One of the reasons there are two officers there is so that if one goes crazy and rigs a spoon and string to turn the other's launch key, the other can shoot him.
It's different if it's something you grow up with.
Its place in history is easier to understand if you look at how awful mass media sf was in 1966. They were groundbreaking. Others later were able to do cathedra building.
An abbott in "A Canticle for Leibowitz" had a balky piece of high technology in his office and shouted something to the effect "It has a soul, I tell you! It knows the difference between good and evil and it has chosen evil!".
Are you seriously saying that a system which enables people to buy private health insurance from competing private companies, the benefits from which will be spent with doctors in private practice and with for-profit hospitals, is "socialized medicine"?
Even if there's an advantage to the offense once the missile has been launched, in order to get to that point the attacker must (1) Find the ship (stealthy, under EMCON, and moving) (2) Get within range (3) Live long enough to fire the missile.
Intelligent educated people have a duty to speak, especially about science and technology issues. It's this whole "democracy" idea that only works when people participate.
His idea was to have something like a geothermal power plant, except that the heat would come from periodically setting off hydrogen bombs underground.
Chase those, and you're in a never-ending cycle of reaction because you were so thrilled by the drama of firefighting that you left yourself exposed to the next specific and immediate threat.
Try to cover broad classes of threat, and you'll get some actual preventive value from your expenditures.
Exxon-Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson said last year that AGW is happening. He went on to argue that we should adapt to it rather than preventing it, but a "should" argument doesn't contradict the science.
I don't know exactly when, but it was eventually canceled in favor of keeping bombers on the ground with crews ready to go in no time flat and "minimum interval takeoffs".
Eventually SAC realized that airborne alert was too dangerous to continue.
It turns out that others have done some real work on this. There may be on the order of a meter of regolith which could be heaped on a shelter much faster than one could burrow into the ice. The leading hemisphere gets less radiation than the trailing hemisphere. I personally would look into a long deployable loop of superconductor to provide a pocket magnetosphere.
Unfortunately, the number that all those measures are chipping away at is one lethal dose per day. Add in the exposure while getting there in the first place. Lifting enough radiation shielding is probably out of the question for anything short of Orion. Maybe launch from a moon base with a bunch of lunar soil? Intercept a crumbly asteroid and mine it for shielding?
You can die in pain in dirty diapers in a nursing home, or you can die of radiation-induced cancer doing something that's never been done before and making historic discoveries. Either way is an equal level of deadness.
Because they are orders of magnitude more productive.
The principal investigator for the Mars rovers said that if he were on Mars he could do in 45 seconds what the rovers do in a day.
Besides, visiting a foreign country is different from looking at it through a webcam. A robot probe is just an improvement over a telescope. Humans want to go to places.
What worries me is that the site has only one passing mention of radiation, for a mission to Jupiter orbit. Aren't humans in that region going to be almost literally fried?
How many telecom executives run sufficiently honest businesses that they could stand up to "Comply or we'll investigate whether you are racketeering?".
One of the reasons there are two officers there is so that if one goes crazy and rigs a spoon and string to turn the other's launch key, the other can shoot him.
It's different if it's something you grow up with.
Its place in history is easier to understand if you look at how awful mass media sf was in 1966. They were groundbreaking. Others later were able to do cathedra building.
An abbott in "A Canticle for Leibowitz" had a balky piece of high technology in his office and shouted something to the effect "It has a soul, I tell you! It knows the difference between good and evil and it has chosen evil!".
Are you seriously saying that a system which enables people to buy private health insurance from competing private companies, the benefits from which will be spent with doctors in private practice and with for-profit hospitals, is "socialized medicine"?
Words have meanings.
Different isotope, different production process, different quantity needs, etc.
Even if there's an advantage to the offense once the missile has been launched, in order to get to that point the attacker must
(1) Find the ship (stealthy, under EMCON, and moving)
(2) Get within range
(3) Live long enough to fire the missile.
Intelligent educated people have a duty to speak, especially about science and technology issues. It's this whole "democracy" idea that only works when people participate.
There's no reason to cover for an abusive person.
It's not a good bet that it was private in any sense. If that's what they said to her directly, what were they saying behind her back?
Yes.
The proverb among pilots is "Any landing you walk away from is a good landing".
Professional pilots obviously hold themselves to a higher standard than that, but for a first-time flyer that landing met the requirements completely.
The Congressional gym is staying open during the "shutdown". It is apparently more necessary than regulating nuclear power plants.
For one thing, it reminds people of https://xkcd.com/208/
His idea was to have something like a geothermal power plant, except that the heat would come from periodically setting off hydrogen bombs underground.
You can wipe out an ant nest by getting a scout to carry back poison ("Did you bring enough for everybody?") but that doesn't work with yellowjackets.
I didn't ask about biological controls. A scout bringing back the hornet equivalent of Ebola might work.
I did wonder about bait with a radioactive label so you could make the nest show up on instruments.
In practice, there is so much traffic near a nest that it's pretty obvious if you're near it.
Yes, I got attacked recently. When people asked what was new with me I said "Thousands of my enemies are dying in convulsions".
Chase those, and you're in a never-ending cycle of reaction because you were so thrilled by the drama of firefighting that you left yourself exposed to the next specific and immediate threat.
Try to cover broad classes of threat, and you'll get some actual preventive value from your expenditures.
If it's still in print, find a copy of John McPhee's "La Place de la Concorde Suisse".
Exxon-Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson said last year that AGW is happening. He went on to argue that we should adapt to it rather than preventing it, but a "should" argument doesn't contradict the science.
The law on "long arm jurisdiction" is a real treat for people who like Fizzbin.
I don't know exactly when, but it was eventually canceled in favor of keeping bombers on the ground with crews ready to go in no time flat and "minimum interval takeoffs".
Eventually SAC realized that airborne alert was too dangerous to continue.
The engineers had decided that since the O-ring had only burned through partway on previous launches, they had a safety margin.
The problem is that it wasn't supposed to burn through at all and they didn't understand what was happening.
If you build a system and 3/4 of mission-critical safety features fail, you take the system out of service for a *thorough* rethink and overhaul.
It turns out that others have done some real work on this. There may be on the order of a meter of regolith which could be heaped on a shelter much faster than one could burrow into the ice. The leading hemisphere gets less radiation than the trailing hemisphere. I personally would look into a long deployable loop of superconductor to provide a pocket magnetosphere.
Unfortunately, the number that all those measures are chipping away at is one lethal dose per day. Add in the exposure while getting there in the first place. Lifting enough radiation shielding is probably out of the question for anything short of Orion. Maybe launch from a moon base with a bunch of lunar soil? Intercept a crumbly asteroid and mine it for shielding?
Being able to fix a stuck wheel has some value, as does being able to make new instruments on the scene from parts in the lab.
But that line of thought presupposes that gathering data is the only thing humans care about.
Do explorers flee their home, or rush toward their destination?
You can die in pain in dirty diapers in a nursing home, or you can die of radiation-induced cancer doing something that's never been done before and making historic discoveries. Either way is an equal level of deadness.
Because they are orders of magnitude more productive.
The principal investigator for the Mars rovers said that if he were on Mars he could do in 45 seconds what the rovers do in a day.
Besides, visiting a foreign country is different from looking at it through a webcam. A robot probe is just an improvement over a telescope. Humans want to go to places.
What worries me is that the site has only one passing mention of radiation, for a mission to Jupiter orbit. Aren't humans in that region going to be almost literally fried?
How many telecom executives run sufficiently honest businesses that they could stand up to "Comply or we'll investigate whether you are racketeering?".