that most prosecutors would care a lot more about cases where their direct constituents are the victim, rather than foreigners. It would be virtually impossible to prove a case under such circumstances.
Yes, to illustrate that the point that the parent poster made about the physical location of the criminal being the only important factor is absurd in many situations.
Australia chose to form a reciprocal extradition treaty on offenses that include the warez kiddie's. Australia could just as easily extradite US citizens for similar offenses. While I think it overall is a little silly IN THIS CASE, it is consistent with international law and is very necessary in many circumstances, like prosecuting white collar crime.
By this logic, arguably the US wouldn't be able to try Osama Bin Laden if he was captured, despite the fact that he allegedly facilitated and conspired in the murder of 3000 people in the US. And the country whose laws he was under at the time wasn't particularly interested in trying him either.
Likewise, if someone committed bank fraud from Australia against the US, it would hardly be the Australian authorities investigating it, nor would anyone in Australia be damaged-- so it wouldn't exactly be very interesting to Australian prosecutors. Hence we have extradition treaties for this type of thing.
I agree being extradited for being a indiscriminate warez kiddie is a bit extreme.
Or speed, to be more precise. I don't know why this is so hard for everyone to understand.
If I normally drive home at 30 MPH, and I increase my speed by 100% (to 60MPH), I will get home in half the time. So if the rate at which pixels change luminosity increases by 100%, the transition time will fall by a factor of 2.
The site linked just tells good public places to get a view of the launch from. That's all. There is a small launch schedule, that says:
This schedule is a composite of unclassified information approved for public release from government, industry, and other sources. It is essentially accurate at the time of publication, but may disagree with other launch schedules (including the official Vandenberg AFB schedule). This listing does not provide sensitive or potentially sensitive information on military launches.
See? No information on classifieds launches, moron.
Slashdot Mirror
Read the article again.
The Navy recently turned down an appeal from the Defense Department inspector general to award Cmdr. Daly a Purple Heart for the incident. Cmdr. Daly, who retired from the service last year, continues to suffer eye pain and deteriorating vision.
I don't read that to say that Cmdr. Daly is personally appealing.
And I don't think he needs a whole lot of help to make the incident as scary as possible. Being blinded while flying an aircraft == bad. Having diminished vision 7 years after the incident is particularly bad. The reason his purple heart was denied, IIRC, is that the purple heart is reserved for injured combat veterans, and the blinding of the flight crew of a recon aircraft was not considered an act of war.
This is something the Russians have done to surveillance aircraft several times; US and Canadian helicopters in the early 80's, and this incident in 1997-- including painting the Space Shuttle Challenger in orbit in 1984, temporarily blinding the crew and causing equipment malfunctions.
IAAP (I am a pilot), and dealing with impaired vision and flashing bright lights from outside is not something I'd like to deal with on final.
NASA was able to get a really good initial fix on the positions of the rovers using doppler measurements of the tones the spacecraft emitted on descent.
For example, from the journal of Michael Watkins, manager of the navigation team:
But we're also still working, and for Opportunity, the Navigation Team wants to get our first solution for the position of Opportunity as quickly as possible to help assess the condition of the rover.
Ten minutes after landing we get it - it's about 10 km further downtrack (to the East on Mars) from the last targeted point (which was about 10 km from the original target), due entirely to low atmospheric density on Mars. This is similar to Spirit, and well within specifications, and it looks from our maps to be an awesome landing site for the scientists. But we'll have to wait and see the first pictures...
This picture shows you the relative accuracy of the navigation. The big blue estimate ellipse is based on doppler data from the approach to Mars. The black ellipse is based on doppler data from the rover's status tones prior to chute deployment. And the white dot is the estimated position based on doppler from surface communications.
That's why he said ALMOST an order of magnitude higher.
.70 almost 1? I guess.
If you want to be precise, it's ~.70 orders of magnitude. Is
Stop being pedantic and read the parent's post.
Netgear MR814 -- 802.11b access point + 4 port switch + firewall/nat for sale at Amazon for less than $20 after rebate-- in other words, barely any more than the wireless card for your gateway.
There's really no reason to run a general purpose machine for the wireless gateway on an ordinary network. Even if you're going to have a dedicated gateway, you can use a wireless router with the routing functionality turned off.
Spartan PPronunciation Key(spärtn)
adj.
1. Of or relating to Sparta or its people.
2. also spartan
a. Rigorously self-disciplined or self-restrained.
b. Simple, frugal, or austere: a Spartan diet; a spartan lifestyle.
c. Marked by brevity of speech; laconic.
d. Courageous in the face of pain, danger, or adversity.
changing the orbit requires use of the limited amount of fuel onboard the spacecraft.
Hubble doesn't have any propellants/reboost capability-- as it'd contaminate the optics. Reboost only comes from Shuttle. (This is one reason why Hubble is in a maximum-performance-from-KSC 22.5 degree inclination).
So does Hubble, given that there is a large planet in the way of part of it's field of view.
And as we've discussed in another post, the fact that Hubble's orbiting the earth means that it has, over each orbit, capability to observe the entire sky (except where the Sun happens to be relative to earth at a given time of year)-- something that no earth based telescope has.
Maybe you want to learn what you're talking about before you spout crap mmkay?
Why not? The earth only eclipses stuff in a narrow set of planes; for instance, stuff that is in the "northern" or "southern" sky (100 degrees+ over the arctic/antarctic) is never eclipsed by earth. And stuff that is above middle latitudes is only eclipsed for short periods each orbit-- at worst, maybe 20 minutes of that 96 minutes. So it's certainly possible to take 35 observations 2 minutes apart, for instance. If there is not sufficient data in that, there are frequency domain techniques (fourier transforms with adapted windows) that can handle the few missing observations while in eclipse.
The hubble is able to slew independently of its orbital period, as long as it doesn't end up pointing at earth, the moon, or the sun.
Well, two telescopes at the poles does not get you the same amount of coverage as you get from a space telescope.
And who's to say the superb seeing that is available in the antarctic is also available in the far north? It's possible, perhaps even likely, but as yet unconfirmed.
Space based telescopes can do things that terrestial scopes can't-- but we'd be wise to do as much terrestially as we can, so we can make smarter use of the highly expensive space assets. Likewise, there are some types of observation where earth based scopes outperform space telescopes-- due to angular resolution (when observing in wavelengths where atmospheric degradation isn't so significant), operational characteristics (longer exposure times, greater ability to take successive observations), quick response, etc. Certainly, where terrestial telescopes can do the job, they win in price performance.
But I think it's silly to say space based scopes are worthless.
The observing efficiency is less than 50%, but not for the reason you state. The telescope is limited in how quickly it can slew to a new location, and large portions of the sky are eclipsed by earth. It also, of course, cannot point anywhere close to where the sun is.
If Hubble was limited to observing when it was out of the sun, it could only observe a tiny fraction of the time-- less than 20%, I believe, when the earth eclipses the sun from Hubble's vantage point.
It's worth noting that in the antarctic, the viewing conditions are unusual; in the winter, when they propose observing, there are several months of near continuous dark sky, enabling very long term observations that are not possible by any other means. Of course, an antarctic telescope cannot see large portions of the sky.
No, but it naturally circles the earth every 96 minutes or so, so there's no large portion of the sky which is continually in eclipse.
However, the price-performance of an antarctic scope is astounding, and in some ways the absolute performance could considerably surpass Hubble. So I'm all for an antarctic telescope.
When they were planning to do things like study distribution of oxygen isotopes from the sun, and they have nanograms of oxygen... probably exposing the probe to a 20% oxygen earth atmosphere probably isn't good.
Likewise, with a few dozen micrograms of total material, tossing in several kilograms of dirt and doubtlessly several grams of fine dust inside the capsule will make determining what materials are extraterrestial in origin difficult indeed. Determining quantities of any substance which is more than a few parts-per-billion in earth soil or atmosphere is going to be extraordinarily difficult, and any results will be very questionable, unfortunately.
That's why he said 'a' deciding factor, instead of 'the' deciding factor. 'a' indicates there are others.
Not exactly the same thing.. The energy of re-entry creates a blanket of charged particles that prevent communications. It's not natural occurance of hot, ionized gases that creates the problem, per se, but the actual energy of the craft heating and ionizing a layer of plasma beneath it. This is the reason why the Shuttle, during re-entry, talks "up" to TDRS satellites instead of down to the ground. UHF comms are not typically established until the shuttle is at a relatively low altitude.
So basically, the time of blackout is not tied to when the craft is in the ionosphere-- but rather when re-entry energies are high (some of which occurs in the ionosphere). A typical blackout for a high energy re-entry would extend from 90 km down to 40km of altitude.
deployed its chute at about 25,000 feet (about 7.6 km).
Ah, but there's more to the design of the craft than just the total amount of parachute braking to accomplish. Genesis was designed with a drogue chute at 33km (108k ft) for stability during the descent. The higher altitude allows the drogue chute to be structurally simpler and lighter, as the peak forces encountered during deployment are less, and serves to stabilize the craft on descent. It would effective to some altitude somewhat lower than that, but at some point the stresses caused by the higher atmospheric pressure would have undesirable effects.
So basically, there's a narrow window after communications would be re-established to get useful telemetry and deploy the chute. And many of the possible failure modes (computer failure, battery failure, pyro failure) would not be addressed by such a "emergency deploy" button.
A good solution to all this might be to just use TDRS at a really low bitrate for sample return missions like this. I hope NASA develops systems to allow that to happen. It would both give us a better idea on why things failed and perhaps allow recovery from some situations like this.
It chooses where to land based on the earth-entry burn. The spacecraft landed within its error ellipse, at the Utah test and training range. So navigation worked pretty well.
Sending radio signals to a probe at orbital velocity in the process of entering the earth's atmosphere is difficult because of the plasma that forms from the entry heat. And deploying the chutes later (at higher atmospheric pressure) likely wouldn't work very well. The Shuttle is one of the few crafts that keeps telemetry data going during entry-- using the Telemetry Data Relay Satellites that NASA has established for this purpose (they talk upwards so that the radio signal doesn't need to go through the plasma). I hope that more sample return missions in the future will use this type of option to get telemetry data back home.
I already said this in a previous followup post. I doubt the OP dropped their cellphone in a vacuum.
When the center of drag forces and the center of gravity of an object don't line up along the axis of the fall, a torque will result. These two things can line up under two circumstances-- when the center of gravity is below the center of drag forces, and when the center of gravity is above. The former is a stable condition, and the latter is unstable as any torque resulting will magnify the error.
This means things on earth, like cellphones, have a tendency to fall with the heavy side down, which the clueless parent of my post said was not the case. So I called him clueless. It almost seems like from your post you're agreeing with me: then it will tend to lead with the end which centre of gravity is towards.
Most cell phones, for example, Nokia's are largely uniform as far as aerodynamics are concerneed.
OK, let's say you're right. Then there's a uniform amount of resistance to the object falling over the surface facing the ground. Let's even be generous and pick a shape that won't induce any torque itself, like a sphere. This can be modelled as a vector, from the aerodynamic center of the object, in the opposite direction of the fall.
Then, when you add up all the mass vectors to figure out the center of mass (where gravity is acting), and you get a different point than the aerodynamic center-- from which the force of gravity is applied. Hence there is a torque applied to the object by these two different force vectors and rotation occurs-- unless they happen to be lined up.
Then you're further ignoring the effects of a tumbling object as it skids along a surface-- it will want to settle into the lower-energy state of having the center of mass as close to the ground as possible.
And there's tons of evidence throughout life that these effects are important-- mass distributions in airplanes and rockets, adding weights to dice to cheat, etc.
It is true if there was no atmosphere, no torque would be applied to a falling object. But on Earth, objects tend to fall and land heavy side down.
Uh, hello Mr. Clueless.
Things like to have their center-of-gravity as close to earth as possible. Ever notice that things that are top-heavy are a lot easier to tip over than things that are bottom-heavy? If you drop something that's very top-heavy out of an airplane, it's going to at least initially flip over to be heavy-side-down.
In a short fall, rigid bodies will tend to rotate so the heavy side faces the ground. In a longer fall, aerodynamic forces become more dominant than distribution-of-mass issues.
t's bad precedent IMO. Bad and absurd, and could lead to legitimization of nonsense like this:
Every extradition treaty I'm familiar with limits the set of crimes that extradition can be sought for. For instance, the Australian-American extradition treaty only grants extradition for things committed outside the requesting state when the requested state's laws would provide for jurisdiction in the reverse situation. So even if we somehow made holocaust-denying outside the US an extraditable offense here, it would require the Australians pulling a similar stunt for us to be able to extradite Australian citizens for holocaust-denying.
if someone in the US committed a crime while in Australia, this is what our treaty dictates.
Wrong.
From the treaty:
Article IV
When the offence for which extradition has been requested has been committed outside the territory of the requesting State -
(a) if the United States of America is the requested State - the executive authority of the United States of America; or
(b) if Australia is the requested State - the Attorney-General of Australia,
shall have the power to grant the extradition if the laws of the requested State provide for jurisdiction over such an offence committed in similar circumstances.
So, the very fact that the extradition was granted means that Australia feels that their law gives them jurisdiction of Americans in similar circumstances.
The French finally extradited Einhorn 2 years ago.
Just FYI-- I agree with your point otherwise.
Well, Australia's government has chosen to enter into a reciprocal extradition agreement with the US; they would expect a US citizen to be extradited to Australia if the circumstances were reversed.
In most cases, the place where victims are located has a lot more incentive and ability to prosecute in most cases. This is why extradition agreements exist. At the same time, extradition agreements are generally purposely limited to 'serious' crimes, to prevent their overuse and miscarriages of justice. Unfortunately, criminal violation of copyright has become a much more broadly appliable statute since information technology has come along, and I think that's where the problem is-- the laws are out of date for the problem.
Think of how difficult it would be for Australia to prosecute an Australian for bank fraud committed against citizens in a foreign country, though-- they would have no power to compel witnesses, to subpoena most of the relevent evidence, etc. Not to mention that most prosecutors would care a lot more about cases where their direct constituents are the victim, rather than foreigners. It would be virtually impossible to prove a case under such circumstances.
Yes, to illustrate that the point that the parent poster made about the physical location of the criminal being the only important factor is absurd in many situations.
Australia chose to form a reciprocal extradition treaty on offenses that include the warez kiddie's. Australia could just as easily extradite US citizens for similar offenses. While I think it overall is a little silly IN THIS CASE, it is consistent with international law and is very necessary in many circumstances, like prosecuting white collar crime.
By this logic, arguably the US wouldn't be able to try Osama Bin Laden if he was captured, despite the fact that he allegedly facilitated and conspired in the murder of 3000 people in the US. And the country whose laws he was under at the time wasn't particularly interested in trying him either.
Likewise, if someone committed bank fraud from Australia against the US, it would hardly be the Australian authorities investigating it, nor would anyone in Australia be damaged-- so it wouldn't exactly be very interesting to Australian prosecutors. Hence we have extradition treaties for this type of thing.
I agree being extradited for being a indiscriminate warez kiddie is a bit extreme.
response speed of pixels on LCDs by 100 per cent
Or speed, to be more precise. I don't know why this is so hard for everyone to understand.
If I normally drive home at 30 MPH, and I increase my speed by 100% (to 60MPH), I will get home in half the time. So if the rate at which pixels change luminosity increases by 100%, the transition time will fall by a factor of 2.
You are such an obvious troll.
The site linked just tells good public places to get a view of the launch from. That's all. There is a small launch schedule, that says:
This schedule is a composite of unclassified information approved for public release from government, industry, and other sources. It is essentially accurate at the time of publication, but may disagree with other launch schedules (including the official Vandenberg AFB schedule). This listing does not provide sensitive or potentially sensitive information on military launches.
See? No information on classifieds launches, moron.