Remember, remember
The fifth of November,
The gunpowder treason and plot.
I know of no reason,
The gunpowder treason,
Should ever be forgot.
The fifth of November is known as Guy Fawkes day in the U.K. (or at least Britain). It is a holiday which recalls the tale of a fellow who (for religious reasons primarily, IIRC) attempted to blow up Parliament with some kegs of gunpowder that he stashed in some tunnels under the appropriate building. His plan was foiled and he and his co-conspirators were hanged.
Nowadays the holiday is primarily celebrated for recreational purposes, and, IIRC, it usually involves fireworks and kids getting bags of candy or something (kind of like Halloween in the States, but without the door to door part).
I was born and raised in California and that is what I can remember about the fifth of November without looking it up via Google. How did I do? I'm guessing I proved you wrong to some extent.
FWIW, I learned about Guy Fawkes day before V for Vendetta came out. There was an episode of an old cartoon about a cynical and sarcastic teenage girl named Daria where she is visited by three holiday spirits, or something like that. One of the spirits is the spirit of Guy Fawkes, which is amusingly depicted as a Sex Pistols style punk rocker with a badass mohawk and a funny British accent. Daria doesn't know who he is or what he is about. After watching that episode, I asked my World Cultures teacher about Guy Fawkes at school (HS level, grade 10ish). He told me most of what I wrote above, minus the nursery rhyme.
Don't sell us Yanks short. Just because our leaders are incompetent, uncultured twits doesn't mean the rest of us are.
Also, I think you were joking but I felt like showing off anyways.
Except the information stored in your fingerprints cannot be used to determine whether you have certain gene sequences that make you a higher risk factor for genetic diseases like your DNA can. DNA is a lot more than a unique identifier from person to person (and whether or not it is that is debatable). It stores a lot of personal, private data about you.
And if you think someone other than the police will never get their hands on this database (or, at least, part of it) eventually, you are kidding yourself.
Since it is the public's ignorance that will make this possible, the battleground of education is where this contest will be decided.
Education? You mean educating those masses of young people that already are more likely to bejigger thier iPhone, Android phone, or Tablet XX in whatever manner that one creepy kid in class told them to just to get their favorite website working than not? You mean educating those masses of people who don't even realize these legal antics are going on, but who still just go to Google and type, "Download Movie _____," and figure out how to do it?
I don't know what world you, or these lawmakers, are living in, but they've already lost the war of education. 95% of the populations doesn't know or give a shit about laws like this. They will still download whatever they want. They will still put in the effort of a minimal hack to get to read what they want. They will still find a way to do anything they can on the internet because the commonly accepted theme in society today is, "it can be done because it has already been done, just find where it has been done by looking on the internet."
Folks are going to get access to the information they want because they have been used to being able to do that for over 20 years now. There are entire swarms of kids that can't even imagine a reality where that doesn't exist. None of these people pay attention to laws like this because they don't give a damn about laws like this. The censors have lost. They just don't know it yet.
And yet, somehow, none of our political leaders are. Aren't out Congressional representatives supposed to, you know, represent us in some form or another?
"Trying to take things away from you". That sense of entitlement is exactly the problem that got us into this mess.
It's funny to me that things that were once considered freedoms and rights are now labeled entitlements and demonized. The right of a woman to chose what happens to her newly conceived child and her body, the right of Americans to work a job and try to fight for that job when a politician at a disconnected level decides what they do is not important anymore, the right to put away money in a retirement fund to properly establish an income in one's later years: those were the three things, specifically, that the OP cited, and yet you labeled them entitlements.
We have the OP talking about, quite literally, an American's right and freedom to make choices regarding his or her life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, three things that this country used to believe in, and you label them entitlements.
I think that most of us that ride a motorcycle accept the fact that if we hit something we're going to die. We don't hop on our two-wheeled sportster-engines-duct-taped-to -a- frame vehicles for safety purposes.
Yep, because that's not emotional hyperbole or anything.
How about this? How about you give me a link to a company that makes a sensor, or a link to the sensor itself, that weighs about as much as the Lego figurines, that requires no additional calibration or testing, that could survive within the environmental envelope this spacecraft will see, and that costs less than $15,000. Go ahead, I'll wait.
So, I clicked through TFA and the link to the paper contained within. I'm not sure why Discover refers to this piece of hardware as a 'chip.' It doesn't appear to be an electronic chip of any sort. It looks like the information about what liquid the material is dipped in is derived from studying the patterns of 'wetness' within the material's structure. But I don't see any mention of how this information would be communicated via some electrical signal to a microprocessor or other circuitry. Perhaps I am thinking in a limited context, but it seems like this material's usefulness as a sensor is still very limited.
Spy satellites are big, heavy, and designed to operate in LEO, below the harsh radiation environment of deep space. Getting one to Mars in functioning condition would be... um.... difficult to say the least.
I would wager that a good chunk of that change was spent on the wages of a professional writing the CNC mill code necessary to do such a detailed machining job. Those are pretty expensive skills
Are we gullible or educated in how the launch industry works?
Rockets like the Atlas V 551 are sold at a certain price. They can lift a certain amount to a certain velocity. If your spacecraft happens to be just slightly under the mass threshold you need it to be to achieve the desired velocity, then you can pretty much put whatever you want on it as long as you remain under that mass threshold.
Believe it or not, not everything cool that happens is not a giant conspiracy by a large corporation in an attempt to pull one over on the poor, unsuspecting masses.
Or, barring the possibility that you are a tinfoil-hatter, and you really are just genuinely this pessimisitc, I will leave you with the good news that the world doesn't always suck, and you are allowed to get excited about some things. Isn't that great news?!
Oh yeah. Because scientific equipment that can survive the myriad of environments this spacecraft will see between here and Jupiter is just something you buy at Wal-Mart and duct tape onto you spacecraft three days before launch. It's not like any of it needs extensive, expensive calibration testing or thermal envelope testing to ensure it will work properly. Nor does scientific equipment need specialized, one-off design components built into it like rad-hardened microchips and vibration survivable optics. Nope. Scientific equipments is obviously just as cheap, simple, and easy to design as static aluminum weight balances machined to look cool. No extra cost, risk, or overhead to come along with that.
Oh, and before you say that they should have built in one more scientific instrument from the start of the mission, you need to do some research on a portion of spacecraft design known as mass margin. NASA has been accounting for a little extra mass margin in the design of this spacecraft from the get go. That margin reduces the risk of a schedule slip later in the design lifecycle. As the design matures, the margin decreases, but since launch vehicle selection occurs relatively early in a mission design lifecycle, a rocket would have been chosen that could lift that extra design margin mass. Since the expected mass was lower than the mass planned for, there was some performance that NASA could eat up with whatever they damn well pleased to slap onto their spacecraft at the last minute without further endanering the flight. Since scientific equpiment can't be will-nilly slapped onto a spacecraft, they would have had to pick something relatively safe, simple, and ultimately useless: like Lego action figures, or nothing at all (which would have been boring and generated no publicity).
Any other questions smartass? And before you ask, yes, I do spacecraft design and launch performance analysis for a living.
Well if you're going to buy an Atlas 551 to get this spacecraft to Jupiter in the first place, and you have a little extra performance margin on the rocket that can cover the weight of adding three Lego figurines (which you do, a 551 is a damn powerful rocket, and three aluminum figures are not particularlly heavy). Then why not add something fun for the ride?
Stop wasting so much energy on being cranky. You'll give yourself an ulcer.
You mean the money that you spent on Lego playsets when you were growing up? Because if you're quite done being a cynical bastard, you could RTFA and discover that Lego footed the costs, not NASA.
I think she's holding a magnifying glass, because she can "perr into the heart of Jupiter," which is the stated reason why the spacecraft itself is called Juno.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember, remember
The fifth of November,
The gunpowder treason and plot.
I know of no reason,
The gunpowder treason,
Should ever be forgot.
The fifth of November is known as Guy Fawkes day in the U.K. (or at least Britain). It is a holiday which recalls the tale of a fellow who (for religious reasons primarily, IIRC) attempted to blow up Parliament with some kegs of gunpowder that he stashed in some tunnels under the appropriate building. His plan was foiled and he and his co-conspirators were hanged.
Nowadays the holiday is primarily celebrated for recreational purposes, and, IIRC, it usually involves fireworks and kids getting bags of candy or something (kind of like Halloween in the States, but without the door to door part).
I was born and raised in California and that is what I can remember about the fifth of November without looking it up via Google. How did I do? I'm guessing I proved you wrong to some extent.
FWIW, I learned about Guy Fawkes day before V for Vendetta came out. There was an episode of an old cartoon about a cynical and sarcastic teenage girl named Daria where she is visited by three holiday spirits, or something like that. One of the spirits is the spirit of Guy Fawkes, which is amusingly depicted as a Sex Pistols style punk rocker with a badass mohawk and a funny British accent. Daria doesn't know who he is or what he is about. After watching that episode, I asked my World Cultures teacher about Guy Fawkes at school (HS level, grade 10ish). He told me most of what I wrote above, minus the nursery rhyme.
Don't sell us Yanks short. Just because our leaders are incompetent, uncultured twits doesn't mean the rest of us are.
Also, I think you were joking but I felt like showing off anyways.
Except the information stored in your fingerprints cannot be used to determine whether you have certain gene sequences that make you a higher risk factor for genetic diseases like your DNA can. DNA is a lot more than a unique identifier from person to person (and whether or not it is that is debatable). It stores a lot of personal, private data about you.
And if you think someone other than the police will never get their hands on this database (or, at least, part of it) eventually, you are kidding yourself.
With my genetic code, anyone could grow an exact replica of my genitals, and those are my privates by name and definition, damn it!
Who gives a shit? If you want one, buy it unlocked on Newegg or eBay. Problem solved.
Since it is the public's ignorance that will make this possible, the battleground of education is where this contest will be decided.
Education? You mean educating those masses of young people that already are more likely to bejigger thier iPhone, Android phone, or Tablet XX in whatever manner that one creepy kid in class told them to just to get their favorite website working than not? You mean educating those masses of people who don't even realize these legal antics are going on, but who still just go to Google and type, "Download Movie _____," and figure out how to do it?
I don't know what world you, or these lawmakers, are living in, but they've already lost the war of education. 95% of the populations doesn't know or give a shit about laws like this. They will still download whatever they want. They will still put in the effort of a minimal hack to get to read what they want. They will still find a way to do anything they can on the internet because the commonly accepted theme in society today is, "it can be done because it has already been done, just find where it has been done by looking on the internet."
Folks are going to get access to the information they want because they have been used to being able to do that for over 20 years now. There are entire swarms of kids that can't even imagine a reality where that doesn't exist. None of these people pay attention to laws like this because they don't give a damn about laws like this. The censors have lost. They just don't know it yet.
And yet, somehow, none of our political leaders are. Aren't out Congressional representatives supposed to, you know, represent us in some form or another?
Is crowdsourcing the long term future of pure research projects?"
Why not? God knows funding from the government isn't safe anymore.
"Trying to take things away from you". That sense of entitlement is exactly the problem that got us into this mess.
It's funny to me that things that were once considered freedoms and rights are now labeled entitlements and demonized. The right of a woman to chose what happens to her newly conceived child and her body, the right of Americans to work a job and try to fight for that job when a politician at a disconnected level decides what they do is not important anymore, the right to put away money in a retirement fund to properly establish an income in one's later years: those were the three things, specifically, that the OP cited, and yet you labeled them entitlements.
We have the OP talking about, quite literally, an American's right and freedom to make choices regarding his or her life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, three things that this country used to believe in, and you label them entitlements.
You're pathetic.
I think that most of us that ride a motorcycle accept the fact that if we hit something we're going to die. We don't hop on our two-wheeled sportster-engines-duct-taped-to -a- frame vehicles for safety purposes.
Fair enough.
Well done. ;)
What can I say? I have great timing. :D
Yep, because that's not emotional hyperbole or anything.
How about this? How about you give me a link to a company that makes a sensor, or a link to the sensor itself, that weighs about as much as the Lego figurines, that requires no additional calibration or testing, that could survive within the environmental envelope this spacecraft will see, and that costs less than $15,000. Go ahead, I'll wait.
So, I clicked through TFA and the link to the paper contained within. I'm not sure why Discover refers to this piece of hardware as a 'chip.' It doesn't appear to be an electronic chip of any sort. It looks like the information about what liquid the material is dipped in is derived from studying the patterns of 'wetness' within the material's structure. But I don't see any mention of how this information would be communicated via some electrical signal to a microprocessor or other circuitry. Perhaps I am thinking in a limited context, but it seems like this material's usefulness as a sensor is still very limited.
Am I missing something?
Spy satellites are big, heavy, and designed to operate in LEO, below the harsh radiation environment of deep space. Getting one to Mars in functioning condition would be... um.... difficult to say the least.
I read a comment like this on a Chinese forum once about America. Go figure.
I would wager that a good chunk of that change was spent on the wages of a professional writing the CNC mill code necessary to do such a detailed machining job. Those are pretty expensive skills
Are we gullible or educated in how the launch industry works?
Rockets like the Atlas V 551 are sold at a certain price. They can lift a certain amount to a certain velocity. If your spacecraft happens to be just slightly under the mass threshold you need it to be to achieve the desired velocity, then you can pretty much put whatever you want on it as long as you remain under that mass threshold.
Believe it or not, not everything cool that happens is not a giant conspiracy by a large corporation in an attempt to pull one over on the poor, unsuspecting masses.
Or, barring the possibility that you are a tinfoil-hatter, and you really are just genuinely this pessimisitc, I will leave you with the good news that the world doesn't always suck, and you are allowed to get excited about some things. Isn't that great news?!
Oh yeah. Because scientific equipment that can survive the myriad of environments this spacecraft will see between here and Jupiter is just something you buy at Wal-Mart and duct tape onto you spacecraft three days before launch. It's not like any of it needs extensive, expensive calibration testing or thermal envelope testing to ensure it will work properly. Nor does scientific equipment need specialized, one-off design components built into it like rad-hardened microchips and vibration survivable optics. Nope. Scientific equipments is obviously just as cheap, simple, and easy to design as static aluminum weight balances machined to look cool. No extra cost, risk, or overhead to come along with that.
Oh, and before you say that they should have built in one more scientific instrument from the start of the mission, you need to do some research on a portion of spacecraft design known as mass margin. NASA has been accounting for a little extra mass margin in the design of this spacecraft from the get go. That margin reduces the risk of a schedule slip later in the design lifecycle. As the design matures, the margin decreases, but since launch vehicle selection occurs relatively early in a mission design lifecycle, a rocket would have been chosen that could lift that extra design margin mass. Since the expected mass was lower than the mass planned for, there was some performance that NASA could eat up with whatever they damn well pleased to slap onto their spacecraft at the last minute without further endanering the flight. Since scientific equpiment can't be will-nilly slapped onto a spacecraft, they would have had to pick something relatively safe, simple, and ultimately useless: like Lego action figures, or nothing at all (which would have been boring and generated no publicity).
Any other questions smartass? And before you ask, yes, I do spacecraft design and launch performance analysis for a living.
Well if you're going to buy an Atlas 551 to get this spacecraft to Jupiter in the first place, and you have a little extra performance margin on the rocket that can cover the weight of adding three Lego figurines (which you do, a 551 is a damn powerful rocket, and three aluminum figures are not particularlly heavy). Then why not add something fun for the ride?
Stop wasting so much energy on being cranky. You'll give yourself an ulcer.
You mean the money that you spent on Lego playsets when you were growing up? Because if you're quite done being a cynical bastard, you could RTFA and discover that Lego footed the costs, not NASA.
Well, I suppose we're lucky that proper ettiquette says not to RTFA then. ;)
Um, peer, that is. Is anyone else having problems with Firefox spellcheck working in Slashdot text boxes?
So who says we geeks don't know how to have fun?
I think she's holding a magnifying glass, because she can "perr into the heart of Jupiter," which is the stated reason why the spacecraft itself is called Juno.