Why the FBI chose to arrest them now is the mystery because the FBI knew for over a decade.
It's no mystery, it's all right there in the criminal complaint, if you read it with attention to dates. It's got nothing to do with global politics and everything to do with the details of the case.
The FBI had been monitoring one of the spy couples since January 2000 (Lazaro and Pelaez). Over the years, this gradually expanded to include five couples plus Metsos, their money man. It's not clear that all these individuals are linked, but many are. Their every daily move was watched, their houses were bugged 24/7, for years.
Three days ago (June 26), the FBI decided to go beyond passive monitoring, and engineer a meet-up between an undercover FBI agent posing as a Russian operative, and one of the spy couples (Chapman and Semenko). The undercover FBI agent knew the right code phrases, but asked Chapman what I'd consider too many nosy questions. They set up a meeting for the next day, but Chapman was apparently suspicious. An hour later, Chapman bought a disposable cell phone to use as a "burner", and apparently made a call to check on the agent. She apparently figured out her cover was blown, since she didn't make the meeting the next day.
At this point, the FBI must have realized the jig was up, and they'd better close the net on the whole spy ring now before they could react.
The perfect shape comes from the spinning liquid: the bowl doesn't have to have any particular shape. You can even use a flat-bottomed bowl, you just need more mercury.
"Flat-bottomed bowls, you make the liquid scope go 'round..." -- Freddie Mercury
Laslo: Well what would you use that for? Ick: Making enormous Swiss cheese? (Chris laughs.) Mitch: The applications are unlimited. Laslo: No. With the fuel you’ve come up with the beam would last for what15 seconds. Well what good is that? Chris: Oh Laslo. That doesn’t matter. I respect you but I graduated. Mitch: Yeah, let the engineers figure out a use for it. That’s not our concern. Laslo: Maybe somebody already has a use for it. One for which it is specifically designed.
As a college professor, I believe that the primary goal of a class should not be to advance your personal agenda. Feel free to share your opinions with your students, but your primary purpose is to inform and inspire, not to brainwash.
This is standard operating procedure for major spacecraft missions. Cassini and Galileo missions to Saturn and Jupiter did the same thing. Kepler's choice of the word "proprietary" is unfortunate: Cassini and Galileo used "embargoed", which is less of a Slashdot buzzword.
To understand why it works this way, you need to realize that your average spacecraft scientist will spend their *entire career* designing and implementing one mission. Two if they're lucky.
So suppose you've been working on making the Kepler mission a reality since 1990. Every day for 20 years you've spent designing instruments, writing proposals, doing proof-of-concept studies, to make it happen. Then one day, the mission launches, and you release data to the public in realtime. The next day, some random dude like myself hits your website, happens on just the right file, writes a quick note to Nature, and gets the credit for discovering the first Earthlike extrasolar planet. You get a brief mention in the acknowledgements.
Folks on Slashdot are used to thinking of the value of data as measured in pennies or dollars. This data's value is measured in lifetimes. Without this sort of "embargo" system, no scientist could afford to pursue a multidecadal project, and cool things like Kepler wouldn't happen.
Everybody knows Wikipedia is often very helpful, but occasionally can't be trusted. The problem is, Wikipedia doesn't seem to give feedback about *when* vandalism, non-neutrality, and other problems are likely. Of course it can happen anywhere, but for some pages, vandalism is an epidemic.
How about if the Wikipedia engine automatically identified pages with very high rates of reverted page edits, "vandalism" and other similar terms appearing in the history, rapidly growing Talk:: sections, and other signs of trouble, and came right out and said in a top-of-page banner: this page is rapidly changing, and may be unreliable.
This can be done mechanically, without having possibly biased editors to flag or protect pages, or to approve or disapprove changes. As a reader, if I know that the page I'm reading has been modified 20 times in the past week, with edits affecting 50% of the total text, most of which were reverted, I can form my own conclusion about its current reliability.
Aha! This allows us to prove that, if the App Store contains a finite number of apps, it cannot be true that "there's an app for that" for all values of "that".
After all, the Store cannot sell the app that sells the app that sells the app that sells the app that sells the app that sells the app that sells the app...
Now if only we could work Cantor's diagonal slash into this, so we could handle the case of an infinite app store...
the republicans will see a wink and a bulge when they lose. and the democrats will see a wink and a bulge when they are in turn the losers. people that are neither will see a wink and a bulge because perhaps that's an area they are interested in, and they see winks and bulges in EVERY election.
Yes, it's just as important to avoid the *possibility* of cheating as it is to avoid actual cheating.
This is why in blackjack, both the players and the dealer are encouraged to keep their hands above the table at all times. And it's why in elections, the original physical copy of every voter's ballot must be stored.
Your analogy is a good one. One way to look at a P-score is to think of it as a false positive rate.
The example you gave, of a 50% false positive rate, indicates a totally useless test. But if we can take for granted TFA's assertion that the test has a 10% false positive rate, it provides very useful information in cases under suspicion.
But until they have a testable theory of how the election was tampered with, or at least more evidence, I hesitate to call it jiggered.
Me too. The statistical evidence here isn't strong enough to prove malfeasance, but it *is* strong enough to motivate an investigation to search for method, motive, and opportunity.
If you're picking unremarkable campaigns at random out of a hat, then yes, this result signifies nothing.
But if you're interested in one *particular* campaign, because that campaign has other irregularities which indicate possible fraud, then a statistical test with a 10% P-value is worthy of note.
To put it another way: if the guy next to you at the blackjack table gets two blackjacks in a row, you shouldn't be alarmed, that happens all the time. But if the guy is also winking at the dealer and has a suspicious bulge in his sleeve, it's time to find another table.
In all fairness, TX and FL are the closest U.S. states to the equator.
As someone who grew up in Hawaii, this statement offends me to the core. OK not really.
Anyway, no question it makes sense to put your *launch* site as far south as possible. But they don't launch rockets at JSC. The only reason to put your training and operations center in Texas, as opposed to any other state in the nation with good weather, good infrastructure, and good R&D is pure politics.
Wars are a different matter, you gotta fight wars.
You gotta fight *some* wars. Other wars, you choose. The U.S. chose a war to convert a tin-pot dictatorship into a chaotic sectocracy over health care for all with a permanent Mars base on the side.
The only reason we were able to make it before was the greedy little piggies were willing to STFU to a point so we could beat the Ruskies.
No. The Apollo program was pig heaven. Ever wonder why NASA's manned space flight center is in Houston? Hint: Texas politicians served as vice president, speaker of the house, and chairs of the house appropriations committee and the House committee on science and astronautics.
Nothing in Washington ever gets done without the piggies coming to the trough. But if you want to get something new done, you need to lay down *new* troughs.
Hopefully, this results in a rise in living conditions for everyone - My personal pessimism has doubts.
Look at Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea today, compared to 60 years ago. I think even the most cynical person would agree that they're *far* better off, by every measurement of human demography that matters, than countries like Thailand and the Phillipines that were not major centers of globalized manufacturing.
Fun exercise: fire up gapminder.org. Set it to show GDP per capita and life expectancy, set the date to 1950, and click to highlight Taiwan and Thailand. In 1950, they're about the same. In 2010, Taiwan outscores Thailand by a factor of 4 on GDP/person and 10 years of life expectancy. Now do the same for South Korea and the Phillipines.
My point is that in either party, regional interest trumps political positions. You can call it hypocrisy if you like, but you should never be surprised when politicians behave this way.
On the Democrat side, take for example Ted Kennedy. Proponent of alternative energy, opponent of expanded oil drilling, but when they wanted to build a wind farm in *his* back yard, he fought it tooth and nail until the day he died.
Here's another way of looking at it. Kind of a Republican way, though Sen. Shelby would hate to admit it.
The achievements of NASA are not the only things the U.S. has accomplished. For all its weaknesses, the U.S. is the only country on Earth where some random dude from South Africa can come, get an education, become a citizen, start a company to revolutionize the way the world buys stuff, sell it for bajillions, and then start launching rockets into orbit, partly because it's awesome, partly as a stepping-stone toward getting humanity off this damned rock.
The achievements of Elon Musk and SpaceX do not just demonstrate America's flaws. They point out what's *great* about America.
Agree. If there's one thing space exploration has taught us, it's that plans count for nothing. The US had grand plans for the Shuttle. The Soviets had grand plans for the Moon. You don't have a space program until main engine cutoff.
I don't want to be a chest-beating American here, the grandparent post may turn out to be true 20 years from now. But right now, at this moment, the U.S. has:
1 guy in orbit 300 tonnes of space station hardware in orbit 13-20 Earth-observing satellites 2-3 sun-observing missions 1 mission to Mercury 1 mission to the asteroid belt 4-5 missions to Mars 1 mission at Saturn 1 mission heading to Pluto
plus some miscellaneous ones I've forgotten about. Some numbers are approximate because it depends on how you count.
Anyway, *that* is a space program. The future may bring what the future may bring, but right now, find me another country that is doing a tenth as much space stuff.
Same deal with KBHutchinson, she's trying to protect Johnson Space Center. She could also be an ignorant ass too, I dunno.
I gotta feel bad for Alabama, though. I could be just an ignorant Yankee, but from here, it looks like if you take away Huntsville, Alabama's up an economic creek without a high-tech paddle.
According to the Falcon 9 user's guide, it's capable of sending a payload of about 2.5 tons to escape velocity (C3=0).
Though I agree, the OP meant "orbit circularization".
Anyway, three cheers for SpaceX, but if I were NASA I'd make damn sure they know what the deal was with that roll before they let a Dragon anywhere near the ISS.
Comparing the Constellation system to the Falcon system is like comparing an over the road semi-articulated tractor trailer to a day-cab straight truck.
Hooray, a truck analogy. Lemme fix that for you. It's like comparing a fusion-powered antigravity freighter to a day-cab straight truck. The antigravity freighter is much more impressive, but the straight truck actually exists.
Slashdot Mirror
Cryptography is for people don't want others to learn their secrets.
Steganography is for people who don't want others to know there *is* a secret.
Why the FBI chose to arrest them now is the mystery because the FBI knew for over a decade.
It's no mystery, it's all right there in the criminal complaint, if you read it with attention to dates. It's got nothing to do with global politics and everything to do with the details of the case.
The FBI had been monitoring one of the spy couples since January 2000 (Lazaro and Pelaez). Over the years, this gradually expanded to include five couples plus Metsos, their money man. It's not clear that all these individuals are linked, but many are. Their every daily move was watched, their houses were bugged 24/7, for years.
Three days ago (June 26), the FBI decided to go beyond passive monitoring, and engineer a meet-up between an undercover FBI agent posing as a Russian operative, and one of the spy couples (Chapman and Semenko). The undercover FBI agent knew the right code phrases, but asked Chapman what I'd consider too many nosy questions. They set up a meeting for the next day, but Chapman was apparently suspicious. An hour later, Chapman bought a disposable cell phone to use as a "burner", and apparently made a call to check on the agent. She apparently figured out her cover was blown, since she didn't make the meeting the next day.
At this point, the FBI must have realized the jig was up, and they'd better close the net on the whole spy ring now before they could react.
Unfortunately, exposure times for astrophotography need to be seconds to an hour long, even with modern digital imaging.
The perfect shape comes from the spinning liquid: the bowl doesn't have to have any particular shape. You can even use a flat-bottomed bowl, you just need more mercury.
"Flat-bottomed bowls, you make the liquid scope go 'round..." -- Freddie Mercury
Laslo: Well what would you use that for?
Ick: Making enormous Swiss cheese?
(Chris laughs.)
Mitch: The applications are unlimited.
Laslo: No. With the fuel you’ve come up with the beam would last for what15 seconds. Well what good is that?
Chris: Oh Laslo. That doesn’t matter. I respect you but I graduated.
Mitch: Yeah, let the engineers figure out a use for it. That’s not our concern.
Laslo: Maybe somebody already has a use for it. One for which it is specifically designed.
PS: I'm serious.
As a college professor, I believe that the primary goal of a class should not be to advance your personal agenda. Feel free to share your opinions with your students, but your primary purpose is to inform and inspire, not to brainwash.
I'm clearly in the minority on this one.
Canceling the manned spaceflight program isn't the same as canceling the space program.
This is standard operating procedure for major spacecraft missions. Cassini and Galileo missions to Saturn and Jupiter did the same thing. Kepler's choice of the word "proprietary" is unfortunate: Cassini and Galileo used "embargoed", which is less of a Slashdot buzzword.
To understand why it works this way, you need to realize that your average spacecraft scientist will spend their *entire career* designing and implementing one mission. Two if they're lucky.
So suppose you've been working on making the Kepler mission a reality since 1990. Every day for 20 years you've spent designing instruments, writing proposals, doing proof-of-concept studies, to make it happen. Then one day, the mission launches, and you release data to the public in realtime. The next day, some random dude like myself hits your website, happens on just the right file, writes a quick note to Nature, and gets the credit for discovering the first Earthlike extrasolar planet. You get a brief mention in the acknowledgements.
Folks on Slashdot are used to thinking of the value of data as measured in pennies or dollars. This data's value is measured in lifetimes. Without this sort of "embargo" system, no scientist could afford to pursue a multidecadal project, and cool things like Kepler wouldn't happen.
Everybody knows Wikipedia is often very helpful, but occasionally can't be trusted. The problem is, Wikipedia doesn't seem to give feedback about *when* vandalism, non-neutrality, and other problems are likely. Of course it can happen anywhere, but for some pages, vandalism is an epidemic.
How about if the Wikipedia engine automatically identified pages with very high rates of reverted page edits, "vandalism" and other similar terms appearing in the history, rapidly growing Talk:: sections, and other signs of trouble, and came right out and said in a top-of-page banner: this page is rapidly changing, and may be unreliable.
This can be done mechanically, without having possibly biased editors to flag or protect pages, or to approve or disapprove changes. As a reader, if I know that the page I'm reading has been modified 20 times in the past week, with edits affecting 50% of the total text, most of which were reverted, I can form my own conclusion about its current reliability.
Aha! This allows us to prove that, if the App Store contains a finite number of apps, it cannot be true that "there's an app for that" for all values of "that".
After all, the Store cannot sell the app that sells the app that sells the app that sells the app that sells the app that sells the app that sells the app...
Now if only we could work Cantor's diagonal slash into this, so we could handle the case of an infinite app store...
the republicans will see a wink and a bulge when they lose. and the democrats will see a wink and a bulge when they are in turn the losers. people that are neither will see a wink and a bulge because perhaps that's an area they are interested in, and they see winks and bulges in EVERY election.
Yes, it's just as important to avoid the *possibility* of cheating as it is to avoid actual cheating.
This is why in blackjack, both the players and the dealer are encouraged to keep their hands above the table at all times. And it's why in elections, the original physical copy of every voter's ballot must be stored.
Your analogy is a good one. One way to look at a P-score is to think of it as a false positive rate.
The example you gave, of a 50% false positive rate, indicates a totally useless test. But if we can take for granted TFA's assertion that the test has a 10% false positive rate, it provides very useful information in cases under suspicion.
But until they have a testable theory of how the election was tampered with, or at least more evidence, I hesitate to call it jiggered.
Me too. The statistical evidence here isn't strong enough to prove malfeasance, but it *is* strong enough to motivate an investigation to search for method, motive, and opportunity.
If you're picking unremarkable campaigns at random out of a hat, then yes, this result signifies nothing.
But if you're interested in one *particular* campaign, because that campaign has other irregularities which indicate possible fraud, then a statistical test with a 10% P-value is worthy of note.
To put it another way: if the guy next to you at the blackjack table gets two blackjacks in a row, you shouldn't be alarmed, that happens all the time. But if the guy is also winking at the dealer and has a suspicious bulge in his sleeve, it's time to find another table.
In all fairness, TX and FL are the closest U.S. states to the equator.
As someone who grew up in Hawaii, this statement offends me to the core. OK not really.
Anyway, no question it makes sense to put your *launch* site as far south as possible. But they don't launch rockets at JSC. The only reason to put your training and operations center in Texas, as opposed to any other state in the nation with good weather, good infrastructure, and good R&D is pure politics.
Wars are a different matter, you gotta fight wars.
You gotta fight *some* wars. Other wars, you choose. The U.S. chose a war to convert a tin-pot dictatorship into a chaotic sectocracy over health care for all with a permanent Mars base on the side.
The only reason we were able to make it before was the greedy little piggies were willing to STFU to a point so we could beat the Ruskies.
No. The Apollo program was pig heaven. Ever wonder why NASA's manned space flight center is in Houston? Hint: Texas politicians served as vice president, speaker of the house, and chairs of the house appropriations committee and the House committee on science and astronautics.
http://crgis.ndc.nasa.gov/historic/Johnson_Space_Center
Nothing in Washington ever gets done without the piggies coming to the trough. But if you want to get something new done, you need to lay down *new* troughs.
Hopefully, this results in a rise in living conditions for everyone - My personal pessimism has doubts.
Look at Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea today, compared to 60 years ago. I think even the most cynical person would agree that they're *far* better off, by every measurement of human demography that matters, than countries like Thailand and the Phillipines that were not major centers of globalized manufacturing.
Fun exercise: fire up gapminder.org. Set it to show GDP per capita and life expectancy, set the date to 1950, and click to highlight Taiwan and Thailand. In 1950, they're about the same. In 2010, Taiwan outscores Thailand by a factor of 4 on GDP/person and 10 years of life expectancy. Now do the same for South Korea and the Phillipines.
Easiest way to think about this problem is from an energy perspective. Don't think about forces, it'll just mess you up.
Initially, the car has a certain amount of kinetic energy; the wind also has kinetic energy.
Question: using its propeller, can the car slow down the wind?
Answer: yes...
Question: where does the wind's kinetic energy go when it slows down?
Answer: it's either A) wasted, or B) TRANSFERRED TO THE CAR.
My point is that in either party, regional interest trumps political positions. You can call it hypocrisy if you like, but you should never be surprised when politicians behave this way.
On the Democrat side, take for example Ted Kennedy. Proponent of alternative energy, opponent of expanded oil drilling, but when they wanted to build a wind farm in *his* back yard, he fought it tooth and nail until the day he died.
Here's another way of looking at it. Kind of a Republican way, though Sen. Shelby would hate to admit it.
The achievements of NASA are not the only things the U.S. has accomplished. For all its weaknesses, the U.S. is the only country on Earth where some random dude from South Africa can come, get an education, become a citizen, start a company to revolutionize the way the world buys stuff, sell it for bajillions, and then start launching rockets into orbit, partly because it's awesome, partly as a stepping-stone toward getting humanity off this damned rock.
The achievements of Elon Musk and SpaceX do not just demonstrate America's flaws. They point out what's *great* about America.
Correction: the guy in orbit is actually a chick.
Agree. If there's one thing space exploration has taught us, it's that plans count for nothing. The US had grand plans for the Shuttle. The Soviets had grand plans for the Moon. You don't have a space program until main engine cutoff.
I don't want to be a chest-beating American here, the grandparent post may turn out to be true 20 years from now. But right now, at this moment, the U.S. has:
1 guy in orbit
300 tonnes of space station hardware in orbit
13-20 Earth-observing satellites
2-3 sun-observing missions
1 mission to Mercury
1 mission to the asteroid belt
4-5 missions to Mars
1 mission at Saturn
1 mission heading to Pluto
plus some miscellaneous ones I've forgotten about. Some numbers are approximate because it depends on how you count.
Anyway, *that* is a space program. The future may bring what the future may bring, but right now, find me another country that is doing a tenth as much space stuff.
Same deal with KBHutchinson, she's trying to protect Johnson Space Center. She could also be an ignorant ass too, I dunno.
I gotta feel bad for Alabama, though. I could be just an ignorant Yankee, but from here, it looks like if you take away Huntsville, Alabama's up an economic creek without a high-tech paddle.
According to the Falcon 9 user's guide, it's capable of sending a payload of about 2.5 tons to escape velocity (C3=0).
Though I agree, the OP meant "orbit circularization".
Anyway, three cheers for SpaceX, but if I were NASA I'd make damn sure they know what the deal was with that roll before they let a Dragon anywhere near the ISS.
Comparing the Constellation system to the Falcon system is like comparing an over the road semi-articulated tractor trailer to a day-cab straight truck.
Hooray, a truck analogy. Lemme fix that for you. It's like comparing a fusion-powered antigravity freighter to a day-cab straight truck. The antigravity freighter is much more impressive, but the straight truck actually exists.