If the vaccine kills 1 in 100 that get it, is it still worthwhile?
With credible projections of up to 1 in 20 of the population killed in this outbreak, yes.
There are vaccines with possible side-effects so bad that they are given only to people with a high risk of getting infected.
Try getting rabies prophylaxis : that one makes you feel like you've been kicked by a donkey, both barrels. Well, that's how I feel after each booster ; thankfully I'm fully done now.
Well, you're being a stupid fucking troll, but try this for size : when transiting West African countries to/ from my work on an oil exploration rig, I overnight at a hotel onshore, each way. so, if the bar tender, or chef, or waiter, or the mid who cleans my room leaves the virus on some hard surface they're handling...
Got it now? Just because your only idea of life is about fucking sheep or boys doesn't mean that there aren't transmission routes beyond your tiny imagination.
A complicating factor is that, for most vaccination systems, the person will always in future test positive for antibodies to the virus. So, if you vaccinate someone, and some weeks/ months/ years/ decades later they report symptoms not incompatible with Ebola, then you have no way of finding out if they have Ebola, other than waiting for the disease to progress.
Same for whatever other disease you're vaccinating against. We had this debate ad nauseam in 2001, during the FMD outbreak. That litle point of virology cost the UK economy in the order of £8 billion.
As such, infection rates among the population of medical staff are highly dependent on the conditions of the environment.
True. Not a helpful point though.
A properly maintained quarantine with medical professionals engaging in best practices should basically have a 0% infection rate,
Are you hearing the reports about the Spanish infection case? Allegedly (and it is an allegation, but one that has not yet, to my knowledge, been denied by the authorities of the hospital involved) the nurses cleaning up after the deaths of the two missionaries in Madrid were issued with torn protective equipment, held together by sticky tape.
That's in a First World, modern hospital. I don't blame the nurses there for quitting.
I now expect Americans to start shouting "we're better than that!" ; from the country where it's first case was set away from the emergency room after he informed them of his symptoms and travel history. Yeah, right, of course America will do better ; I am so confident.
All the protocols in the world are fuck-all use if they're not followed, comprehensively, from day one.
You'll never catch me going through the doors of one of those revolting places. They should be shut down and the captive animals rehabilitated and returned to the wild. The ones which were captive-born are a more difficult problem, and may need to be released into a constrained area (a fjord with a netted sea connection. perhaps) for an extended period of rehabilitation and time to form a stable pod and learn their natural environment.
All these snarky comments do highlight a point though (which I am sure will offend many): Why should any non-African nation even have to do anything-Ebola related ever?
Because diseases don't respect borders, and people move around.
I live in Britain ; next month I'm likely to be working in Canada ; last month I was working in West Africa. There are approximately 80 Americans working on the same vessel as me, commuting month-by-month to the USA.
The world is bigger than the borders of your mind. If you find that inconvenient, that's tough on you.
The scale is likely the result of a mutation in the virus, there's a much longer incubation time now.
I'm not aware of any evidence of a particular mutation that has been identified leading to this putative increase in incubation period. The observed differences in incubation rates estimated for this outbreak are not different enough to point to a different incubation period, when you take into account that the statistics being collected are sample statistics, not population statistics. Not everyone who dies is know to the authorities, and often there is significant uncertainty about the actual date of infection.
If you know of any new data (mine is about 3 weeks old), please post a link.
Ever since the first identification of Ebola, the potential of it to expand like this has been recognised. Most previous outbreaks have been in relatively isolated areas (Kikwit, 1995, being an exception), simplifying prevention of spread. However, West Africa has generally higher population densities, and the disease is simply spreading between villages and hamlets.
Murder by hacking of internet-connected devices (such as an automated enema-delivering wank-bot which got loaded up with dietary additives that killed the wankee) was a major plot element.
Not being a car buff, I can't even think of why, outside on-track racing, you'd have any need for such a huge engine in a personal vehicle. That's up in the engine size range for articulated freight lorries.
Or is it, in the words of Madame Sin, a case of "big car small dick"?
. And increase the odds of an ebola filled future for the world.
Reporting today (2014-10-11) has the WHO seriously considering that Ebola is going to become generally established across the world. Viz, there are around 10 cases outside West Africa, and most of those have led to multiple secondary cases (most countries with cases are still within the incubation period, so we do not know the extent of secondary infections. Yet. We simply do not yet know about tertiary infections). This is telling us that, before the disease peaks (New Year, if containment efforts are successful), essentially every country in the world will have received primary or secondary cases from West Africa, or one of the secondary infection clusters. Some of those cases will escape early detection and lead to new outbreaks.
Consequently, turning up at the doctors or hospital with fever and joint pain is likely to get you put into isolation, immediately, anywhere in the world.
And for people who don't have "health insurance"... the hospitals are just going to have to suck up the costs themselves, or pass it on to government. Because the cost of isolating one suspect case is considerably lower than the costs of dealing with a hundred-strong outbreak.
IF (note : that's the word "if", not the word "when", or anything logically similar to "when") a vaccine is possible, and sufficiently effective, that may be adequate to bring the disease back under control. In a number of years.
I don't know about you, but I keep my passport in a pouch with my vaccination record booklet, because I'm just used to presenting the two together at $COUNTRY$ Border Control. I suppose I'd better volunteer to go into second-stage vaccine tests (for efficacy, after the basic safety testing). I'll be back to West Africa in about 5 months.
Take whatever pots you have large enough to take at least one monkey (ape!) ; stack the pots onto the stove as compactly as possible with as many monkeys as possible and a reasonable amounts of water per pot ; set the stove to start boiling the monkeys.
While your monkeys come to the boil, go to the nearest shop and get as many bin liner bags as you can, at least one per monkey, preferably two ; then return home to the aroma of cooking monkey.
When you've got one of the monkeys thoroughly boiled, transfer it while still scorching hot into one of the bin liners, and tie the neck as tightly as possible. If you have enough bags, double bag it. Refill that pan with monkeys and water and continue cooking.
Lather, rinse, repeat until you have an apartment full of the aroma of dilute monkey soup, and sterile boiled bags of monkey. As long as the bags remain un-opened, the monkeys should remain sterile and not actually decompose further. Take them to the park, morning and evening and feed the local dogs - your monkey problem should be disposed of in a few months.
The same technique may be modified to dispose of inconvenient dead hookers, but you need to deal with troublesome easily-identified bones, particularly the long ones. Isn't there a Grand Theft Auto add-on for this? And aren't the GTA developers working on an Ebola-Zombie game too, where you dare not splatter blood or body fluids from the zombies?
That's pretty much the case with 15' wide, 40' long townhouses all in a row, where everyone has modern WiFi routers
Normal suburban street lined with 2/3/4 bedroom houses with one garage space per house ; I'm seeing 14 WiFi networks plus my own one. Without getting out a survey tape, I'd say that's essentially every house within 50m radius, which sounds about right (brick and tile construction, little steelwork apart from garage doors). In denser, multi-story city centre accommodation, 40 networks within reach is easily achievable.
That's a so-obvious false assumption. A two-person startup doesn't have to build a data center - most start-ups lease server space or do colocation.
Which would imply that large virtualisation providers (e.g. Amazon or Akamai) will have to set up local operations in each country (or region, such as.EU) that they want to operate in, and they'll have to satisfy local laws about prevention of unauthorised external access from the likes of NSA.
Since the management of US-owned corporations cannot be trusted to not kow-tow to US courts (threats of jail, or damaged parental credit ratings, for example), possibly this would have to be done by local companies - probably existing large ISPs who already have the national/ regional set up and staff - under contract to (say) Amazon. Amazon provide the technical specs and the billing configuration, and the local people perform the actual construction and management under their local laws. And crucially, Amazon (e.g.) management in the US simply do not have a chain of command to break the law in their German subcontractors.
Meanwhile, from the start-up's point of view, there's a a tick box in the AWS paperwork about "when you receive a request from a new country or region, clone an instance into the appropriate country/ regional block of AWS".
Actually, to my slight surprise, AWS is already divided up somewhat like this. So it seems to already have passed their "sniff test."
This was in a slashdot article a while ago, but it would cost the average user $230 a year to use the internet without adds.
You say this while I have my re-subscription information for my professional society... £198/ year, including access to the Society's journals and books online, and a considerable slew of other related international Societies' equivalent content. That's $US318, per year, for one subject. About the same again for TV service from the BBC (I don't know if that can be brought in the US? Might be an interesting technical and legal challenge.) ; say £300/ year for books and magazines and newspapers.
Where's the problem with $230 (US or CA? Or even AU? You didn't say.) a year for an advert-free internet feed?
the cost of replacing bladders hit by micrometeorites.
Think back to the bike tube I was repairing. Why empty, move and replace a bladder for a relatively small hole when you can apply a patch in-situ? (I first met those bladders as non-potable water storage on a desert island off the coast of Tanzania. They're laid out on roughly cleared ground, and when you pump ten tonnes of water into one, it's not uncommon for a stone to rip the bottom. Since you're pumping water from the shuttle tanker, you need to fix the leak quickly, so the mud man used a pole and clip arrangement to pinch the leak closed. Since low pressures are involved, it's sufficient (of course, that bladder gets used first, so a glued patch can be applied at leisure).
The remaining sublimation loss could be minimized by keeping the glazed shield as cold as possible. At first it seemed like this would be easier in the outer solar system, but then I realized that the side of the ship facing the sun would probably be covered with solar panels anyway.
I think we got into this discussion talking about rotating ships, to provide midi-gravity. We know that microgravity requires a lot of effort to counteract, so... you're going to need some major engineering reasons to not go down the spin-for-pseudo-gravity route. And on your general voyage (no, you don't design a vessel for only one voyage - craft design versus industrial production?) you are going to have a component of travel which is not radial to the Sun. Therefore, essentially all parts of the ship's surface are going to have alternating exposure to light and dark. So now, your mass production design moves to coating the whole of the ship with cheap-as-you-can-get solar cells. Which in the context of the design we're iterating would mean the bladders have solar cells on one side ("this side out"), and part of the hook-up includes plugging the solar cells into the vessel's power bus. Actually, revise that - the bladders aren't exactly lightweight, so including some power conditioning and a battery would provide you with options for powering condition-monitoring, condition reporting by wireless, maybe even corner-stretching propulsion to assist emplacement.
corner-stretching propulsion
Doh ! The terrestrial bladders I'm familiar with are rectangular, but lenticular shape may well be more appropriate. referring back to the small range of standard sizes - maybe also some range in shapes, but you do not want the ships stores to be carrying 35 different stock lines, half of which won't be used. And of course, all of the different models use the same fittings, electronics, fixings, etc (I was about to make a point about the different fire-hose fittings on last-months vessel compared to next week's vessel. But while looking for illustrations, I came across this page, which makes the point by reductio ad absurdam.)
or a large cheap mirror to collect more sunlight.
Now that's a point. A good one. Yeah, hanging a solar sail off an axial protrusion would boost your power production (90% exposure time instead of 50%) nicely, and help with the radial component of your velocity management too. At destination, hang a science package off the solar sail then cast it adrift - probably easier than attempting to recover.
Those bladders could be covered with radiators and individually connected or disconnected to the ship's interior via insulated loop heat pipes.
Hmmm, I'd keep the components as simple as possible. Take a close look at the design of the ISS (because I've seen those designs online ; other spacecraft will have the same issues) : the radiators protrude in one direction radial
Unless you've had a vasectomy and been tested to confirm your count is down to 0
You consider those as distinct things? It's back to the "what do they teach children in sex education classes" question. If you haven't had the TWO successive test results of zero, then your vasectomy hasn't taken and held (incidentally, that means that you go back under the knife without additional fees, at least with the organisation who did mine). Didn't you RTFM before you had yours done?
The phrase I used earlier was "to become infertile", not "have a temporary decrease in fertility". So of course that doesn't include temporary chemical, physical or hormonal barriers. Because - get this, I think it's a point you understand - temporary chemical, physical or hormonal obstacles have a dangerously high failure rate.
people seem to really, really want to believe otherwise.
Most people don't think. But you knew that already.
Well, I work on the borderline between science, design and engineering. If the answers in my business were on the internet anywhere, then someone, somewhere would be getting seriously fired (black-listed internationally too) for breaching commercial confidentiality.
If you're talking about reference data... well, I carry colour reference charts in my work bag ; micrometers and other size-references ; PDFs of standard forms for recording the raw data that I collect ; PDFs of published papers defining how to do particular (algorithmic) tasks... all very standard stuff. Why look it up on the Internet when you've got the definitive document with you already? I'd guess a lawyer would have a library of major cases in his specialism ; medics the standard protocols for their specialisms. If you're looking for "the correct answer" for a specified task, then by definition you're also looking for data that doesn't change very often. When was the last revision to Ohm's Law? 1860-odd? When was the last revision to the minimum curvature method for calculating a wellbore survey? (1972) Standard methods don't change rapidly - because engineering, science, the law and many other disciplines are cumulative, and they depend on standards. You may have more of a point for "design", but if you're talking about the engineering parts of a design, then you're rapidly back onto stock parts and calculations (stiffness of a beam, qualities of a material) which don't vary often.
A popular trope on/. is "ohh, text books cost so much!" Well what a pity - my colour charts cost nearly £200 per set and I have to replace them every couple of years because they wear out. Being "right" (and being able to document your procedures to demonstrate that you're "right") does have cost.
Working at the border of science, engineering and design, I generate several hundred times more data than I consume, and could perfectly well do my work without internet access (allowing intranet access for communications to the client on the other side of the world ; or at least telephone contact, which is why we carry several Iridium systems, in case the satellite link goes down). This gets some of the new trainees (a completely new one, every month ; as green as the grass) a bit upset when they discover they've not got the communications they grew up with. But there's no business case for more provision - 1MBPS shared between 100 people is more than adequate.
I suspect that glazing a ship in ice would always be cheaper than building a network of chambers to act as a radiation shield.
Vapour pressure is not your friend. At temperatures where water is liquid, it has a high enough vapour pressure (6.1173 millibars) that it will evaporate pretty rapidly. You'd need to cover your water glazing with something - probably something thicker than cling film. Sure, for patching, your repair robot can carry patches (I was applying a patch to my bike tube this afternoon - the parallel amuses me) to glue, loosely, over the hole before starting to spray the water. Maybe the water has... glass fibre or wood pulp in it, to add mechanical strength. But that vapour pressure is going to be a problem.
Maybe you'd surround your outermost structure with bladders like this for the outermost protection... engineering details. Velcro and/ or webbing straps to get them to stick together, but be repairable/ replaceable. A couple of sizes to fit all options ; it doesn't have to be a tight fit, just solid enough to do the job.
When Conal returned all the equipment to Comcast and, being an experienced accountant at one of the nation's most prestigious firms, even prepared a spreadsheet detailing every charge, overcharge, payment and credit on his account for his brief time as a Comcast customer.
There's a fairly high chance that, if he prepared the spreadsheet at work (e.g. in his lunch break, or at the weekend after taking work home on a company-issue laptop), then there would have been hidden components of the spreadsheet such as macros, style sheets or logos, which included ownership information such as "Copyright (c) VeryBigAccountingCo. Contact ITSecurity@VeryBigAccounting.com if you have received this file in error."
When I use the client's computer to process data - as spreadsheets or word processing documents - they're riddled with data like this, which also comes out in the PDF forms of the document. They also reveal that these parts of the presentation standardisation haven't been updated since 2008. It looks a bit odd when I send in my direct employer's monthly paperwork with this mess attached, so I use LibreOffice as a PortableApp to circumvent the dreck.
You have to ARM security guards? What sort of insane society do you live in? We don't even arm people driving guided missiles around the country for repair (I was hitch-hiking once and got a good long lift off such a load.)
Slashdot Mirror
With credible projections of up to 1 in 20 of the population killed in this outbreak, yes.
Try getting rabies prophylaxis : that one makes you feel like you've been kicked by a donkey, both barrels. Well, that's how I feel after each booster ; thankfully I'm fully done now.
There are other ways of making a vaccine than attenuating or killing viruses.
Got it now? Just because your only idea of life is about fucking sheep or boys doesn't mean that there aren't transmission routes beyond your tiny imagination.
Same for whatever other disease you're vaccinating against. We had this debate ad nauseam in 2001, during the FMD outbreak. That litle point of virology cost the UK economy in the order of £8 billion.
True. Not a helpful point though.
Are you hearing the reports about the Spanish infection case? Allegedly (and it is an allegation, but one that has not yet, to my knowledge, been denied by the authorities of the hospital involved) the nurses cleaning up after the deaths of the two missionaries in Madrid were issued with torn protective equipment, held together by sticky tape.
That's in a First World, modern hospital. I don't blame the nurses there for quitting.
I now expect Americans to start shouting "we're better than that!" ; from the country where it's first case was set away from the emergency room after he informed them of his symptoms and travel history. Yeah, right, of course America will do better ; I am so confident.
All the protocols in the world are fuck-all use if they're not followed, comprehensively, from day one.
You'll never catch me going through the doors of one of those revolting places. They should be shut down and the captive animals rehabilitated and returned to the wild. The ones which were captive-born are a more difficult problem, and may need to be released into a constrained area (a fjord with a netted sea connection. perhaps) for an extended period of rehabilitation and time to form a stable pod and learn their natural environment.
Because diseases don't respect borders, and people move around.
I live in Britain ; next month I'm likely to be working in Canada ; last month I was working in West Africa. There are approximately 80 Americans working on the same vessel as me, commuting month-by-month to the USA.
The world is bigger than the borders of your mind. If you find that inconvenient, that's tough on you.
What? Shortly after the anthrax attacks? Who'd have thunk it?
I'm not aware of any evidence of a particular mutation that has been identified leading to this putative increase in incubation period. The observed differences in incubation rates estimated for this outbreak are not different enough to point to a different incubation period, when you take into account that the statistics being collected are sample statistics, not population statistics. Not everyone who dies is know to the authorities, and often there is significant uncertainty about the actual date of infection.
If you know of any new data (mine is about 3 weeks old), please post a link.
Ever since the first identification of Ebola, the potential of it to expand like this has been recognised. Most previous outbreaks have been in relatively isolated areas (Kikwit, 1995, being an exception), simplifying prevention of spread. However, West Africa has generally higher population densities, and the disease is simply spreading between villages and hamlets.
Published 2011.
Murder by hacking of internet-connected devices (such as an automated enema-delivering wank-bot which got loaded up with dietary additives that killed the wankee) was a major plot element.
Not being a car buff, I can't even think of why, outside on-track racing, you'd have any need for such a huge engine in a personal vehicle. That's up in the engine size range for articulated freight lorries.
Or is it, in the words of Madame Sin, a case of "big car small dick"?
Reporting today (2014-10-11) has the WHO seriously considering that Ebola is going to become generally established across the world. Viz, there are around 10 cases outside West Africa, and most of those have led to multiple secondary cases (most countries with cases are still within the incubation period, so we do not know the extent of secondary infections. Yet. We simply do not yet know about tertiary infections). This is telling us that, before the disease peaks (New Year, if containment efforts are successful), essentially every country in the world will have received primary or secondary cases from West Africa, or one of the secondary infection clusters. Some of those cases will escape early detection and lead to new outbreaks.
Consequently, turning up at the doctors or hospital with fever and joint pain is likely to get you put into isolation, immediately, anywhere in the world.
And for people who don't have "health insurance" ... the hospitals are just going to have to suck up the costs themselves, or pass it on to government. Because the cost of isolating one suspect case is considerably lower than the costs of dealing with a hundred-strong outbreak.
IF (note : that's the word "if", not the word "when", or anything logically similar to "when") a vaccine is possible, and sufficiently effective, that may be adequate to bring the disease back under control. In a number of years.
I don't know about you, but I keep my passport in a pouch with my vaccination record booklet, because I'm just used to presenting the two together at $COUNTRY$ Border Control. I suppose I'd better volunteer to go into second-stage vaccine tests (for efficacy, after the basic safety testing). I'll be back to West Africa in about 5 months.
have costs that cap at about $5000.
That's for the transport and accommodation expenses and the hit fees for a competent Russian hitman.
Of course, you don't kill the litigant. Just his (or her) family. The day before a deadline would be good.
Just think of it as evolution in action.
Take whatever pots you have large enough to take at least one monkey (ape!) ; stack the pots onto the stove as compactly as possible with as many monkeys as possible and a reasonable amounts of water per pot ; set the stove to start boiling the monkeys.
While your monkeys come to the boil, go to the nearest shop and get as many bin liner bags as you can, at least one per monkey, preferably two ; then return home to the aroma of cooking monkey.
When you've got one of the monkeys thoroughly boiled, transfer it while still scorching hot into one of the bin liners, and tie the neck as tightly as possible. If you have enough bags, double bag it. Refill that pan with monkeys and water and continue cooking.
Lather, rinse, repeat until you have an apartment full of the aroma of dilute monkey soup, and sterile boiled bags of monkey. As long as the bags remain un-opened, the monkeys should remain sterile and not actually decompose further. Take them to the park, morning and evening and feed the local dogs - your monkey problem should be disposed of in a few months.
The same technique may be modified to dispose of inconvenient dead hookers, but you need to deal with troublesome easily-identified bones, particularly the long ones. Isn't there a Grand Theft Auto add-on for this? And aren't the GTA developers working on an Ebola-Zombie game too, where you dare not splatter blood or body fluids from the zombies?
You're not a Terry Pratchett / Discworld fan, are you?
Normal suburban street lined with 2/3/4 bedroom houses with one garage space per house ; I'm seeing 14 WiFi networks plus my own one. Without getting out a survey tape, I'd say that's essentially every house within 50m radius, which sounds about right (brick and tile construction, little steelwork apart from garage doors). In denser, multi-story city centre accommodation, 40 networks within reach is easily achievable.
Which would imply that large virtualisation providers (e.g. Amazon or Akamai) will have to set up local operations in each country (or region, such as .EU) that they want to operate in, and they'll have to satisfy local laws about prevention of unauthorised external access from the likes of NSA.
Since the management of US-owned corporations cannot be trusted to not kow-tow to US courts (threats of jail, or damaged parental credit ratings, for example), possibly this would have to be done by local companies - probably existing large ISPs who already have the national/ regional set up and staff - under contract to (say) Amazon. Amazon provide the technical specs and the billing configuration, and the local people perform the actual construction and management under their local laws. And crucially, Amazon (e.g.) management in the US simply do not have a chain of command to break the law in their German subcontractors.
Meanwhile, from the start-up's point of view, there's a a tick box in the AWS paperwork about "when you receive a request from a new country or region, clone an instance into the appropriate country/ regional block of AWS".
Actually, to my slight surprise, AWS is already divided up somewhat like this. So it seems to already have passed their "sniff test."
You say this while I have my re-subscription information for my professional society ... £198/ year, including access to the Society's journals and books online, and a considerable slew of other related international Societies' equivalent content. That's $US318, per year, for one subject. About the same again for TV service from the BBC (I don't know if that can be brought in the US? Might be an interesting technical and legal challenge.) ; say £300/ year for books and magazines and newspapers.
Where's the problem with $230 (US or CA? Or even AU? You didn't say.) a year for an advert-free internet feed?
Woo, more in there than I'm going to try to deal with on a phone's screen - board. L8R
Think back to the bike tube I was repairing. Why empty, move and replace a bladder for a relatively small hole when you can apply a patch in-situ? (I first met those bladders as non-potable water storage on a desert island off the coast of Tanzania. They're laid out on roughly cleared ground, and when you pump ten tonnes of water into one, it's not uncommon for a stone to rip the bottom. Since you're pumping water from the shuttle tanker, you need to fix the leak quickly, so the mud man used a pole and clip arrangement to pinch the leak closed. Since low pressures are involved, it's sufficient (of course, that bladder gets used first, so a glued patch can be applied at leisure).
I think we got into this discussion talking about rotating ships, to provide midi-gravity. We know that microgravity requires a lot of effort to counteract, so ... you're going to need some major engineering reasons to not go down the spin-for-pseudo-gravity route. And on your general voyage (no, you don't design a vessel for only one voyage - craft design versus industrial production?) you are going to have a component of travel which is not radial to the Sun. Therefore, essentially all parts of the ship's surface are going to have alternating exposure to light and dark. So now, your mass production design moves to coating the whole of the ship with cheap-as-you-can-get solar cells. Which in the context of the design we're iterating would mean the bladders have solar cells on one side ("this side out"), and part of the hook-up includes plugging the solar cells into the vessel's power bus. Actually, revise that - the bladders aren't exactly lightweight, so including some power conditioning and a battery would provide you with options for powering condition-monitoring, condition reporting by wireless, maybe even corner-stretching propulsion to assist emplacement.
Doh ! The terrestrial bladders I'm familiar with are rectangular, but lenticular shape may well be more appropriate. referring back to the small range of standard sizes - maybe also some range in shapes, but you do not want the ships stores to be carrying 35 different stock lines, half of which won't be used. And of course, all of the different models use the same fittings, electronics, fixings, etc (I was about to make a point about the different fire-hose fittings on last-months vessel compared to next week's vessel. But while looking for illustrations, I came across this page, which makes the point by reductio ad absurdam .)
Now that's a point. A good one. Yeah, hanging a solar sail off an axial protrusion would boost your power production (90% exposure time instead of 50%) nicely, and help with the radial component of your velocity management too. At destination, hang a science package off the solar sail then cast it adrift - probably easier than attempting to recover.
Hmmm, I'd keep the components as simple as possible. Take a close look at the design of the ISS (because I've seen those designs online ; other spacecraft will have the same issues) : the radiators protrude in one direction radial
You consider those as distinct things? It's back to the "what do they teach children in sex education classes" question. If you haven't had the TWO successive test results of zero, then your vasectomy hasn't taken and held (incidentally, that means that you go back under the knife without additional fees, at least with the organisation who did mine). Didn't you RTFM before you had yours done?
The phrase I used earlier was "to become infertile", not "have a temporary decrease in fertility". So of course that doesn't include temporary chemical, physical or hormonal barriers. Because - get this, I think it's a point you understand - temporary chemical, physical or hormonal obstacles have a dangerously high failure rate.
Most people don't think. But you knew that already.
If you're talking about reference data ... well, I carry colour reference charts in my work bag ; micrometers and other size-references ; PDFs of standard forms for recording the raw data that I collect ; PDFs of published papers defining how to do particular (algorithmic) tasks ... all very standard stuff. Why look it up on the Internet when you've got the definitive document with you already? I'd guess a lawyer would have a library of major cases in his specialism ; medics the standard protocols for their specialisms. If you're looking for "the correct answer" for a specified task, then by definition you're also looking for data that doesn't change very often. When was the last revision to Ohm's Law? 1860-odd? When was the last revision to the minimum curvature method for calculating a wellbore survey? (1972) Standard methods don't change rapidly - because engineering, science, the law and many other disciplines are cumulative, and they depend on standards. You may have more of a point for "design", but if you're talking about the engineering parts of a design, then you're rapidly back onto stock parts and calculations (stiffness of a beam, qualities of a material) which don't vary often.
A popular trope on /. is "ohh, text books cost so much!" Well what a pity - my colour charts cost nearly £200 per set and I have to replace them every couple of years because they wear out. Being "right" (and being able to document your procedures to demonstrate that you're "right") does have cost.
Working at the border of science, engineering and design, I generate several hundred times more data than I consume, and could perfectly well do my work without internet access (allowing intr a net access for communications to the client on the other side of the world ; or at least telephone contact, which is why we carry several Iridium systems, in case the satellite link goes down). This gets some of the new trainees (a completely new one, every month ; as green as the grass) a bit upset when they discover they've not got the communications they grew up with. But there's no business case for more provision - 1MBPS shared between 100 people is more than adequate.
Vapour pressure is not your friend. At temperatures where water is liquid, it has a high enough vapour pressure (6.1173 millibars) that it will evaporate pretty rapidly. You'd need to cover your water glazing with something - probably something thicker than cling film. Sure, for patching, your repair robot can carry patches (I was applying a patch to my bike tube this afternoon - the parallel amuses me) to glue, loosely, over the hole before starting to spray the water. Maybe the water has ... glass fibre or wood pulp in it, to add mechanical strength. But that vapour pressure is going to be a problem.
Maybe you'd surround your outermost structure with bladders like this for the outermost protection ... engineering details. Velcro and/ or webbing straps to get them to stick together, but be repairable/ replaceable. A couple of sizes to fit all options ; it doesn't have to be a tight fit, just solid enough to do the job.
There's a fairly high chance that, if he prepared the spreadsheet at work (e.g. in his lunch break, or at the weekend after taking work home on a company-issue laptop), then there would have been hidden components of the spreadsheet such as macros, style sheets or logos, which included ownership information such as "Copyright (c) VeryBigAccountingCo. Contact ITSecurity@VeryBigAccounting.com if you have received this file in error."
When I use the client's computer to process data - as spreadsheets or word processing documents - they're riddled with data like this, which also comes out in the PDF forms of the document. They also reveal that these parts of the presentation standardisation haven't been updated since 2008. It looks a bit odd when I send in my direct employer's monthly paperwork with this mess attached, so I use LibreOffice as a PortableApp to circumvent the dreck.
You have to ARM security guards? What sort of insane society do you live in? We don't even arm people driving guided missiles around the country for repair (I was hitch-hiking once and got a good long lift off such a load.)