This is sheer fabrication. The wreckage of the Thresher was located years earlier, I recall seeing pictures of it probably in the 1970s, if not the late 60s. They sent the Trieste down to photograph the debris field.
Now, maybe the Navy wanted Ballard to re-photograph the area to determine any changes, but it wasn't to "find" the subs.
Landing on Mars is so dangerous for robots as well as humans, you could bet that the chosen landing place is going to be as "safe" as possible -- meaning very few local features.
Only true for robots -- at least until we have nearly human-equivalent AI. Humans are very good at making the kinds of decisions and changes from plan that allow for spot landings in interesting terrain -- as witness all the Apollo landings. (A-11 had to overfly a boulder field, A-12 landed near the old Surveyor 3, A-14 through 17 landed in geologically interesting terrain -- rilles, highlands, etc.)
While it may hypothetically be true that you can do anything with remotely controlled devices that an on-site human can do, in fact it is only true so long as you purpose-build the remote device appropriately in the first place -- several years ahead of the time you intend to use it -- and if you can live with the light-speed lag in the controls -- anywhere from 10 to 40 minutes depending on Earth and Mars's relative positions. The fact remains that humans are the most flexible, adaptable and intelligent machines we can yet come up with, so the additional life support requirements are worth it.
Not that I'm in any hurry to send humans to Mars. There's still plenty to do on the Moon first.
Because the remote sensing experiments aren't asking the right questions.
We haven't landed any experiments on Mars with the specific purpose of looking for life in over 30 years -- the Viking landers. They returned ambiguous results -- see especially the labelled release experiment, which returns results that matched those expected if life were found. The failure of the other experiments (actually, one other was also soemwhat ambiguous) turned out to be possibly due to its lack of sensitivity -- it couldn't even detect life in some samples of Earth soil (eg from Antarctic dry valleys).
Or as I like to put it, in 1976 we landed two probes designed to answer the question, "is there life on Mars?". They landed, collected soil samples, ran their experiments, and called back "could you repeat the question?".
Just because most of Mars is apparently hostile to most life as we know it, we have literally barely scratched the surface, and on Earth we're constantly finding extremophiles where nobody suspected anything could live.
Even if Mars is life-hostile and barren today, the evidence suggests that it wasn't always. If nothing else, we may find fossils. Robots can only answer (if they answer at all) questions they were programmed to ask. Humans can make up new questions on the spot and adapt tools to look for the answers.
In SF, this is sometimes phrased as "the Golden Age of science fiction is fourteen". Whatever you read at or about that age you'll remember as best. I know that's about when I discovered Analog SF magazine, and they just don't write stories like that anymore;-) (Or if they do, the editors aren't buying them.)
(Of course, I've mercifully forgotten all the crap I no doubt read at that age.)
A star 26,000 LY from Earth goes supernova and it's light could have been seen on Earth 140 years ago. No one on Earth 'saw' it then because it was too far away and buried in the center of the Milky Way,
Hmm. Ever read Larry Niven's "At the Core"? Stars are packed kind of closely there. Maybe this is the supernova that triggered the chain reaction of supernovas causing the core explosion. We may not have much longer before the main wavefront gets here.
Better start working on that hyperdrive, folks. Or investing in sunshields.;-)
Going even further off-topic, this is why the carrier of the bits and the ISP need to be decoupled.
It still is around here; Qwest provides my DSL line, somebody else provides internet access. I believe the default ISP if you don't tell Qwest otherwise is MSN, but there are a number of other ISPs around here (Denver area) you can sign up with.
Of course if you want access via cable, you're stuck with Comcast.
There are hundreds of small/medium airports and airfields that are miles from the nearest car rental agency. There might be a few rental agencies that might be willing to ferry a car out, at great added cost, but that's a decidedly non-trivial exercise, and not always available.
It's understandable. Imagine how they feel when every time they ask "where's my flying car?", the response back is "where's your pilot's license?".
Those of us that are licensed pilots (alas, not current in my case) think this is a cool idea. Ground transport when you get to your destination airport is always an issue. Years back they used to sell a small motorbike that folded up into something the size of a suitcase, my father-in-law had one. Or if you have a regular destination, you buy a cheap used car and leave it parked there. At some places rental cars are an option, but there are a lot of small airfields a long way from the nearest rental agency.
That sounds like an excellent reason not to use it.
Not that I was ever a huge fan of Flash either, although between Gnash and Adobe's latest move to open it, it's marginally acceptable (I'm just not a big fan of all-singing, all-dancing web sites). But there was never a need for Silverfish, er, light.
Modern fighter aircraft are software-limited to 9G maneuvers, with the crew in G-suits and trained for it. (The hardware can probably take higher). The Gemini launches on converted Titan-II missiles routinely hit about 8G during the ascent (Shuttle does 3G).
Then-Captain John Stapp in his rocket sled experiments in the late 1940s/early 1950s routinely experienced 18G in the "eyeballs in" position, and 30G in "eyeballs out" deceleration as the sled stopped. The peak force he survived was around 45G. (Black-eyed, bloodshot, bruised, with the occasional cracked rib and generally beat up, but survived.)
Re. your sig "Ayn Rand is a bloody socialist compared to me." - Robert A. Heinlein": got a cite for that? It doesn't sound like something he would have said, either in tone or the use of the word "bloody", but then I only met him a couple of times.
Not only that, but the part in question (a component of the guidance system) was intended to update the rocket's position while on the pad, not after launch. The flight trajectory on the earlier model Arianes were such that it didn't matter, it wouldn't overflow anyway. Not so on the Ariane V.
It was really a matter of the spec or procedures being wrong, not the code.
Unlike, say, the first Mariner Venus mission where the Fortran guidance code had a line in it something like
DO 20 I = 1.10
instead of
DO 20 I = 1,10
The latter iterates I from 1 to 10, with label 20 marking the end of the loop. The former assigns the value 1.10 to the real variable DO20I -- in those days Fortran didn't care about whitespace, and implicit declarations were ok, type being indicated by the first letter of the variable name.
Please tell me that's a parody site. Or at least that those products are parody items on a legit site.
"The Ruby Mountain features truly massive G6 Silver-Gold conductors in our proprietary X-Balanced Micro Technology geometry. The ultimate in power, dynamics, resolution and transparency. Supremely musical, simply the best power cable available."
In a power cable. Right.
For that price they'd better be rewiring my house.
With a SSTO there is a little problem, though - nobody on this planet has a clue how to do it, even in theory.
You're wrong there, it's just that nobody has properly tried it. If you think it has something to do with physics, you're reading the wrong physics books.
Take Atlas, for example, the original 1958 technology. Using kerosene/LOX propellants, not known for their high Isp, it was damn close to SSTO -- the only thing it discarded on its way to orbit were the two outboard booster engines -- just the engines, mind, they fed from the main fuel tank.
Or consider the Shuttle External tank and six SSME's, plus an allowance for structure and plumbing. Go ahead, do the math yourself. All the way to orbit with no dropped parts. You can do a similar thought experiment with Saturn tankage and SSMEs.
Now, that's just to orbit. Most people pushing SSTO also want the thing to de-orbit, land, and be reused, otherwise there's not much point. That's doable too, but you need to be a bit more careful about the design so that you can afford the weight of a heat shield. It also helps to design the thing with a single primary load path rather than two orthogonal load paths (ie, you land in the same orientation you launch, either vertical or horizontal, rather than launching one way and landing the other -- this also gives you more launch abort options).
I know a number of rocket scientists and engineers who believe SSTO can be done as long as it's done right, including Max Hunter, who has written books on rocket design and was responsible for the Thor missile, which later became the Delta.
(The X-33 was a cluster fuck from the start: vertical takeoff/horizontal landing, so two load paths, so extra weight; the airframe separate from the propellant tankage, so twice the weight penalty there, and then that godawful V-shaped tank with a lousy surface-area to volume ratio (more weight) and ridiculous stresses where the two lobes of the V join. No wonder it kept breaking.)
Most of the meeting/conference rooms where I work have motion (or possibly passive IR?) sensors on the light switches, they'll turn the lights off if nobody's in the room. (Or, if they're strictly motion sensitive, if everybody just sits really still for a few minutes. I haven't tested.;-)
A bit impractical for the cubicle farms though, and in my case there are at least a few people there at any given time.
Slashdot Mirror
This is sheer fabrication. The wreckage of the Thresher was located years earlier, I recall seeing pictures of it probably in the 1970s, if not the late 60s. They sent the Trieste down to photograph the debris field.
Now, maybe the Navy wanted Ballard to re-photograph the area to determine any changes, but it wasn't to "find" the subs.
Landing on Mars is so dangerous for robots as well as humans, you could bet that the chosen landing place is going to be as "safe" as possible -- meaning very few local features.
Only true for robots -- at least until we have nearly human-equivalent AI. Humans are very good at making the kinds of decisions and changes from plan that allow for spot landings in interesting terrain -- as witness all the Apollo landings. (A-11 had to overfly a boulder field, A-12 landed near the old Surveyor 3, A-14 through 17 landed in geologically interesting terrain -- rilles, highlands, etc.)
While it may hypothetically be true that you can do anything with remotely controlled devices that an on-site human can do, in fact it is only true so long as you purpose-build the remote device appropriately in the first place -- several years ahead of the time you intend to use it -- and if you can live with the light-speed lag in the controls -- anywhere from 10 to 40 minutes depending on Earth and Mars's relative positions. The fact remains that humans are the most flexible, adaptable and intelligent machines we can yet come up with, so the additional life support requirements are worth it.
Not that I'm in any hurry to send humans to Mars. There's still plenty to do on the Moon first.
At the point the Snack^WSecurity Guard is searching the bag, he has the gun, and the owner of the bag doesn't.
I always thought of The Eagles' "Take It To The Limit" (one more time) as The Calculus Song.
My high school calculus teacher was always saying that.
Because the remote sensing experiments aren't asking the right questions.
We haven't landed any experiments on Mars with the specific purpose of looking for life in over 30 years -- the Viking landers. They returned ambiguous results -- see especially the labelled release experiment, which returns results that matched those expected if life were found. The failure of the other experiments (actually, one other was also soemwhat ambiguous) turned out to be possibly due to its lack of sensitivity -- it couldn't even detect life in some samples of Earth soil (eg from Antarctic dry valleys).
Or as I like to put it, in 1976 we landed two probes designed to answer the question, "is there life on Mars?". They landed, collected soil samples, ran their experiments, and called back "could you repeat the question?".
Just because most of Mars is apparently hostile to most life as we know it, we have literally barely scratched the surface, and on Earth we're constantly finding extremophiles where nobody suspected anything could live.
Even if Mars is life-hostile and barren today, the evidence suggests that it wasn't always. If nothing else, we may find fossils. Robots can only answer (if they answer at all) questions they were programmed to ask. Humans can make up new questions on the spot and adapt tools to look for the answers.
In SF, this is sometimes phrased as "the Golden Age of science fiction is fourteen". Whatever you read at or about that age you'll remember as best. I know that's about when I discovered Analog SF magazine, and they just don't write stories like that anymore ;-) (Or if they do, the editors aren't buying them.)
(Of course, I've mercifully forgotten all the crap I no doubt read at that age.)
A star 26,000 LY from Earth goes supernova and it's light could have been seen on Earth 140 years ago.
;-)
No one on Earth 'saw' it then because it was too far away and buried in the center of the Milky Way,
Hmm. Ever read Larry Niven's "At the Core"? Stars are packed kind of closely there. Maybe this is the supernova that triggered the chain reaction of supernovas causing the core explosion. We may not have much longer before the main wavefront gets here.
Better start working on that hyperdrive, folks. Or investing in sunshields.
since I haven't even been served in this case since the preliminary injunction
So he was served. What, he was expecting an engraved invitation to every court date? It doesn't work that way.
Regardless, the check's in the mail.
Oh I hope so, check fraud for that amount is a felony.
I wonder if Digital's and Compaq's CEO's sent out a similar e-mail when they got bought out by HP :)
Digital wasn't bought out by HP, it was bought out by Compaq.
But yeah, a moot point in the long run.
Going even further off-topic, this is why the carrier of the bits and the ISP need to be decoupled.
It still is around here; Qwest provides my DSL line, somebody else provides internet access. I believe the default ISP if you don't tell Qwest otherwise is MSN, but there are a number of other ISPs around here (Denver area) you can sign up with.
Of course if you want access via cable, you're stuck with Comcast.
There are hundreds of small/medium airports and airfields that are miles from the nearest car rental agency. There might be a few rental agencies that might be willing to ferry a car out, at great added cost, but that's a decidedly non-trivial exercise, and not always available.
It's understandable. Imagine how they feel when every time they ask "where's my flying car?", the response back is "where's your pilot's license?".
Those of us that are licensed pilots (alas, not current in my case) think this is a cool idea. Ground transport when you get to your destination airport is always an issue. Years back they used to sell a small motorbike that folded up into something the size of a suitcase, my father-in-law had one. Or if you have a regular destination, you buy a cheap used car and leave it parked there. At some places rental cars are an option, but there are a lot of small airfields a long way from the nearest rental agency.
Wow.
You read an awful lot into a simple statement of fact. You must be seeing things that aren't there.
Do you hear voices, too?
and it hasn't happened yet.
On Sept 10, 2001, nobody had flown commercial airliners into the WTC or the Pentagon yet, either. "It hasn't happened yet" is a damned weak argument.
if that's not the case, it seems like the environmental impact of nuclear reactors is less than some people would claim.
Bingo!
"If you don't use it, nobody will install it."
That sounds like an excellent reason not to use it.
Not that I was ever a huge fan of Flash either, although between Gnash and Adobe's latest move to open it, it's marginally acceptable (I'm just not a big fan of all-singing, all-dancing web sites). But there was never a need for Silverfish, er, light.
Ah, so not referring to human physiology at all.
Don't know where you got that figure from.
Modern fighter aircraft are software-limited to 9G maneuvers, with the crew in G-suits and trained for it. (The hardware can probably take higher). The Gemini launches on converted Titan-II missiles routinely hit about 8G during the ascent (Shuttle does 3G).
Then-Captain John Stapp in his rocket sled experiments in the late 1940s/early 1950s routinely experienced 18G in the "eyeballs in" position, and 30G in "eyeballs out" deceleration as the sled stopped. The peak force he survived was around 45G. (Black-eyed, bloodshot, bruised, with the occasional cracked rib and generally beat up, but survived.)
Re. your sig "Ayn Rand is a bloody socialist compared to me." - Robert A. Heinlein": got a cite for that? It doesn't sound like something he would have said, either in tone or the use of the word "bloody", but then I only met him a couple of times.
Not only that, but the part in question (a component of the guidance system) was intended to update the rocket's position while on the pad, not after launch. The flight trajectory on the earlier model Arianes were such that it didn't matter, it wouldn't overflow anyway. Not so on the Ariane V.
It was really a matter of the spec or procedures being wrong, not the code.
Unlike, say, the first Mariner Venus mission where the Fortran guidance code had a line in it something like
DO 20 I = 1.10
instead of
DO 20 I = 1,10
The latter iterates I from 1 to 10, with label 20 marking the end of the loop. The former assigns the value 1.10 to the real variable DO20I -- in those days Fortran didn't care about whitespace, and implicit declarations were ok, type being indicated by the first letter of the variable name.
In a power cable. Right.
For that price they'd better be rewiring my house.
With a SSTO there is a little problem, though - nobody on this planet has a clue how to do it, even in theory.
You're wrong there, it's just that nobody has properly tried it. If you think it has something to do with physics, you're reading the wrong physics books.
Take Atlas, for example, the original 1958 technology. Using kerosene/LOX propellants, not known for their high Isp, it was damn close to SSTO -- the only thing it discarded on its way to orbit were the two outboard booster engines -- just the engines, mind, they fed from the main fuel tank.
Or consider the Shuttle External tank and six SSME's, plus an allowance for structure and plumbing. Go ahead, do the math yourself. All the way to orbit with no dropped parts. You can do a similar thought experiment with Saturn tankage and SSMEs.
Now, that's just to orbit. Most people pushing SSTO also want the thing to de-orbit, land, and be reused, otherwise there's not much point. That's doable too, but you need to be a bit more careful about the design so that you can afford the weight of a heat shield. It also helps to design the thing with a single primary load path rather than two orthogonal load paths (ie, you land in the same orientation you launch, either vertical or horizontal, rather than launching one way and landing the other -- this also gives you more launch abort options).
I know a number of rocket scientists and engineers who believe SSTO can be done as long as it's done right, including Max Hunter, who has written books on rocket design and was responsible for the Thor missile, which later became the Delta.
(The X-33 was a cluster fuck from the start: vertical takeoff/horizontal landing, so two load paths, so extra weight; the airframe separate from the propellant tankage, so twice the weight penalty there, and then that godawful V-shaped tank with a lousy surface-area to volume ratio (more weight) and ridiculous stresses where the two lobes of the V join. No wonder it kept breaking.)
Heh. But it doesn't (yet) tag the movement dots with the names of the movers.
;-)
Hmm, prior art do you suppose?
Most of the meeting/conference rooms where I work have motion (or possibly passive IR?) sensors on the light switches, they'll turn the lights off if nobody's in the room. (Or, if they're strictly motion sensitive, if everybody just sits really still for a few minutes. I haven't tested. ;-)
A bit impractical for the cubicle farms though, and in my case there are at least a few people there at any given time.