In Maryland (and possibly other places with two-party consent laws), it is a FELONY to record a conversation without the other person's consent (be they a cop, your mother, a telemarketer, or someone attempting to threaten you). Not everyone has the moral fiber to be willing to commit a felony in the pursuit of justice.
Rather, it is much preferable to fix the broken laws properly first, rather than hoping you can incite enough outrage to get it fixed and for a pardon to be passed down so you don't rot in prison.
But somehow when it's a cop being taped, it's an illegal "unconsented" recording and people are going to jail.
According to the law (and depending on the interpretation of 'private conversation'), it is illegal by the current laws. One example is Maryland (where I live) in which 'private' conversations require consent from both parties to be recorded. Otherwise, it's a felony. The problem is that the courts have decided that officers have a 'reasonable expectation of privacy', even while the police have an exception in the law allowing them to video tape traffic stops without receiving consent.
This is less a case of cops bending the law, the law is just broken in the first place. Alternatively, as a police officer, anything done while in uniform should be considered a public action, and therefor not a 'private conversation'.
Judges, juries and legislatures support the police overwhelmingly on this issue
Honestly, why? What possible legitimate reason do the police have for wanting to keep things (at least things outside the station) off camera?
Portions of a video being taken out of context and posted online, for example an officer hitting a person, yet conveniently skipping the part where said citizen assaulted another person and multiple officers. Jams up the press and judicial system, etc. That said, it seems like better justification for all officers having their own tapes of everything they do, which can be used to refute said segments.
As well, another common argument revolved around informed consent private conversation recording laws, and whether a police officer is allowed to have a reasonable expectation of privacy (and thus must give consent to being recorded) while performing his duties. Cops say 'yes', citizens say 'no'.
I don't see any implication of 'better' or 'worse'. Simply that in a culture where a certain attribute is favored and parents drive their children toward success in that area, it should hardly be suprising that these children excel.
See: american cultures in sports, Indian culture and spelling, East-asian culture and math, French culture and cooking, polynesean culture and fishing, etc.
I think the idea is to simulate worst-case all the way. If 6 schmucks can make it 18 months of isolation and a 20 minute communication delay, then we are more likely to find any psychological effects.
They will often treat non-MDs who work with them as underlings, who job is purely to aid the doctor from doing those little jobs that they don't like to do.
While it may not give them the right to act like a prick about it, a technician's job is to do menial tasks so that a doctor or nurse (or engineer, in other fields) doesn't need to. There are plenty of reasons for this, not least of which is that it keeps costs down. Not only does it cost more to pay a doctor to do so (and keep him from his other duties), but the technicians are certainly better at getting lab work done. And, since technicians can't provide patient care, it's best to give each task to those who specialize in it (nurse draws the blood, lab tech runs tests, doctor diagnoses and prescribes treatment).
It's similar in engineering (electrical in this example, since it's what I do). The engineer designs the circuit, a draftsman lays it out physically, and a technician lays out and solders the parts. Yes, the engineer can do it, but it's not their specialty, and it's much more expensive and slower to have them do it.
One could certainly make an argument that such jobs are 'below' engineers/doctors, but I wouldn't direct that kind of sentiment to a tech. It's certainly valuable work that they do that saves me a hell of a lot of time, and I try to show my appreciation (lots of 'please' and 'thank you'). It doesn't give me or anyone else the right to shit on a tech, but it is their job to assist the doctor/engineer by doing menial tasks that they don't have time to do.
My point is that putting a small amount of money in up front would have saved them from spending many orders of magnitude more now. Even just the cost of the drilling mud is higher now, not to mention cleanup, reparations, additional boats, loss of the platform, other prevention measures, etc.
Scramjets aren't purely used for missiles. As with any other rocket, it's possible they could be used to reach orbit, but a scramjet could conceivably do it lighter and on less fuel (and thus cheaper).
Because there was a chance that it could make the situation worse. They were trying things first that if they went wrong would not make the problem worse.
I guess I'm a little more cynical than this. I assumed they were trying things that would cost them the least money first.
In theory, those are the same. Factor in the potential cost of failure alongside the cost of the procedure itself. The top kill probably costs less than many of the other methods (a 93-ton, four-story-tall concrete dome can't be cheap), until you factor in the risk and cost of failure (top kill can make more oil leak, which in turn makes future attempts more expensive).
A Relief Well isn't for production. So yes, it's not really something you can question...
But that's the point. They can claim it's purely as a precautionary measure, even though it can potentially provide them with profit and a way to avoid the moratorium on new offshore drills.
Just because they call it a relief well, doesn't mean they won't use it for production or that it's only going to be used to releive that pressure. Besides, what did you think they would do with the oil that comes from the relief well, other than sell it?
I'm glad to see that this solution seems to be working well.
Of course, if they had just used the drilling mud in the first place (instead of switching to seawater before the well was ready, causing the blowout), they wouldn't have needed to perform a top-kill. A stitch in time saves nine.
The issue would be inserting said bag. You need to insert the bag with something flexible enough to wind through the pipe or side-ports into the drill-hole itself, yet strong enough to allow you to force the bag against immense rate of flow. That's not an easy task.
If you're lamenting that we didn't create and implement a realistic plan for developing a shuttle successor thirty years ago like we should have, then we're in complete agreement.
That's exactly it.
There is no scenario, starting with circumstances as they existed in 2009, where we weren't dependent on the Russians for some time, and where private industry wasn't likely to beat NASA to providing the same service.
Agreed, you neither perform engineering works of this magnitude, nor produce these numbers of delays, overnight. Really, the issue has been around probably as long as I've been alive (around when Atlantis was built).
Actually, ISS resupply missions is the very first thing SpaceX is going to be doing under contract from NASA. Science missions are one of the first uses of their Dragon capsule (called 'DragonLab') that they're planning as well. There are lots of incentives to develop this stuff, at least if the proposed NASA budget passes Congress.
My personal prediction: Private industry will be ferrying people to the ISS before 2016, the first year Ares I would have realistically yet optimistically (i.e. without further delays) have been able to do the same.
That's good to hear. I hadn't heard much from SpaceX in a while, so I assumed the worst. It doesn't forgive the feds from letting NASA's own plans slip and fail, but at least it means that we will still be able to get astronauts into orbit somehow.
And, in general, I suggest you direct your ire at incompetent, over bloated national defense contractors and subcontractors that have been promising results for cheap and delivering compromises for twice the damn price. Frankly, the large players in the aerospace industry these days, are some of the most wasteful companies in existence in my opinion.
I work for the aerospace/defense/gov't contract industry, you insensitive clod!
Then again, I was raised with the idea that it shouldn't take three works of paperwork to change a damn screw on a piece of hardware (and yes, that last part was a personal anecdote).
That's about equal parts engineering best practices (review every change, or someone will make a mistake that kills your system), corporate inefficiency (too many people asked to sign onto too many drawings, resulting in a massive backlog), and gov't beaurocracy (everything documented for oversight).
I agree the shuttle has reached its end-of-life. It did years ago, and we've been bootstrapping it for quite a while.
The real shame as far as space exploration is that we have neither a domestic replacement craft, nor a plan to create one. We're supposed to just wait (and hope and pray) that the private sector can satisfy our manned launch vehicle needs, even though none of them are close. AFAIK, all the private space companies are looking at tourism, not rendesvous with the ISS, Hubble, or science missions. There's also no plan to incentivize this development that I'm aware of.
We're just letting our manned space flight program slowly fade away. Such a shame.
Doping really isn't relevent here, since we're not talking CMOS or FET transistors. While it's still a transistor operationally, the structure is completely different, so there is no p- or n-type material, per-se.
What this is, is a quantum dot which acts as a single electron transistor. It's as different from a CMOS transistor as CMOS is from a vaccuum tube. So, asking for a doping ratio of a quantum dot transistor is like asking for the grid spacing of a CMOS, or the oxide thickness of a JFET: it doesn't exist.
"Off" is almost never zero current. There's usually just a tiny amount of 'leakage' current, although some quantum designs (such as this one seems to be) can have exactly no current while off.
Basically, while all our computers and data are binary, they operate in an analog environment. We just treat any value greater than (for example) analog 0.8 as a digital 1, and anything less than analog 0.2 as a digital 0. The problem has been as we shrink the gate size and thickness and reduce supply voltage in order to get faster, we also increase this leakage current.
One of the things keeping us from getting smaller faster is that without handling this well, we could have the issue where the 'off' current was more than 50% of the 'on' current, sometimes significantly more. It's still technically a transistor, but it's not practical if you're trying to determine between 8uA for 'on' and 7uA for 'off'. What GP is asking is whether this is a practical transistor (the output currents are different enough that it could be used to toggle the gate of another equivalent transistor), or just a theoretical 'acts like a transistor, but has no use'.
Could the same logic be applied to BP and the oil spill? sometimes mistakes will happen and they need to be accepted as unavoidable?
If they followed best practices without cutting corners, then I wouldn't lay the blame on BP. I would instead lay it upon the entire petrolium industry and regulatory bodies for allowing such drilling without proper safeguards in place, and in water too deep to effectively counter a blowout. We need to wait for investigations to be completed before we decide which is to blame: those who designed faulty best-practices, or BP for not following them. Maybe both? It seems both BP cut corners which caused the issue, and regulatory bodies allowed drilling at a depth where it takes more than a month to seal a gusher.
In other words: if the best practices were 99.999% safe and BP followed them precisely, then I accept that shit happens (at least, the initial blow-out, not the protracted month of failed attempts to seal the well). IMO, it's ridiculous to excessively punish someone for the bad luck of being in that 0.001%. I'd only have chance to blame. It's when safety isn't taken seriously enough (2% chance of a gusher and you have 200 wells, meaning you can expect 4 gushers, for example) that I feel blame is justified.
The fact that it was able to go on for years without being detected (and the detection was perhaps only prompted by the EU regulators asking a lot of questions) could be seen as problematic by some.
Which would be recklessness. Otherwise, if they're following best practices (the crux of the issue), sometimes a mistake will happen and need to be accepted as unavoidable.
Not everything the US puts into space is owned by NASA. NASA gets the unclassified science stuff, but pretty much all of the rest will be classified and owned by the military.
In other words, there is nothing in the intersection of the Venn diagram between 'classified space stuff' and 'NASA space stuff'. The X-37 is a good example, since it was NASA until they wanted to put classified equipment on it.
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In Maryland (and possibly other places with two-party consent laws), it is a FELONY to record a conversation without the other person's consent (be they a cop, your mother, a telemarketer, or someone attempting to threaten you). Not everyone has the moral fiber to be willing to commit a felony in the pursuit of justice.
Rather, it is much preferable to fix the broken laws properly first, rather than hoping you can incite enough outrage to get it fixed and for a pardon to be passed down so you don't rot in prison.
But somehow when it's a cop being taped, it's an illegal "unconsented" recording and people are going to jail.
According to the law (and depending on the interpretation of 'private conversation'), it is illegal by the current laws. One example is Maryland (where I live) in which 'private' conversations require consent from both parties to be recorded. Otherwise, it's a felony. The problem is that the courts have decided that officers have a 'reasonable expectation of privacy', even while the police have an exception in the law allowing them to video tape traffic stops without receiving consent.
This is less a case of cops bending the law, the law is just broken in the first place. Alternatively, as a police officer, anything done while in uniform should be considered a public action, and therefor not a 'private conversation'.
Judges, juries and legislatures support the police overwhelmingly on this issue
Honestly, why? What possible legitimate reason do the police have for wanting to keep things (at least things outside the station) off camera?
Portions of a video being taken out of context and posted online, for example an officer hitting a person, yet conveniently skipping the part where said citizen assaulted another person and multiple officers. Jams up the press and judicial system, etc. That said, it seems like better justification for all officers having their own tapes of everything they do, which can be used to refute said segments.
As well, another common argument revolved around informed consent private conversation recording laws, and whether a police officer is allowed to have a reasonable expectation of privacy (and thus must give consent to being recorded) while performing his duties. Cops say 'yes', citizens say 'no'.
Only for the first 9 months (as the suggested case would be). It's possible, but obviously they can only test one at a time.
I don't see any implication of 'better' or 'worse'. Simply that in a culture where a certain attribute is favored and parents drive their children toward success in that area, it should hardly be suprising that these children excel.
See: american cultures in sports, Indian culture and spelling, East-asian culture and math, French culture and cooking, polynesean culture and fishing, etc.
I think the idea is to simulate worst-case all the way. If 6 schmucks can make it 18 months of isolation and a 20 minute communication delay, then we are more likely to find any psychological effects.
They will often treat non-MDs who work with them as underlings, who job is purely to aid the doctor from doing those little jobs that they don't like to do.
While it may not give them the right to act like a prick about it, a technician's job is to do menial tasks so that a doctor or nurse (or engineer, in other fields) doesn't need to. There are plenty of reasons for this, not least of which is that it keeps costs down. Not only does it cost more to pay a doctor to do so (and keep him from his other duties), but the technicians are certainly better at getting lab work done. And, since technicians can't provide patient care, it's best to give each task to those who specialize in it (nurse draws the blood, lab tech runs tests, doctor diagnoses and prescribes treatment).
It's similar in engineering (electrical in this example, since it's what I do). The engineer designs the circuit, a draftsman lays it out physically, and a technician lays out and solders the parts. Yes, the engineer can do it, but it's not their specialty, and it's much more expensive and slower to have them do it.
One could certainly make an argument that such jobs are 'below' engineers/doctors, but I wouldn't direct that kind of sentiment to a tech. It's certainly valuable work that they do that saves me a hell of a lot of time, and I try to show my appreciation (lots of 'please' and 'thank you'). It doesn't give me or anyone else the right to shit on a tech, but it is their job to assist the doctor/engineer by doing menial tasks that they don't have time to do.
Our beaches vs their wallets. Tough choice.
My point is that putting a small amount of money in up front would have saved them from spending many orders of magnitude more now. Even just the cost of the drilling mud is higher now, not to mention cleanup, reparations, additional boats, loss of the platform, other prevention measures, etc.
Scramjets aren't purely used for missiles. As with any other rocket, it's possible they could be used to reach orbit, but a scramjet could conceivably do it lighter and on less fuel (and thus cheaper).
Because there was a chance that it could make the situation worse. They were trying things first that if they went wrong would not make the problem worse.
I guess I'm a little more cynical than this. I assumed they were trying things that would cost them the least money first.
In theory, those are the same. Factor in the potential cost of failure alongside the cost of the procedure itself. The top kill probably costs less than many of the other methods (a 93-ton, four-story-tall concrete dome can't be cheap), until you factor in the risk and cost of failure (top kill can make more oil leak, which in turn makes future attempts more expensive).
A Relief Well isn't for production. So yes, it's not really something you can question...
But that's the point. They can claim it's purely as a precautionary measure, even though it can potentially provide them with profit and a way to avoid the moratorium on new offshore drills.
Just because they call it a relief well, doesn't mean they won't use it for production or that it's only going to be used to releive that pressure. Besides, what did you think they would do with the oil that comes from the relief well, other than sell it?
I'm glad to see that this solution seems to be working well.
Of course, if they had just used the drilling mud in the first place (instead of switching to seawater before the well was ready, causing the blowout), they wouldn't have needed to perform a top-kill. A stitch in time saves nine.
The issue would be inserting said bag. You need to insert the bag with something flexible enough to wind through the pipe or side-ports into the drill-hole itself, yet strong enough to allow you to force the bag against immense rate of flow. That's not an easy task.
If you're lamenting that we didn't create and implement a realistic plan for developing a shuttle successor thirty years ago like we should have, then we're in complete agreement.
That's exactly it.
There is no scenario, starting with circumstances as they existed in 2009, where we weren't dependent on the Russians for some time, and where private industry wasn't likely to beat NASA to providing the same service.
Agreed, you neither perform engineering works of this magnitude, nor produce these numbers of delays, overnight. Really, the issue has been around probably as long as I've been alive (around when Atlantis was built).
Actually, ISS resupply missions is the very first thing SpaceX is going to be doing under contract from NASA. Science missions are one of the first uses of their Dragon capsule (called 'DragonLab') that they're planning as well. There are lots of incentives to develop this stuff, at least if the proposed NASA budget passes Congress.
My personal prediction: Private industry will be ferrying people to the ISS before 2016, the first year Ares I would have realistically yet optimistically (i.e. without further delays) have been able to do the same.
That's good to hear. I hadn't heard much from SpaceX in a while, so I assumed the worst. It doesn't forgive the feds from letting NASA's own plans slip and fail, but at least it means that we will still be able to get astronauts into orbit somehow.
And, in general, I suggest you direct your ire at incompetent, over bloated national defense contractors and subcontractors that have been promising results for cheap and delivering compromises for twice the damn price. Frankly, the large players in the aerospace industry these days, are some of the most wasteful companies in existence in my opinion.
I work for the aerospace/defense/gov't contract industry, you insensitive clod!
Then again, I was raised with the idea that it shouldn't take three works of paperwork to change a damn screw on a piece of hardware (and yes, that last part was a personal anecdote).
That's about equal parts engineering best practices (review every change, or someone will make a mistake that kills your system), corporate inefficiency (too many people asked to sign onto too many drawings, resulting in a massive backlog), and gov't beaurocracy (everything documented for oversight).
I agree the shuttle has reached its end-of-life. It did years ago, and we've been bootstrapping it for quite a while.
The real shame as far as space exploration is that we have neither a domestic replacement craft, nor a plan to create one. We're supposed to just wait (and hope and pray) that the private sector can satisfy our manned launch vehicle needs, even though none of them are close. AFAIK, all the private space companies are looking at tourism, not rendesvous with the ISS, Hubble, or science missions. There's also no plan to incentivize this development that I'm aware of.
We're just letting our manned space flight program slowly fade away. Such a shame.
Any idea how close (or far) we are from being able to produce stable room-temperature quantum dots and wells? Perpetually 20 years away?
Same way you solder to individual CMOS transistors in any IC.
Very carefully.
But it's software upgradable!
Doping really isn't relevent here, since we're not talking CMOS or FET transistors. While it's still a transistor operationally, the structure is completely different, so there is no p- or n-type material, per-se.
What this is, is a quantum dot which acts as a single electron transistor. It's as different from a CMOS transistor as CMOS is from a vaccuum tube. So, asking for a doping ratio of a quantum dot transistor is like asking for the grid spacing of a CMOS, or the oxide thickness of a JFET: it doesn't exist.
Even in a crystaline structure? Forgive me, IANAMS.
"Off" is almost never zero current. There's usually just a tiny amount of 'leakage' current, although some quantum designs (such as this one seems to be) can have exactly no current while off.
Basically, while all our computers and data are binary, they operate in an analog environment. We just treat any value greater than (for example) analog 0.8 as a digital 1, and anything less than analog 0.2 as a digital 0. The problem has been as we shrink the gate size and thickness and reduce supply voltage in order to get faster, we also increase this leakage current.
One of the things keeping us from getting smaller faster is that without handling this well, we could have the issue where the 'off' current was more than 50% of the 'on' current, sometimes significantly more. It's still technically a transistor, but it's not practical if you're trying to determine between 8uA for 'on' and 7uA for 'off'. What GP is asking is whether this is a practical transistor (the output currents are different enough that it could be used to toggle the gate of another equivalent transistor), or just a theoretical 'acts like a transistor, but has no use'.
Read this for a bit more info.
Could the same logic be applied to BP and the oil spill? sometimes mistakes will happen and they need to be accepted as unavoidable?
If they followed best practices without cutting corners, then I wouldn't lay the blame on BP. I would instead lay it upon the entire petrolium industry and regulatory bodies for allowing such drilling without proper safeguards in place, and in water too deep to effectively counter a blowout. We need to wait for investigations to be completed before we decide which is to blame: those who designed faulty best-practices, or BP for not following them. Maybe both? It seems both BP cut corners which caused the issue, and regulatory bodies allowed drilling at a depth where it takes more than a month to seal a gusher.
In other words: if the best practices were 99.999% safe and BP followed them precisely, then I accept that shit happens (at least, the initial blow-out, not the protracted month of failed attempts to seal the well). IMO, it's ridiculous to excessively punish someone for the bad luck of being in that 0.001%. I'd only have chance to blame. It's when safety isn't taken seriously enough (2% chance of a gusher and you have 200 wells, meaning you can expect 4 gushers, for example) that I feel blame is justified.
The fact that it was able to go on for years without being detected (and the detection was perhaps only prompted by the EU regulators asking a lot of questions) could be seen as problematic by some.
Which would be recklessness. Otherwise, if they're following best practices (the crux of the issue), sometimes a mistake will happen and need to be accepted as unavoidable.
Not everything the US puts into space is owned by NASA. NASA gets the unclassified science stuff, but pretty much all of the rest will be classified and owned by the military.
In other words, there is nothing in the intersection of the Venn diagram between 'classified space stuff' and 'NASA space stuff'. The X-37 is a good example, since it was NASA until they wanted to put classified equipment on it.