When the chaos is at its climax, a fleet of 10 Sikorsky CH-53E heavy lift helicopters wearing NASA Emergency Rescue livery will show up, and heroically inform everyone that they're here to take the Shuttle to a more secure location, away from the fire, and all that, back at LAX.
I don't think it would be possible for 10 choppers to coordinate to lift a load like that, the diameter of the rotors on the chopper is 80 feet, and the wingspan of the shuttle is 80 feet, so they would be pulling at an angle, which even if they could maintain the proper separation, would reduce their payload capacity. Worse, if one chopper loses or reduces power, the downward force would pull all of the choppers closer together, likely causing their rotors to collide. This coordination would be much harder to maintain when they fly into the smokescreen. To do this in real life, they'd need some kind of special bracket to allow the choppers to have enough horizontal separation to lift vertically.
Meanwhile, the real Endeavour is being flown a few miles West, out to the Pacific. While in flight, a crack team of Swiss military aerialists will wrap the Shuttle in camouflaged and water-tight plastic wrap, like they use for boats and other heavy equipment when shipping.
It seems highly unlikely that they'd be able to get a watertight seal around all of the tow ropes while airborne.... though they are a *crack* team, so maybe.
Once wrapped, the tethers holding the Shuttle will be released, sending the plastic-coated orbiter plunging into the icy Pacific.
This part is even harder - the picture in the article shows the shuttle sinking under the water to the special submarine, except that the shuttle wouldn't sink, it would float.
The shuttle cargo bay alone is 18m x 4.5m x 2m (estimated), or 162 m^3, which would displace 162,000 kg or water, or around 178 US tons. Add in the rest of the volume of the shuttle, and it's probably closer to 250 tons of displacement. The sub would have to come snatch it from the surface. I assume that something like an 16,000 ton Ohio Class sub would be able to submerge even with a 200 ton buoyant chamber on it, but I don't know for sure - I don't know how close to neutrally buoyant a sub is.
And of course, if the shuttle was submerged, it's unlikely that it could handle much pressure - it's designed to be under positive pressure in space, every 30 feet under water is one atmosphere of negative pressure, which the shuttle was never designed for.
And then finally there's the problem of what to do with it once they get it, the article suggests:
A country with a motive, like maybe a strange fixation on neutrality to the degree they've made their country a fortress and they may be interested in getting a spaceship for an off-world colony, fast.
If they are building a space colony, they'd probably want to get higher than the 400 mile max orbit of the shuttle. And if they just want a launch vehicle, for the $600M they are spending on the 20 CH-53E's, they may as well pay the Russians to take them to space, since they Russians can launch them cheaper than the $450M/flight it costs for the shuttle. And, of course, the shuttles are no longer spaceworthy, and it's likely that no one (not even NASA) has the ability to take a mothballed shuttle that's been on an underwater journey and make it spaceworthy again.
If I were a Mythbuster, I'd declare this myth "Busted", as I don't see any way it could work in real life.
It has an Outlook plugin so your Windows users will be happy, and it speaks Activesync, so any smartphone should be able to sync email contacts and calendar with it.
I haven't used Zimbra for a few years, but last time I used it it worked quite well -- much easier to set up and administer than Exchange, and cheaper too.
Maybe NASA should have planned ahead to make sure they'd have a launch vehicle to reach their expensive ISS?
that's ridiculous. if the US is contributing almost 2x the cash of all the others together it should buy them something. if they're going to be denied seats over a few million, screw the ISS... we might as well build our own space station.
and also screw sarah brightman.
If it's true that NASA is missing out on a seat that they need over a few million dollars, they should just pay the few million dollars. A space shuttle launch cost $450M ($1.5B if you count the cost of the shuttles themselves). Assuming a 7 person crew, that's $64M/person. But since a typical ISS crew rotation flight only carried 3 ISS crew members, it's closer to $150M per person to get someone to the ISS (granted, there were other mission specialists and equipment/experiments on the flight). So if you look at the per-person cost of sending astronauts on the space shuttle versus Soyuz, NASA is saving money even at $50M/person.
we might as well build our own space station
If it's true that it cost $175B to build the ISS in the first place where do you think NASA is going to come up with another $175B to build their own? That's almost 10 years of 100% of NASA's current budget. And NASA still has no proven heavy lift capability to launch components into space.
Is spending the next decades NASA budget on a low earth orbit space station really a good use of their money? I'd rather see more exploration farther from the planet.
More more importantly... where can I get 0.32% of this kind of money? It would make me debt free and radically change the lifestyle (health, stress, etc.) for my family right now. Hell, 0.1% as an interest free lone would do the same thing but take about 5-6 more years to complete the transition. Straight out giving the 0.1%: 3-4 years.
TLDR; 0.1% of the cost of this joyride could completely change the lives of a family in fairly short order.
Some may find such news items interesting and even exciting, whereas I (and likely the rest of the 97+%) find it extremely depressing.
One way would be to work for a company that is developing a launch vehicle that can take passengers to orbit. Offer to work for little to no wage for now, and take equity in the company instead of salary compensation. If the company succeeds then you'll have your money.
I bet that $50M will enhance the lives of more Russian families than it would if it were split among American families. Much of that $50M is spent on labor to build the spacecraft, extract raw materials, refine rocket fuel, etc. Most Americans can earn the amount you're asking for ($160K) in less than 5 years. It would take a Russian earner 15 - 20 years to earn the same.
While it may seem like an extravagant expense for a single person, thousands of average workers benefit. Competition has helped drive the price of a Soyuz seat up from $25M to the current $50M, so it's been good for the Russian space program.
No doubt she make good money selling records, but its also no doubt she's making pennies on the dollar for those record sales. 30 million records does not come close to 30 million dollars. Which is why so many Aging Rockers are still playing Indian Casinos these days.
More worrying is that NASA, a MORE THAN EQUAL partner in the ISS, having built 7 of the 10 modules of the station, is being shut out of seats by Russia simply as a money grab.
Total estimated costs: U.S.: $100 billion plus 38 billion to build the Shuttle. Europe: $14 billion Japan: $10 billion Russia: Unknown, but estimated at 45 billion, mostly launch vehicles. Canada: $2 billion
Maybe NASA should have planned ahead to make sure they'd have a launch vehicle to reach their expensive ISS?
It's like building a beautiful vacation property on a remote island, then you find out that your 30 year old yacht is too unreliable and expensive to get there. You've been paying a Russian freighter for rides to your island, but when someone else pays them more for your seat, you realize that maybe you should have purchased a more modern yacht before you retired your old one.
Lots of universities had research reactors (a few still do). They had no more security than some bored grad students working in the outer lab. If it was an open house even they would have been too busy to look after every wandering kid.
When I was in high school we did a tour of university's research reactor, and like you said, the only people there were a few grad students and an operator (or maybe he was a professor?) - no armed guards, no fancy security systems, we just had to sign in with the student at the front desk. We weren't allowed in the room that had the reactor pool,but we could see it (and the blue Cherenkov Radiation glow) through a large thick glassed window. They said that the water was sufficient to contain the radiation but they didn't want many people in the reactor room since any contaminants in the water could become radioactive.
We were standing in the room that had the door to the reactor room, so I don't think it would have been hard for a kid to accidentally gain access to the reactor room if someone inadvertently left the door open or didn't pull it closed after they left the room.
But at the time, the coolest thing in the building was the remote manipulator arms they used for working with radioactive materials. After playing with those arms, I decided I was going to have a career in nuclear science. Though somehow I ended up in IT instead.
Glass, recall the last conversation I had with Tim keyword spaghetti. Skip ahead 2 minutes. Start point. Double speed. End point. New email to Bob. Bob, here is that spaghetti recipe that I told you about. Glass, end email. Insert video segment. Send email.
Email to simula. I asked for a freakin' recipe not a 5 minute conversation with Tim. Would it be so hard to send me a transcript? Send email. No. not sandymail. S-e-n-d email.
If you really want an EV (as opposed to a hobby car) that you can count on for a reliable commute, why spend $14,000 turning a $2,000 16 year old car into an EV, when you can buy a Mitsubishi i-Miev for around $22,000 (after tax rebate)? For $6000 more you get a full factory warranty, twice the range, a car that's been designed to be safe in a crash with the extra battery weight, and no hassle from your insurance company if a charging problem burns down your house. Or for a few thousand more, get a Nissan Leaf for an arguably better car?
For me, his 30 mile practical range is a little tight... my commute is 10 miles each way - a detour to run an errand or due to a traffic accident could leave me uncomfortably close to the max practical range of the vehicle. Fortunately, my 10 mile commute is still well within comfortable biking distance, so I don't typically drive at all.
I guess you forgot about the other five movies, and the hundreds of games, books, comics, cartoons, and other works that are all based in the same universe, many of which are still being produced.
Just because someone likes what you don't like doesn't make them pathetic. Your behavior, on the other hand...
I think that he was referring to the habit of pointing out why much of Star Wars is scientifically impossible or makes no sense in the real world, when it wasn't supposed to be a space documentary - it's a space opera. It's like pointing out the scientific inaccuracies of Sponge Bob Square Pants.
In your pocket? Do you need maps to walk to the grocery store?
You don't travel much do you? When I'm in a new city and have 20 minutes to grab a coffee before a meeting, it's nice to have a directions that will guide me from the transit station to Starbucks, and then to the building where the meeting is. It's also not having to pack yet another device in my travel bag so I have a GPS in my rental car (even if I wanted to spend $15/day to rent a GPS with the car, they don't always have one available).
It's not strictly FUD. For people who leave an AP open because they don't know better, this is a good service. For people who leave a WAP open because of some kind of principled and conscentious decsion, there's nothing there they're not already familiar with and willing to risk.
And let's face it. There is risk. If some random bad actor uses your unsecured WAP for random badness, it will inconvenience you. You will be a "person of interest" until they find a better suspect. Again, this might be a risk worth taking if you decide it is, but for a clueless schlub who just bought the router and plugged it in? Not so much.
Agreed, it's not FUD - the majority of people with open Wifi access points don't know and and don't know why it's bad. Those that leave their AP open on purpose will read the letter and ignore it. I used to keep a guest Wifi connection open, bandwidth constrained to less than 1mbit with port 25 blocked outbound. I saw a few dozen MAC addresses on it, so I think it was useful to some people.
Hopefully the letter included some online resources and companies that those AP owners could use to secure their Wifi it's likely that many of those with an open AP don't have any idea how to secure it.
When I moved into my last apartment, before I had set up internet service I found that a neighbor (no idea who, I could see dozens of SSIDs) had left their Wifi open, so I used it. It was a little flaky, kept dropping my VPN connections so I wished I could reboot it. He had left the default password on it, so it was trivial to log in and reboot it (and it behaved a lot better after that!)
I'm pretty sure that what I did was illegal, but do you really think that my neighbor purposely left his access point wide open and able to be reconfigured by pretty much anyone who wanted to?
Why would I want to carry around a standalone GPS that is twice as big as my phone? My phone barely fits comfortably in my pocket, I don't want to have to stuff a GPS in my pocket. Are there any standalone GPS's that will do transit directions?
Hey, if it saves you a $10,000 dollar funeral from a tiger attack, that's a $9,950 savings. Good ROI.
The difference is how realistically you assess the POI, as they call it in engineering-management-speak: Probabilty of Incidence. (Or "POO", Probability of Occurrence. I like that one. Anything that reminds me of all the crap in a big program's management and engineering environment makes me smile).
If it can be shown that this $100,000 "fix" really would have prevented the problem, then the process they used to assess the replacement was faulty. It's easy in retrospect to say that they made the wrong decision, but the value in doing so is that the whole process used to arrive at the decision can be analyzed and improved.
Sorry. It's a numbers game. Something that's not absolutely not guaranteed to happen WILL NOT HAPPEN in order to justify not paying for prevention.
There's a corollary to this. I usually express it by paraphrasing an old saying in Safety Engineering: "Safety decisions are written in blood."
I don't think that's true - there is no guarantee that any particular piece of the hydraulic system will fail, yet there is redundancy built it to those systems because it's likely that it will happen. There's no guarantee that a plane will suffer damage such that it's uncontrollable, but not so damaged that a pilot can eject, but they still put expensive ejection seats into military jets. There's a cost-benefit decision for every project (sometimes the cost is weight or complexity, but it's still a cost). It sounds like they may have made the wrong decision in this case.
Not even including the life insurance policies that most pilots would have. Back in 1996, it was about $250,000 when my father passed due to Benzene induced leukemia (since the USAF was Benzene happy at the time). That didn't even include the MGIB chapter 35 benefits and Tricare benefits I and my sister received. A quick look at the current policy shows it as $400,000. You could retrofit at least 4+ jets for the cost of killing one pilot.
The pilot training costs dwarf insurance payouts. This article says it costs $2.8M to train a fighter pilot.
Fair enough, although I'd suggest that the biggest factor in his deciding to apologize is not the objective quality of the maps app (or lack thereof), but rather quality in the context of the demo that was done and the expectations that were set. They portrayed it as best in class and it's obviously not. If they had been a little more humble in advance, we might not be seeing an apology today.
Are you serious? Do you really think Apple would go to a product launch and say "one more thing: We've taken away the Google Maps app that you all know and love and replaced it with our own product. Our product doesn't work as well, we're missing some entire towns from our database, but hey, we created it, so it's going to be spectacular! Except that it's not. So you should probably download some other mapping app, just use google maps in your web browser since even that is better than our app"
That sounds much worse than launching a bad product and saying "Oh oops, sorry, we didn't know it was that bad, we'll improve it"
Paying money to a direct competitor to use their products is not always the best plan, even if it makes sense when looking only at dollars.
Neither is replacing a data supplier on an established product (for which updates will be pushed out to existing customers) without assuring that what you are getting from a replacement supplier at least matches the features and quality from the supplier you are replacing, even if it makes sense when looking only at your late founders stated intent to wage nuclear war against the existing data supplier.
Granted, a shoddy software implementation is almost always the wrong thing to do, but it's possible that they made a conscious decision to burn up some of their seemingly bottomless goodwill with consumers and spend it on releasing a sub-par mapping app with the belief that they'll be able to quickly address the problems.
But my point was that more than dollars factor into the decision. Even if it costs 10x more to develop their own mapping App, that may still be the better decision despite the extra cost.
The whole reason I moved from my corporate issued Blackberry to my own personal smartphone was to get better mapping.
First, since you say "smartphone" instead of "iPhone", shall we assume that you're an Android user, that this issue doesn't affect you and your comment about the mapping app sucks is based entirely on anecdotal data?
When the CEO of Apple apologizes for the poor quality of their mapping app and recommends that dissapointed users download a different app, it's no longer "anecdotal data". This isn't a case of one guy saying "omg, I can't map my street! Apple maps suck!"
The next question is, if you are indeed an iPhone user, then is your experience with the new maps app--as bad as it may be--better than or worse than the Blackberry experience you were trying to get away from? As a former Blackberry user myself, I'm going to guess it's still way way way better. iOS 6 maps are certainly a step backwards, so it's worth complaining about. But don't add to the argument that this application was the very reason you moved away from another platform that was and probably still is several orders of magnitude worse.
I was careful to not say whether I moved to Android or iPhone, you made the (correct) assumption that it was Android, even if I moved to an iPhone 2 years ago, that doesn't change my basic point that maps are important to many people so a bad map implementation is worse than, say, not enough Fart applications.
I chose Android for reasons other than mapping (at the time, IOS was using Google Maps), but if I were going to buy a Smartphone today, I'd rule out iPhone based on the mapping problems alone. The iPhone is a good phone and until the Android ICS release, I'd say that most consumers would be more satisfied with iPhone than Android, but now I see little overall usability difference.
Honest Question: after perusing your site, the findings indicate that the underlying mapping data is seriously flawed. Apple gets its mapping data from third parties, primarily Tom Tom. I'm not trying to be an Apple apologist--they still need to take responsibility for the performance of the final product, data used and all--but wouldn't this suggest that Tom Tom's dataset is largely to blame? Or am I missing something deeper here?
Wouldn't the same apply if Apple had chosen to stop using Samsung to supply Flash RAM for the iPhone, so they found a different (but inferior) source, which sometimes has memory corruption problems. Apple doesn't make the Flash themselves, all they do is choose the manufacturer and integrate it into their phone. The did some testing, found a few faults but figured that it was "good enough" so they shipped it...or maybe Apple didn't even test it, they just assumed it would work. Would it be Apple's fault that the Flash sucks or is it the Flash manufacturer's?
I agree that that map app is flawed, but first releases of anything usually is.
So you're saying they've adopted the Microsoft way: release software which is horribly bug infested, let the user's who've paid for the product tell you what's wrong, then go about fixing the problems you either knew about or were too lazy to fix in the first place because you saved a few bucks by not doing testing.
Pretty much, yeah! The difference is that Apple users are not paying for this app. It comes with the new iPhone. I don't think there were many in line waiting overnight to purchase the new iPhone5 simply because it had a map app. They were there to get the latest and greatest that Apple has to offer.
Kind of the same way that people don't pay for Windows since it comes free with a new computer?
Saying that people don't purchase the phone to get the map app is the same as saying that people don't purchase the phone for Siri, or the high res screen, or the fast CPU, or the LTE connection - they buy the phone for the "whole package", and for many people, maps is part of that package.
The whole reason I moved from my corporate issued Blackberry to my own personal smartphone was to get better mapping. The Blackberry was great for emails and for making phone calls and txts (my primary use of a smartphone), but the mapping app sucks, so even though the BB was completely free for me through work, I paid my own money for a better smartphone.
Do we know for a fact that Google refused to negotiate better terms with Apple? Surely for whatever money Apple is investing in re-inventing the wheel they could have offered a fraction of that to obtain a more favorable agreement.
Paying money to a direct competitor to use their products is not always the best plan, even if it makes sense when looking only at dollars.
Here is a picture of the Ranch. Notice the caption:
George W. Bush (center) is joined by Condoleezza Rice (left) and Paul Wolfowitz, (right) as they talk with reporters before the start of an intelligence briefing from the CIA at Bush's ranch
Obama has pictures of his "working vacations" too!
President Obama and top national security advisor Denis McDonough working in Hawaii, where the Obama family was vacationing over the holiday break. The family returned to Washington on Monday.
Obama doesn't attend CIA briefings when he's in Washington!
That's a little misleading, according to this source:
Clearly, different presidents have structured their daily briefing from the CIA to fit their unique personal styles. Many did not have an oral briefing, while three — two of whom are named Bush — preferred to deal directly with a CIA official. Obama appears to have opted for a melding of the two approaches, in which he receives oral briefings, but not as frequently as his predecessor.
These [washingtonexaminer.com] guys put it another way:
According to presidential watcher Mark Knoller of CBS, George W. Bush, at this time of his presidency, had made 30 visits to his Texas ranch spanning all or part of 220 days. The Obama’s vacation day count is less than half of that.
But his have become more controversial because of the costs associated with moving the first family to a public vacation spot, unlike the Bushes to their remote ranch in Crawford, Texas. For example, the Hawaii Reporter said the first family’s 2011 Christmas vacation in Hawaii would exceed $1.5 million.
So we should never vote for presidents that don't own a large private ranch, or that come from states that are popular vacation spots?
Camp David is nice.
Lots of places are nice, but they are not "home". I still go home for Christmas and other times of year because it's "home" -- I still have many family and friends there, and nice to be in familiar surroundings from time to time. While going to Hawaii is may be closer and cheaper for me than flying to a small east coast town for Christmas, I still choose the more expensive trip because it's "home".
Should a president give up his right to visit his home because it's "too expensive" for taxpayers? Why not just set up predetermined vacations for each president - grant each president one week at Camp David and one week at Monticello each year. Many jobs in this country offer only 2 weeks of vacation, so that should be more than enough for a president right? After all, he is our employee.
People make this complaint about every president - the president really has no choice in the matter, he can't book a ticket on a commercial flight and slip away to NYC for a private weekend with his wife. All of his trips, regardless of reason come with immense security that most individuals cannot afford to pay, so every trip is on the taxpayer's dime. This is the tradeoff we make between protecting our top leaders and saving money. Is there any candidate that will promise to never go on vacation? Would you want such a candidate in office?
But if something did happen, can't you just elect a new president?
Sure, and there is a succession plan 18 people deep to decide who would take over in the interim and it would take up to a year for the special election to take place. In the meantime the VP is next in line to become president, and there are few vice presidents (or speaker of the house, or secretary of education, or any other people in the succession plan) from either party that I'd want to be acting as president. Especially in a crisis like the death of a sitting president.
The costs from the financial turmoil from even an unsuccessful assassination attempt would be far greater than the cost of providing years of first class security to the president.
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When the chaos is at its climax, a fleet of 10 Sikorsky CH-53E heavy lift helicopters wearing NASA Emergency Rescue livery will show up, and heroically inform everyone that they're here to take the Shuttle to a more secure location, away from the fire, and all that, back at LAX.
I don't think it would be possible for 10 choppers to coordinate to lift a load like that, the diameter of the rotors on the chopper is 80 feet, and the wingspan of the shuttle is 80 feet, so they would be pulling at an angle, which even if they could maintain the proper separation, would reduce their payload capacity. Worse, if one chopper loses or reduces power, the downward force would pull all of the choppers closer together, likely causing their rotors to collide. This coordination would be much harder to maintain when they fly into the smokescreen. To do this in real life, they'd need some kind of special bracket to allow the choppers to have enough horizontal separation to lift vertically.
Meanwhile, the real Endeavour is being flown a few miles West, out to the Pacific. While in flight, a crack team of Swiss military aerialists will wrap the Shuttle in camouflaged and water-tight plastic wrap, like they use for boats and other heavy equipment when shipping.
It seems highly unlikely that they'd be able to get a watertight seal around all of the tow ropes while airborne.... though they are a *crack* team, so maybe.
Once wrapped, the tethers holding the Shuttle will be released, sending the plastic-coated orbiter plunging into the icy Pacific.
This part is even harder - the picture in the article shows the shuttle sinking under the water to the special submarine, except that the shuttle wouldn't sink, it would float.
The shuttle cargo bay alone is 18m x 4.5m x 2m (estimated), or 162 m^3, which would displace 162,000 kg or water, or around 178 US tons. Add in the rest of the volume of the shuttle, and it's probably closer to 250 tons of displacement. The sub would have to come snatch it from the surface. I assume that something like an 16,000 ton Ohio Class sub would be able to submerge even with a 200 ton buoyant chamber on it, but I don't know for sure - I don't know how close to neutrally buoyant a sub is.
And of course, if the shuttle was submerged, it's unlikely that it could handle much pressure - it's designed to be under positive pressure in space, every 30 feet under water is one atmosphere of negative pressure, which the shuttle was never designed for.
And then finally there's the problem of what to do with it once they get it, the article suggests:
A country with a motive, like maybe a strange fixation on neutrality to the degree they've made their country a fortress and they may be interested in getting a spaceship for an off-world colony, fast.
If they are building a space colony, they'd probably want to get higher than the 400 mile max orbit of the shuttle. And if they just want a launch vehicle, for the $600M they are spending on the 20 CH-53E's, they may as well pay the Russians to take them to space, since they Russians can launch them cheaper than the $450M/flight it costs for the shuttle. And, of course, the shuttles are no longer spaceworthy, and it's likely that no one (not even NASA) has the ability to take a mothballed shuttle that's been on an underwater journey and make it spaceworthy again.
If I were a Mythbuster, I'd declare this myth "Busted", as I don't see any way it could work in real life.
If you don't mind paying for a product (and don't want to use Google Apps), take a look at Zimbra:
http://www.zimbra.com/products/index.html
It has an Outlook plugin so your Windows users will be happy, and it speaks Activesync, so any smartphone should be able to sync email contacts and calendar with it.
I haven't used Zimbra for a few years, but last time I used it it worked quite well -- much easier to set up and administer than Exchange, and cheaper too.
Maybe NASA should have planned ahead to make sure they'd have a launch vehicle to reach their expensive ISS?
that's ridiculous. if the US is contributing almost 2x the cash of all the others together it should buy them something. if they're going to be denied seats over a few million, screw the ISS ... we might as well build our own space station.
and also screw sarah brightman.
If it's true that NASA is missing out on a seat that they need over a few million dollars, they should just pay the few million dollars. A space shuttle launch cost $450M ($1.5B if you count the cost of the shuttles themselves). Assuming a 7 person crew, that's $64M/person. But since a typical ISS crew rotation flight only carried 3 ISS crew members, it's closer to $150M per person to get someone to the ISS (granted, there were other mission specialists and equipment/experiments on the flight). So if you look at the per-person cost of sending astronauts on the space shuttle versus Soyuz, NASA is saving money even at $50M/person.
we might as well build our own space station
If it's true that it cost $175B to build the ISS in the first place where do you think NASA is going to come up with another $175B to build their own? That's almost 10 years of 100% of NASA's current budget. And NASA still has no proven heavy lift capability to launch components into space.
Is spending the next decades NASA budget on a low earth orbit space station really a good use of their money? I'd rather see more exploration farther from the planet.
More more importantly... where can I get 0.32% of this kind of money? It would make me debt free and radically change the lifestyle (health, stress, etc.) for my family right now. Hell, 0.1% as an interest free lone would do the same thing but take about 5-6 more years to complete the transition. Straight out giving the 0.1%: 3-4 years.
TLDR; 0.1% of the cost of this joyride could completely change the lives of a family in fairly short order.
Some may find such news items interesting and even exciting, whereas I (and likely the rest of the 97+%) find it extremely depressing.
One way would be to work for a company that is developing a launch vehicle that can take passengers to orbit. Offer to work for little to no wage for now, and take equity in the company instead of salary compensation. If the company succeeds then you'll have your money.
I bet that $50M will enhance the lives of more Russian families than it would if it were split among American families. Much of that $50M is spent on labor to build the spacecraft, extract raw materials, refine rocket fuel, etc. Most Americans can earn the amount you're asking for ($160K) in less than 5 years. It would take a Russian earner 15 - 20 years to earn the same.
While it may seem like an extravagant expense for a single person, thousands of average workers benefit. Competition has helped drive the price of a Soyuz seat up from $25M to the current $50M, so it's been good for the Russian space program.
No doubt she make good money selling records, but its also no doubt she's making pennies on the dollar for those record sales. 30 million records does not come close to 30 million dollars. Which is why so many Aging Rockers are still playing Indian Casinos these days.
More worrying is that NASA, a MORE THAN EQUAL partner in the ISS, having built 7 of the 10 modules of the station, is being shut out of seats by Russia simply as a money grab.
Total estimated costs:
U.S.: $100 billion plus 38 billion to build the Shuttle.
Europe: $14 billion
Japan: $10 billion
Russia: Unknown, but estimated at 45 billion, mostly launch vehicles.
Canada: $2 billion
Maybe NASA should have planned ahead to make sure they'd have a launch vehicle to reach their expensive ISS?
It's like building a beautiful vacation property on a remote island, then you find out that your 30 year old yacht is too unreliable and expensive to get there. You've been paying a Russian freighter for rides to your island, but when someone else pays them more for your seat, you realize that maybe you should have purchased a more modern yacht before you retired your old one.
Lots of universities had research reactors (a few still do). They had no more security than some bored grad students working in the outer lab. If it was an open house even they would have been too busy to look after every wandering kid.
When I was in high school we did a tour of university's research reactor, and like you said, the only people there were a few grad students and an operator (or maybe he was a professor?) - no armed guards, no fancy security systems, we just had to sign in with the student at the front desk. We weren't allowed in the room that had the reactor pool,but we could see it (and the blue Cherenkov Radiation glow) through a large thick glassed window. They said that the water was sufficient to contain the radiation but they didn't want many people in the reactor room since any contaminants in the water could become radioactive.
We were standing in the room that had the door to the reactor room, so I don't think it would have been hard for a kid to accidentally gain access to the reactor room if someone inadvertently left the door open or didn't pull it closed after they left the room.
But at the time, the coolest thing in the building was the remote manipulator arms they used for working with radioactive materials. After playing with those arms, I decided I was going to have a career in nuclear science. Though somehow I ended up in IT instead.
Glass, recall the last conversation I had with Tim keyword spaghetti. Skip ahead 2 minutes. Start point. Double speed. End point. New email to Bob. Bob, here is that spaghetti recipe that I told you about. Glass, end email. Insert video segment. Send email.
Email to simula. I asked for a freakin' recipe not a 5 minute conversation with Tim. Would it be so hard to send me a transcript?
Send email. No. not sandymail. S-e-n-d email.
Apparently, it's a trademarked Intel name, because the article referenced in the summary said:
Devices such as HP's $579 Sleekbook - which runs AMD's chips, so can't be called an Ultrabook
I always thought Ultrabook was a generic term for a more powerful netbook (or a notebook in a smaller formfactor), but apparently it's Intel specific.
If you really want an EV (as opposed to a hobby car) that you can count on for a reliable commute, why spend $14,000 turning a $2,000 16 year old car into an EV, when you can buy a Mitsubishi i-Miev for around $22,000 (after tax rebate)? For $6000 more you get a full factory warranty, twice the range, a car that's been designed to be safe in a crash with the extra battery weight, and no hassle from your insurance company if a charging problem burns down your house. Or for a few thousand more, get a Nissan Leaf for an arguably better car?
For me, his 30 mile practical range is a little tight... my commute is 10 miles each way - a detour to run an errand or due to a traffic accident could leave me uncomfortably close to the max practical range of the vehicle. Fortunately, my 10 mile commute is still well within comfortable biking distance, so I don't typically drive at all.
I guess you forgot about the other five movies, and the hundreds of games, books, comics, cartoons, and other works that are all based in the same universe, many of which are still being produced.
Just because someone likes what you don't like doesn't make them pathetic. Your behavior, on the other hand...
I think that he was referring to the habit of pointing out why much of Star Wars is scientifically impossible or makes no sense in the real world, when it wasn't supposed to be a space documentary - it's a space opera. It's like pointing out the scientific inaccuracies of Sponge Bob Square Pants.
In your pocket? Do you need maps to walk to the grocery store?
You don't travel much do you? When I'm in a new city and have 20 minutes to grab a coffee before a meeting, it's nice to have a directions that will guide me from the transit station to Starbucks, and then to the building where the meeting is. It's also not having to pack yet another device in my travel bag so I have a GPS in my rental car (even if I wanted to spend $15/day to rent a GPS with the car, they don't always have one available).
It's not strictly FUD. For people who leave an AP open because they don't know better, this is a good service. For people who leave a WAP open because of some kind of principled and conscentious decsion, there's nothing there they're not already familiar with and willing to risk.
And let's face it. There is risk. If some random bad actor uses your unsecured WAP for random badness, it will inconvenience you. You will be a "person of interest" until they find a better suspect. Again, this might be a risk worth taking if you decide it is, but for a clueless schlub who just bought the router and plugged it in? Not so much.
Agreed, it's not FUD - the majority of people with open Wifi access points don't know and and don't know why it's bad. Those that leave their AP open on purpose will read the letter and ignore it. I used to keep a guest Wifi connection open, bandwidth constrained to less than 1mbit with port 25 blocked outbound. I saw a few dozen MAC addresses on it, so I think it was useful to some people.
Hopefully the letter included some online resources and companies that those AP owners could use to secure their Wifi it's likely that many of those with an open AP don't have any idea how to secure it.
When I moved into my last apartment, before I had set up internet service I found that a neighbor (no idea who, I could see dozens of SSIDs) had left their Wifi open, so I used it. It was a little flaky, kept dropping my VPN connections so I wished I could reboot it. He had left the default password on it, so it was trivial to log in and reboot it (and it behaved a lot better after that!)
I'm pretty sure that what I did was illegal, but do you really think that my neighbor purposely left his access point wide open and able to be reconfigured by pretty much anyone who wanted to?
Why didn't you buy a standalone GPS?
Really? You have to ask that question?
Why would I want to carry around a standalone GPS that is twice as big as my phone? My phone barely fits comfortably in my pocket, I don't want to have to stuff a GPS in my pocket. Are there any standalone GPS's that will do transit directions?
Here, buy my patented tiger-repellant rock. $50.
Hey, if it saves you a $10,000 dollar funeral from a tiger attack, that's a $9,950 savings. Good ROI.
The difference is how realistically you assess the POI, as they call it in engineering-management-speak: Probabilty of Incidence. (Or "POO", Probability of Occurrence. I like that one. Anything that reminds me of all the crap in a big program's management and engineering environment makes me smile).
If it can be shown that this $100,000 "fix" really would have prevented the problem, then the process they used to assess the replacement was faulty. It's easy in retrospect to say that they made the wrong decision, but the value in doing so is that the whole process used to arrive at the decision can be analyzed and improved.
Sorry. It's a numbers game. Something that's not absolutely not guaranteed to happen WILL NOT HAPPEN in order to justify not paying for prevention.
There's a corollary to this. I usually express it by paraphrasing an old saying in Safety Engineering: "Safety decisions are written in blood."
I don't think that's true - there is no guarantee that any particular piece of the hydraulic system will fail, yet there is redundancy built it to those systems because it's likely that it will happen. There's no guarantee that a plane will suffer damage such that it's uncontrollable, but not so damaged that a pilot can eject, but they still put expensive ejection seats into military jets. There's a cost-benefit decision for every project (sometimes the cost is weight or complexity, but it's still a cost). It sounds like they may have made the wrong decision in this case.
Not even including the life insurance policies that most pilots would have. Back in 1996, it was about $250,000 when my father passed due to Benzene induced leukemia (since the USAF was Benzene happy at the time). That didn't even include the MGIB chapter 35 benefits and Tricare benefits I and my sister received. A quick look at the current policy shows it as $400,000. You could retrofit at least 4+ jets for the cost of killing one pilot.
The pilot training costs dwarf insurance payouts. This article says it costs $2.8M to train a fighter pilot.
Compared to the cost of training new pilots to replace the ones that died?
Even if the fix saved just one aircraft, that's a $190M savings. That's a pretty good return on investment.
Fair enough, although I'd suggest that the biggest factor in his deciding to apologize is not the objective quality of the maps app (or lack thereof), but rather quality in the context of the demo that was done and the expectations that were set. They portrayed it as best in class and it's obviously not. If they had been a little more humble in advance, we might not be seeing an apology today.
Are you serious? Do you really think Apple would go to a product launch and say "one more thing: We've taken away the Google Maps app that you all know and love and replaced it with our own product. Our product doesn't work as well, we're missing some entire towns from our database, but hey, we created it, so it's going to be spectacular! Except that it's not. So you should probably download some other mapping app, just use google maps in your web browser since even that is better than our app"
That sounds much worse than launching a bad product and saying "Oh oops, sorry, we didn't know it was that bad, we'll improve it"
Neither is replacing a data supplier on an established product (for which updates will be pushed out to existing customers) without assuring that what you are getting from a replacement supplier at least matches the features and quality from the supplier you are replacing, even if it makes sense when looking only at your late founders stated intent to wage nuclear war against the existing data supplier.
Granted, a shoddy software implementation is almost always the wrong thing to do, but it's possible that they made a conscious decision to burn up some of their seemingly bottomless goodwill with consumers and spend it on releasing a sub-par mapping app with the belief that they'll be able to quickly address the problems.
But my point was that more than dollars factor into the decision. Even if it costs 10x more to develop their own mapping App, that may still be the better decision despite the extra cost.
The whole reason I moved from my corporate issued Blackberry to my own personal smartphone was to get better mapping.
First, since you say "smartphone" instead of "iPhone", shall we assume that you're an Android user, that this issue doesn't affect you and your comment about the mapping app sucks is based entirely on anecdotal data?
When the CEO of Apple apologizes for the poor quality of their mapping app and recommends that dissapointed users download a different app, it's no longer "anecdotal data". This isn't a case of one guy saying "omg, I can't map my street! Apple maps suck!"
The next question is, if you are indeed an iPhone user, then is your experience with the new maps app--as bad as it may be--better than or worse than the Blackberry experience you were trying to get away from? As a former Blackberry user myself, I'm going to guess it's still way way way better. iOS 6 maps are certainly a step backwards, so it's worth complaining about. But don't add to the argument that this application was the very reason you moved away from another platform that was and probably still is several orders of magnitude worse.
I was careful to not say whether I moved to Android or iPhone, you made the (correct) assumption that it was Android, even if I moved to an iPhone 2 years ago, that doesn't change my basic point that maps are important to many people so a bad map implementation is worse than, say, not enough Fart applications.
I chose Android for reasons other than mapping (at the time, IOS was using Google Maps), but if I were going to buy a Smartphone today, I'd rule out iPhone based on the mapping problems alone. The iPhone is a good phone and until the Android ICS release, I'd say that most consumers would be more satisfied with iPhone than Android, but now I see little overall usability difference.
Honest Question: after perusing your site, the findings indicate that the underlying mapping data is seriously flawed. Apple gets its mapping data from third parties, primarily Tom Tom. I'm not trying to be an Apple apologist--they still need to take responsibility for the performance of the final product, data used and all--but wouldn't this suggest that Tom Tom's dataset is largely to blame? Or am I missing something deeper here?
Wouldn't the same apply if Apple had chosen to stop using Samsung to supply Flash RAM for the iPhone, so they found a different (but inferior) source, which sometimes has memory corruption problems. Apple doesn't make the Flash themselves, all they do is choose the manufacturer and integrate it into their phone. The did some testing, found a few faults but figured that it was "good enough" so they shipped it...or maybe Apple didn't even test it, they just assumed it would work. Would it be Apple's fault that the Flash sucks or is it the Flash manufacturer's?
I agree that that map app is flawed, but first releases of anything usually is.
So you're saying they've adopted the Microsoft way: release software which is horribly bug infested, let the user's who've paid for the product tell you what's wrong, then go about fixing the problems you either knew about or were too lazy to fix in the first place because you saved a few bucks by not doing testing.
Pretty much, yeah! The difference is that Apple users are not paying for this app. It comes with the new iPhone. I don't think there were many in line waiting overnight to purchase the new iPhone5 simply because it had a map app. They were there to get the latest and greatest that Apple has to offer.
Kind of the same way that people don't pay for Windows since it comes free with a new computer?
Saying that people don't purchase the phone to get the map app is the same as saying that people don't purchase the phone for Siri, or the high res screen, or the fast CPU, or the LTE connection - they buy the phone for the "whole package", and for many people, maps is part of that package.
The whole reason I moved from my corporate issued Blackberry to my own personal smartphone was to get better mapping. The Blackberry was great for emails and for making phone calls and txts (my primary use of a smartphone), but the mapping app sucks, so even though the BB was completely free for me through work, I paid my own money for a better smartphone.
Do we know for a fact that Google refused to negotiate better terms with Apple? Surely for whatever money Apple is investing in re-inventing the wheel they could have offered a fraction of that to obtain a more favorable agreement.
Paying money to a direct competitor to use their products is not always the best plan, even if it makes sense when looking only at dollars.
Wow. He spent some time playing golf. Big fucking deal.
Call me when he spends 3 years on vacation like bush.
http://politic365.com/2012/05/08/obamas-vacations-of-any-president-bush-racked-up-the-most/
Here is a picture of the Ranch. Notice the caption:
George W. Bush (center) is joined by Condoleezza Rice (left) and Paul Wolfowitz, (right) as they talk with reporters before the start of an intelligence briefing from the CIA at Bush's ranch
Obama has pictures of his "working vacations" too!
http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2010/01/obamas_working_hawaii_vacation.html
President Obama and top national security advisor Denis McDonough working in Hawaii, where the Obama family was vacationing over the holiday break. The family returned to Washington on Monday.
Obama doesn't attend CIA briefings when he's in Washington!
That's a little misleading, according to this source:
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/09/24/898081/kessler-thiessen-intel-breifing-bogus-misleading/?mobile=nc
Clearly, different presidents have structured their daily briefing from the CIA to fit their unique personal styles. Many did not have an oral briefing, while three — two of whom are named Bush — preferred to deal directly with a CIA official. Obama appears to have opted for a melding of the two approaches, in which he receives oral briefings, but not as frequently as his predecessor.
These [washingtonexaminer.com] guys put it another way:
According to presidential watcher Mark Knoller of CBS, George W. Bush, at this time of his presidency, had made 30 visits to his Texas ranch spanning all or part of 220 days. The Obama’s vacation day count is less than half of that.
But his have become more controversial because of the costs associated with moving the first family to a public vacation spot, unlike the Bushes to their remote ranch in Crawford, Texas. For example, the Hawaii Reporter said the first family’s 2011 Christmas vacation in Hawaii would exceed $1.5 million.
So we should never vote for presidents that don't own a large private ranch, or that come from states that are popular vacation spots?
Camp David is nice.
Lots of places are nice, but they are not "home". I still go home for Christmas and other times of year because it's "home" -- I still have many family and friends there, and nice to be in familiar surroundings from time to time. While going to Hawaii is may be closer and cheaper for me than flying to a small east coast town for Christmas, I still choose the more expensive trip because it's "home".
Should a president give up his right to visit his home because it's "too expensive" for taxpayers? Why not just set up predetermined vacations for each president - grant each president one week at Camp David and one week at Monticello each year. Many jobs in this country offer only 2 weeks of vacation, so that should be more than enough for a president right? After all, he is our employee.
People make this complaint about every president - the president really has no choice in the matter, he can't book a ticket on a commercial flight and slip away to NYC for a private weekend with his wife. All of his trips, regardless of reason come with immense security that most individuals cannot afford to pay, so every trip is on the taxpayer's dime. This is the tradeoff we make between protecting our top leaders and saving money. Is there any candidate that will promise to never go on vacation? Would you want such a candidate in office?
But if something did happen, can't you just elect a new president?
Sure, and there is a succession plan 18 people deep to decide who would take over in the interim and it would take up to a year for the special election to take place. In the meantime the VP is next in line to become president, and there are few vice presidents (or speaker of the house, or secretary of education, or any other people in the succession plan) from either party that I'd want to be acting as president. Especially in a crisis like the death of a sitting president.
The costs from the financial turmoil from even an unsuccessful assassination attempt would be far greater than the cost of providing years of first class security to the president.