This is especially promising, considering that the US used to intentionally degrade its own GPS signals available to civilians, for fear that it'd be used by "terrorists".
Huh? SA was turned on from Day One - not because of fears of use by 'terrorists', but because it was a military system and it never occurred to anyone that it might have far reaching civilian uses.
The only thing this did was to piss off a lot of legitimate users, including the FAA and the Military when the available supply of Military GPS units dried up.
Huh? The FAA was quite happy to use GPS, and was not 'pissed off' at all. Back in the days of SA, GPS was starting to be widely used for general aviation navigation. Autolanding systems and precise navigation was a pipe dream. (More because of a lack of suitable electronics than because of SA. The electronics industry lagged badly in getting into the GPS game on both the civil and military sides of the house.)
One, how are they going to keep the astronaut warm/cool in it.
That's just one thing that the advocates of skinsuits would rather you didn't think about.
Two, they talk about how its safer if it gets punctured because the hole can just be patched without affecting the rest of the suit. How are you going to puncture it in a way that doesn't puncture, you know... you?
That's another thing they don't want you to think too hard about.
The fact is, the actual pressure bladder is a fairly small fraction of the weight of a full spacesuit. Thermal protection, micrometeorite protection, life support, etc... etc... account for the vast majority of the weight and the bulk (and restriction on movement). Absent the sudden availability of unobtanium, skinsuits don't actually work. And I don't mean 'stuff that is on the horizon but needs R&D', nor 'stuff that has been thought about but nobody has ever really detailed'... I mean pure unalloyed unobtanium - stuff we haven't even a clue how to go about doing yet.
Most of the article, and specifically the sections you quote, are unsupported by any references.
Unsurprising as they run counter to common historical opinion - which is that the raids accomplished little of lasting importance. In particular the conclusion about the effect of the Dambuster's raid on AA is nonsense because a) the dams and other important industrial targets were already protected by AA, and b) the raids on German cities were already drawing AA away from the Eastern Front. (As well as diverting considerable industrial effort to increased fighter production.)
In addition, the pictures of the broken dams proved to be a morale boost to the Allies, especially to the British, still suffering under German bombing.
This specifically is an impossibility - pictures of the damage to the dams were classified and not released until postwar.
And of course, a major effect was to pursuade Harris to support Barnes Wallis's greatest contribution, the Tallboy and Grand Slam supersonic precision earth penetrators. These stopped the V2 and the V3, and sunk the Tirpitz, and well as the U-Boat pens at St Nazaire.
This paragraph can best be described as hyperbole... Niether the V2 or the V3 was stopped until the installations were overrun by the Allies. The St Nazaire U-boat pens were never attacked by such weapons and remain intact today. Sinking Tirpitz... Well, by that point in the war attacking her had become a habit. In reality Churchill's ongoing focus on her destruction consumed man hours and resources all our of proportion to her remaining strategic importance.
And now we come to the real reason for your post and the fictions it contains:
The Americans wished they had something like them, and are only now developing something similar for use against Iran.
You wish to sneak in a slam against the Americans... And just like the above, you get yourfactswrong.
It's more likely they left it out simply because such computing machinery was part of the 'assumed background'. (I.E. a detail it never occurred to them to specify, because the detail was so common.) Specialized calculating machinery was hardly unknown in the 1940's, even if the general public was only dimly aware of what IBM (and others) did.
In the same vein you find multiple mentions of the use of the (exciting, new, and unusual) ENIAC in the development of the H-bomb, but very few mentions of the massive use of (fairly common) computing, tabulating, and calculating machinery in the development of the A-bomb.
That's true to an extent, but our bodies are in fact designed to expel unneeded calories.
Huh? News to science - they've long believed that fat is designed to store excess calories against lean times, like pretty much all of the animal kingdom.
(From the remainder of your message it appears you get your information the diet industry, and parrot it without understanding.)
The end result of this protectionism is that Americans pay extra to get fatter while Africans starve, in order to make sure that American sugar farmers can carry on farming sugar instead of getting a real job.
Funny how you insist that American sugar farmers can get 'real jobs' - but somehow the African farmers can't change crops or jobs?
A CEO (actually any C_O) is differentiated because they have insider information - I.E. information not available (legally) to the general public and the average investor.
In this case though, did his position give him access to internal Wild Oats information? If the answer is no, than he's no different from any other investor.
not quite true - as access to internal Whole Foods information (the fact that they were planning to aquire Wild Oats) is also an issue.
Doesn't exist. Someone will hold it against you. This is why the more polite a society gets, the less it tolerates or even cares about truth, and the more its science gets politicized.
One wonders what theoretical society you are using as a model for this supposition. Our current one is much less polite than previously, has little tolerance for the truh, and damm near _everything_ is politicized.
A CEO would be differentiated because...well..he's a CEO, and has a HIGHER stake in case his agenda is out to acquire the company.
A CEO (actually any C_O) is differentiated because they have insider information - I.E. information not available (legally) to the general public and the average investor.
He also cut his own salary for his employees' benefit
That sure sounds impressive. How much did he cut it, and how prescisely did the employess benefit thereby?
We can easily send materials into orbit. (Which is different from the casual trips mentioned by the OP.)
Knowing how to build and maintain things on the Lunar surface is just infitesimally this side of useless - the Lunar enviroment being so radically different from the Martian one. Antartica (or Devon Island) is much, much closer. (And we've built intensively on one and have ongoing research at the other.) Even so, we won't be building for a long time, we'll be landing (like the Apollo LM's), but again the Lunar experience isn't much help here either because of the vast differences in environment and operations.
A space station is relevant because any Mars mission for the foreseeable future will spent most of it's time either in orbit (around Earth or Mars) or cruising between them.
They're selling indemnification insurance. Open Logic is a capitalist enterprise, not some FOSS charity. They're in the business of monetizing FUD.
Indemnification isn't FUD, it's a fact of life in many real world businesses. Ever heard of Sarbanes-Oxley for example? Or the privacy laws surrounding medical information? Etc... Etc...
I emailed the company and told them I found this misleading and they were very nice about it, saying they did not want to be accused of bait-and-switch and would contact their marketing department about this. I don't expect all companies to be so honest.
Um... They gave you a meaningless but 'sincere' apology. They weren't being honest, they were telling you what you wanted to hear so you'd get the hell off of the phone and taking up time that could be used on a paying customer.
Of course the ideal would be if we could develop a cheap digital permanent storage that had guaranteed physical longevity, say several millenia. That combination would allow easy dissemination of the data and safety by using a multiplicty of sources.
Ceramic/fired clay tablets will nicely. There's likely to be density issues however.
That's kinda like substituting 1000 Ford Escorts for a Caterpillar D11. You'll have a lot more metal laying about - but you won't get as much done.
Give me a 1,000 Ford Escorts with a scoop bolted on the front, and you can have your Caterpillar D11. Sure, the Escort may not be as powerful or as efficient, but I suspect 1,000 of them pushing dirt around would give me a big advantage.
If merely pushing dirt around was all a D11 did, you'd have a point.
You know, thinking about it, this is almost the John Henry legend all over again. We have to send a human because a machine "can't" replace them.
Let's put it this way... What the two rovers have accomplished in three years? Could be accomplished by two trained field geologists in two *weeks*.
Space technology is improving all the time. But it foolish to shoot for Mars when we can't even put humans in orbit economically. Why don't at least solve that problem first?
Why for heaven's sake. On problem has nothing to do with another.
And maybe see about creating a few space hotels, to figure out in-space construction?
Again, why? Construction in space is simply a matter of attaching modules to each other - not all that difficult.
I've harped on this before, but it's still true: we could send 1,000 probes similar to the Mars Lander for the price it takes to do a P.R. stunt like sending humans to Mars.
That's kinda like substituting 1000 Ford Escorts for a Caterpillar D11. You'll have a lot more metal laying about - but you won't get as much done.
I like space. I'm a supporter of space. But I think humans should go on the back burner until space exploration is much, much, much more of a mature technology.
That's a self defeating argument - as the technology won't mature unless you send people in the first place.
Just put together another pair of Mars Rovers and update them to answer those questions and to survive better than the ones down there now.
Ah, if it were only that easy.
The problem is, answering those questions means a fairly heavy (as such things go) automated laboratory in place of the fairly light (as such things go) robotic arm and sensors... Which means the existing airbag design (which has already been stretched beyond it's limits) will have to stretched yet further - or replaced entirely. Such an update will require much more power than the arm - but the existing rover chassis can't support more solar cells. Back to the drawing board to supersize the chassis, _and_ increase the size of the airbags.... (Even more than in the last round where they were upsized for the additional weight...)
I think there's little doubt we can do it. So why aren't we?
One could say that amount of doubt if directly proportional to the amount of knowledge of the problem domain.
Well, I downloaded the PDF and waded my way through the turgid prose. The sad truth is that the subject is very interesting and timely. Unfortunately, the author really has nothing insightful to say on the subject. The 25 pages of text are clunky and directly focused on academic publication. He writes a great deal, but doesn't SAY anything. How can he say so little with so many words?
Precisely. The article summary claims that Solove's essay "exposes the faulty underpinnings of the "I have nothing to hide" arguement", for my money it singularly fails to do so. (Except in the context of the complex and opaque theoretical philosophical universe he creates in the paper.) He misses the point (to my mind) by a country mile - there are no 'underpinnings' to the argument. It is a (if I may borrow a term) Platonic arguement. He weakens how own case by diving off into the philosophical and theoretical rather than adressing the issue head on.
The only thing that I took from his publication is that he doesn't like the Bush Administration. That's fine with me; everyone is entitled to his own opinion. My problem is that this issue as such is far greater than any current administration. It's one of the fundamental questions about the relationship between the individual and the state, and deserves to be treated as an issue of profound significance.
Both Solove and Schneier have both allowed their political dogma to become the dominant force in their writings. You see the same thing here in many of the Slashdot replies - most of them hare off into tinfoil hat conspiracy land, and few analyzing the quality of the thinking. (Mostly because this kind of essay preaches to the Slashdot choir, largely an uncritical lot so long as you agree with the Hivemind.)
I'm glad you don't care where or how the aggregation happens, but who is going to pay the bills? If you use Amazon to find local books, what does Amazon get out of it?
Precisely. Alone the same lines, the OP blames the 'legal departments' - he doesn't care about other people's rights, or about their ability to pay their bills. He just wants what he wants, now, Now, NOW!
Other people and their rights and interests be dammed.
Ever bothered to actually read the Constitution? Or follow the varying interpretations over the years? I know, questioning the Constitution and the FCC gets you modded "insightful" on Slashdot, but in the real world it makes educated people look at you as an idiot.
To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;
To establish Post Offices and Post Roads;
To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.
Has (IIRC) long been looked at as the basic enabling legislature for regulating commerce and communications in the US. Specific legislative authority for preventing monopolies (and trusts) also flows from this basic premise. Presumably, the authority to mandate unlocking will also, along with the Supreme Court decisions in re Ma Bell and attaching privately purchased and owned equipment to be attached to her networks. Unlocking is also just a further step from the ruling that prevented the telco's from holding your (cell) phone number hostage in their network.
Certainly some future Nichols and McVeigh can also rent a truck - but trucks have license plates too!. Sure, it won't stop 'em before the fact, but it will make catching them after the fact a whole lot easier - you won't have to depend on a random traffic stop or hoping enough remains of the bomb carrying vehicle to make an ID.
Catching them is important as preventing them in the first place.
Amen. The armchair analysts here are all going gaga over pictures - but pictures are only a (very) small piece of the puzzle. Off the top of my head I can think of a dozen or so items of tactical interest, none of which a picture gives you.
For example - the linked weblog compares the two [Chinese] SSBN's, and implies the extra length aft is all engineering spaces. But what if the layout has more in common with the Soviet/Russian Delta series, which has extensive berthing and support systems placed between the missile compartment and the engineering spaces? (Unlike US and UK practice which places much of those functions outboard of the missile tubes in the missile compartment proper.)
A picture tells you to look closer - and gives a clue where and when... But a picture isn't the whole picture.
From TFA: Here are the reported download speeds in Kbps: New York, 18,946; Washington, 15,821; Atlanta, 11,257; Chicago, 10,042; San Francisco, 4,230. What is going on?
I see pretty much normal 'net behavior. Different sites have different download speeds because there are different paths between your computer and the server. Duh. (And if you repeat the test - you'll almost always find that the results vary between tests as internet 'weather' conditions vary from moment to moment.)
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? SA was turned on from Day One - not because of fears of use by 'terrorists', but because it was a military system and it never occurred to anyone that it might have far reaching civilian uses.
Huh? The FAA was quite happy to use GPS, and was not 'pissed off' at all. Back in the days of SA, GPS was starting to be widely used for general aviation navigation. Autolanding systems and precise navigation was a pipe dream. (More because of a lack of suitable electronics than because of SA. The electronics industry lagged badly in getting into the GPS game on both the civil and military sides of the house.)
That's just one thing that the advocates of skinsuits would rather you didn't think about.
That's another thing they don't want you to think too hard about.
The fact is, the actual pressure bladder is a fairly small fraction of the weight of a full spacesuit. Thermal protection, micrometeorite protection, life support, etc... etc... account for the vast majority of the weight and the bulk (and restriction on movement). Absent the sudden availability of unobtanium, skinsuits don't actually work. And I don't mean 'stuff that is on the horizon but needs R&D', nor 'stuff that has been thought about but nobody has ever really detailed'... I mean pure unalloyed unobtanium - stuff we haven't even a clue how to go about doing yet.
Unsurprising as they run counter to common historical opinion - which is that the raids accomplished little of lasting importance. In particular the conclusion about the effect of the Dambuster's raid on AA is nonsense because a) the dams and other important industrial targets were already protected by AA, and b) the raids on German cities were already drawing AA away from the Eastern Front. (As well as diverting considerable industrial effort to increased fighter production.)
This specifically is an impossibility - pictures of the damage to the dams were classified and not released until postwar.
This paragraph can best be described as hyperbole... Niether the V2 or the V3 was stopped until the installations were overrun by the Allies. The St Nazaire U-boat pens were never attacked by such weapons and remain intact today. Sinking Tirpitz... Well, by that point in the war attacking her had become a habit. In reality Churchill's ongoing focus on her destruction consumed man hours and resources all our of proportion to her remaining strategic importance.
And now we come to the real reason for your post and the fictions it contains:
You wish to sneak in a slam against the Americans... And just like the above, you get your facts wrong.
It's more likely they left it out simply because such computing machinery was part of the 'assumed background'. (I.E. a detail it never occurred to them to specify, because the detail was so common.) Specialized calculating machinery was hardly unknown in the 1940's, even if the general public was only dimly aware of what IBM (and others) did.
In the same vein you find multiple mentions of the use of the (exciting, new, and unusual) ENIAC in the development of the H-bomb, but very few mentions of the massive use of (fairly common) computing, tabulating, and calculating machinery in the development of the A-bomb.
Huh? News to science - they've long believed that fat is designed to store excess calories against lean times, like pretty much all of the animal kingdom.
(From the remainder of your message it appears you get your information the diet industry, and parrot it without understanding.)
Funny how you insist that American sugar farmers can get 'real jobs' - but somehow the African farmers can't change crops or jobs?
not quite true - as access to internal Whole Foods information (the fact that they were planning to aquire Wild Oats) is also an issue.
One wonders what theoretical society you are using as a model for this supposition. Our current one is much less polite than previously, has little tolerance for the truh, and damm near _everything_ is politicized.
A CEO (actually any C_O) is differentiated because they have insider information - I.E. information not available (legally) to the general public and the average investor.
That sure sounds impressive. How much did he cut it, and how prescisely did the employess benefit thereby?
We can easily send materials into orbit. (Which is different from the casual trips mentioned by the OP.)
Knowing how to build and maintain things on the Lunar surface is just infitesimally this side of useless - the Lunar enviroment being so radically different from the Martian one. Antartica (or Devon Island) is much, much closer. (And we've built intensively on one and have ongoing research at the other.) Even so, we won't be building for a long time, we'll be landing (like the Apollo LM's), but again the Lunar experience isn't much help here either because of the vast differences in environment and operations.
A space station is relevant because any Mars mission for the foreseeable future will spent most of it's time either in orbit (around Earth or Mars) or cruising between them.
If any of those things, other than space stations, were stepping stones... You (and he) would have a point.
Indemnification isn't FUD, it's a fact of life in many real world businesses. Ever heard of Sarbanes-Oxley for example? Or the privacy laws surrounding medical information? Etc... Etc...
Um... They gave you a meaningless but 'sincere' apology. They weren't being honest, they were telling you what you wanted to hear so you'd get the hell off of the phone and taking up time that could be used on a paying customer.
Ceramic/fired clay tablets will nicely. There's likely to be density issues however.
If merely pushing dirt around was all a D11 did, you'd have a point.
Let's put it this way... What the two rovers have accomplished in three years? Could be accomplished by two trained field geologists in two *weeks*.
Why for heaven's sake. On problem has nothing to do with another.
Again, why? Construction in space is simply a matter of attaching modules to each other - not all that difficult.
That's kinda like substituting 1000 Ford Escorts for a Caterpillar D11. You'll have a lot more metal laying about - but you won't get as much done.
That's a self defeating argument - as the technology won't mature unless you send people in the first place.
Ah, if it were only that easy.
The problem is, answering those questions means a fairly heavy (as such things go) automated laboratory in place of the fairly light (as such things go) robotic arm and sensors... Which means the existing airbag design (which has already been stretched beyond it's limits) will have to stretched yet further - or replaced entirely. Such an update will require much more power than the arm - but the existing rover chassis can't support more solar cells. Back to the drawing board to supersize the chassis, _and_ increase the size of the airbags.... (Even more than in the last round where they were upsized for the additional weight...)
One could say that amount of doubt if directly proportional to the amount of knowledge of the problem domain.
Precisely. The article summary claims that Solove's essay "exposes the faulty underpinnings of the "I have nothing to hide" arguement", for my money it singularly fails to do so. (Except in the context of the complex and opaque theoretical philosophical universe he creates in the paper.) He misses the point (to my mind) by a country mile - there are no 'underpinnings' to the argument. It is a (if I may borrow a term) Platonic arguement. He weakens how own case by diving off into the philosophical and theoretical rather than adressing the issue head on.
Both Solove and Schneier have both allowed their political dogma to become the dominant force in their writings. You see the same thing here in many of the Slashdot replies - most of them hare off into tinfoil hat conspiracy land, and few analyzing the quality of the thinking. (Mostly because this kind of essay preaches to the Slashdot choir, largely an uncritical lot so long as you agree with the Hivemind.)
Precisely. Alone the same lines, the OP blames the 'legal departments' - he doesn't care about other people's rights, or about their ability to pay their bills. He just wants what he wants, now, Now, NOW!
Other people and their rights and interests be dammed.
Anyhow; try:
Article I, Section 8
Has (IIRC) long been looked at as the basic enabling legislature for regulating commerce and communications in the US. Specific legislative authority for preventing monopolies (and trusts) also flows from this basic premise. Presumably, the authority to mandate unlocking will also, along with the Supreme Court decisions in re Ma Bell and attaching privately purchased and owned equipment to be attached to her networks. Unlocking is also just a further step from the ruling that prevented the telco's from holding your (cell) phone number hostage in their network.
One can always produce idiot objections to any scenario.
Actually - there aren't any obvious risks. (Handwaving tinfoil hat conspiracy theories != obvious risks.)
Certainly some future Nichols and McVeigh can also rent a truck - but trucks have license plates too!. Sure, it won't stop 'em before the fact, but it will make catching them after the fact a whole lot easier - you won't have to depend on a random traffic stop or hoping enough remains of the bomb carrying vehicle to make an ID.
Catching them is important as preventing them in the first place.
Amen. The armchair analysts here are all going gaga over pictures - but pictures are only a (very) small piece of the puzzle. Off the top of my head I can think of a dozen or so items of tactical interest, none of which a picture gives you.
For example - the linked weblog compares the two [Chinese] SSBN's, and implies the extra length aft is all engineering spaces. But what if the layout has more in common with the Soviet/Russian Delta series, which has extensive berthing and support systems placed between the missile compartment and the engineering spaces? (Unlike US and UK practice which places much of those functions outboard of the missile tubes in the missile compartment proper.)
A picture tells you to look closer - and gives a clue where and when... But a picture isn't the whole picture.
From TFA:
Here are the reported download speeds in Kbps: New York, 18,946; Washington, 15,821; Atlanta, 11,257; Chicago, 10,042; San Francisco, 4,230. What is going on?
I see pretty much normal 'net behavior. Different sites have different download speeds because there are different paths between your computer and the server. Duh. (And if you repeat the test - you'll almost always find that the results vary between tests as internet 'weather' conditions vary from moment to moment.)