Hell the placement makes us drool as ANY functioning telescope data from the far side of the moon would probably give us new and tantalizing images.
Not really. There's nothing visible from the far side of the moon that can't be seen from the Earth's surface or LEO. What makes a lunar telescope tantalizing is the size theoretically possible, not the location itself.
I've been wondering why this hasn't happened yet for years. The answer, of course, is that the ag industry could rely on incredibly cheap labor, so it wasn't worth developing a technological replacement.
Actually the answer is: it's taken a long time for a convergence of cheap and ubiquitous computing, reasonably priced (and fairly small) mechanical actuators, machine vision (cheap and ubiquitous small digital cameras), software, etc... etc... Robotics, like a lot of other things (*cough* fusion, AI, *cough*) has turned out in the real world to be a whole lot more difficult than it was thought back in the 50's.
To the Anonymous Coward who claims it was a student protest that did the deed: If that were true, then we should be seeing robots with the dexterity and robustness required of the fruit picking robot coming from places other than Stanford. Stanford isn't the only place in the US (or the world) doing robotics research, and those other places have a twenty year odd headstart if you (and your mates) 'stopped' this research at Stanford back in the 80's.
Actually, no. Truly old-school nerds were (mostly) guys with a deep and abiding interest in some unusual hobby or academic subject (or both). (Mine back in the 70's was model rocketry and space travel.) This was, almost 100% of the time, combined with dysfunctional social skills (except with fellow nerds and geeks).
The stereotype of a nerd or a geek being a shallow gadget freak and member of an obsessive fanboy community is a recent one. (I.E., like the term 'hacker', the terms 'nerd' and 'geek' have been greatly debased.)
I worked at a cable company (our company was doing a trial of Internet over Cable-TV before cable modems), and people would have their phone turned off before their cable. As a side benefit, this made it difficult for the CSRs to reach them about paying their cable bills once they couldn't pay those either.
Your second sentence contains the real truth - they shut their phones off before their TV's not primarily for a love of TV, but because shutting off the phones allows them to dodge creditors. (If they aren't paying their cable bill, you can damm sure bet they aren't paying their other bills either.)
For example, in the US you can die for your country but you can't drink a beer - service personnel don't have to be at least 21 years old to enlist, but you do have to be 21 to drink legally. And the same is true in the UK and most other countries. And it's not just buying a beer, it's stuff like being able to smoke, being able to drive, being able to vote, being able to stand for election, being able to marry without parental consent, etc.
At least in the US, you _can_ do most of those things at 18. (The minimum age for enlistment without parental consent.) I think drinking is the only thing you universally cannot, while smoking and driving vary by state (and most states are either 16 or 18 for the latter).
Console makers do the whole "sales protection" thing regarding what games are released. Their motivation is not to police morality, but to ensure they don't alienate a large portion of the market.
But that's exactly what's going to happen. Consoles ain't kid's toys. Yes, Gameboys and DSs are. PSPs may be. But a PS3 for 600 bucks with games costing in the 60 bucks range? If that's targeted at kids, how much allowance do they have today, and could I get adopted please?
Just because it is targeted at kids - doesn't mean that kids are buying. Kids have this thing called 'parents', remember?
Bring a Geiger counter with you when selecting your construction material.
That's a waste of time and money - because the material can have an activity level an order of magnitude below the counters detection threshold, and still have enough activity to be threatening to the film on the timescale of years. It's the accumulated (chronic) damage that matters here, not the acute damage.
As a kid, I dreamed of space and really believed in NASA. I believed that we would soon have moonbases and men on Mars by the 80's, and maybe even start looking out to other stars within my lifetime.
[snippage about how the real world didn't live up to his dreams]
I felt the same way about the first girl I had a crush on too... When she rejected me, it hurt like hell, but I grew up and got over it. You need to grow up too. Nobody ever promised you that your dreams would be fulfilled.
How many people know who developed the atomic bomb, versus who developed the first machine gun?
Probably fairly few know either - especially since the former was a group project and the latter a process that took place over time. With regards to the atomic bomb, most people probably associate Einstein with the bomb, even though he had nothing to with the Manhattan Engineer District and nothing to do with the larger concept of atomic weapons besides lending his name and fame to a letter urging research into them.
the SR-71 is a famous example of something very advanced remaining classified for a long time. By the time the public saw them, they were practically retired.
Hardly. President Johnson announced it's existence in 1964, I saw pictures of one back in the mid 70's, and it wasn't retired until 1998.
I'd be interested to see what kind of weapon they're planning to pop out the bottom of this thing @ Mach 6. Doesn't seem like a terribly bright idea...
Why not? The B-71/A-12 (later modified into the SR-71 and the Oxcart) launched weapons at Mach 3 back in the early 60's. Not to mention the relative wind at 100kft at Mach 6 is going to be on the order of a few hundred MPH (because of the lower atmospheric pressure). You certainly won't be dropping by gravity, but ejector/launch systems were pioneered back in the 50's. (And are in use today.)
There will be some R&D work - but the basic concepts are well known.
At some point, you don't need the stealth, because by the time anyone realizes you're coming and gets some sort of weapon 100k ft into the air, you'll probably have already landed.
The Shuttle (which accelerates relatively gently) hits 100kft in about a minute and a half or thereabouts. (The SRB's are jettisoned at roughly 150kft at two minutes into the flight.) With they higher acceleration available to an unmanned vehicle you can fairly easily cut that to under a minute. (Back in the 1960's/70's Sprint could do it roughly 15 seconds, but that's a fairly extreme design.)
You would not believe that the Air Force or any other branch of the government would reveal the stealth fighter (F-117) and the stealth bomber (B-2) to the public and the world, if they did not already have something much more advanced and in production, did you?
Yeah, I would believe they would do so. Mostly because there is no reason to do otherwise and historically they have not done so.
But, what do I know? I just live near a base where they test out its weapons delivery. Your mileage may vary.
Who care where you live? I live near an SSBN base - but I'm knowledgeable to near expert levels not because I live where I do, but because I served on 'em for ten years and have spent twenty years studying them.
I've been advocating for years that space station, lunar base, and Mars mission crews should be recruited from the submarine community rather than from fighter pilots. An awful lot of skills and experiences those types of missions would require are part and parcel of the daily life of a bubble head.
Extreme isolation? Check. Low to zero probability of rescue if something goes badly wrong? Check. Used to operating and maintaining complicated electrical, electronic, hydraulic, and pneumatic systems? Check. Used to an implacably hostile enviroment? Check. Used to living and working in cramped spaced? Check. Trained reflexes for dealing with emergencies? Check. Etc... Etc...
But if the participants know that the whole thing is a simulation, it robs the experiment of any useful insight into many aspects of psychological stress because this motivational factor is missing; the difference between a simulated airlock and a real one will not be lost on participants.
Haven't spent any time in simulations like this have you? (I have, and you are quite wrong. This is nothing like playing a 'simulator' on your PC.)
Of course, this still leaves lots of room for interesting experiments on group dynamics, but we already know quite a lot on this subject: for example, years of experimentation with Skylab, Mir etc. suggested that if there was some tension in the group, ground control would usually create an obviously impossible schedule of work for the team, creating a them-versus-us mentality which tended to bring the team closer; tensions within the group were eased by colluding to grumble about ground control.
I can't speak to Mir, but so far as Skylab goes - you have the order of events exactly backwards, and the actual events somewhat garbled. Mission Control created an impossible work schedule (mostly for the third crew on the basis of Mission Control's experience with the overachieving first and second crew) - which lead not to 'collusion to grumble', but to an outright strike/work stoppage.
Motivated people throughout history have endured considerably more privation than being confined to 92 m2/person for 17 months. We know that from a psychological standpoint, people can and will make a trip of this nature. The key word here is motivation.
Never in history have we had people secluded in this manner - not only secluded from their fellows but living in an implacably hostile enviroment for years. On a ship, you can go topside and see the sun and sea. In Antartica you can go on the surface in the summer - and it's not impossible to do so in the winter.
This sort of thing has been studied exhaustively by many military and civilian organisations for a long time, so what are the objectives here?
I'm sure the ESA (and NASA) would be glad of any cites you can provide.
Seriously ! I spent a year with 12 other people in the middle of Antarctica in 2005 and we were being followed by shrinks of the ESA. There's a big difference between a winterover and the proposed experiment: the first has a purpose while the second has not. I mean the only purpose here is to stay in a can.
Precisely. Because that's what Mars bound astronauts will be doing - staying in a can. Wintering over in Antartica is an entirely different psychological environment and not really applicable. (Not to mention the exponentially greater logistics cost of supporting this experiment in Antartica rather than in a warehouse in a suburb.)
I would sign up for another winterover or a Mars mission no questions asked. I wouldn't get canned like this for a heap of gold and an all you can download porn access.
Not everyone is like you, you couldn't get me to do a winterover except as a matter of (my) life and death. OTOH - seventeen months in isolation? Feh - that's the equivalent of six SSBN patrols, and I did four with no problems at all. Two of my friends have over a dozen apiece. One of my friends just returned from his sixteenth. (And none of us are particularly uncommon.)
I can't speak to the EU, but here in the US a quick trip to the United States Submarine Veterans association will likely yield them enough applicants that they'll have to beating them off with sticks.
The job market is looking up for those with "hydroponics" listed as a hobby on their resume... I'm already surprised NASA doesn't hire them to come up with effective ways to grow things in space.
Why should NASA hire them when they've already got people with "hydroponics" listed as a profession on their resume?
Hydroponics is a (fairly) well understood field with decades of experience behind them - hydroponics in zero-G however is a very differnt ballgame.
I would suspect that most of the people who would submit their DNA to Ancestory.com are not the same type of people who go leaving their DNA at crime scenes, let alone are every around any crime scenes as anything other than a victim.
Sure, but if you get someone with enough similarities to suggest a familial connection, you can go interview them about their family.
"Mrs. Scharffenberger, do you have any close relatives who live in the Mendocino area? Do you know where they were Saturday night?"
Which isn't (AIUI) typically unusual in a criminal investigation currently - to question relatives, neighbors, teachers, etc...
I've even had this happen to me. I have a slightly unusual last name, and last year a very nice police detective from Seattle called me to find out if I knew the whereabouts of an individual who shared the name and had been spotted over in my neck of the woods across the Sound. I told him, since my family is from the South and, except for me and my sister in California, we all remain there - I had no knowledge of the individual. The detective thanked me, hung up, and that was the end of that.
Whoever this fellow is, he's a bit of a cad and a bounder - as I've gotten calls about him from police, private detectives, and collection agencies every couple of years ever since I moved here.
All kidding aside... would the FBI (or some other government or law enforcement agency) ever be able to request (wink wink) your DNA from ancestry.com?
I doubt they'd even bother - as evidence in a criminal case requires a fairly strict chain-of-custody. DNA mailed in from $JOE_RANDOM with no strict identity verification by the recieving authority (Ancestry.com) and (very likely) without strict handling and accountability will be pretty much useless as evidence.
Aha, but there you are wrong. If you send a postcard, you have very low expectation of privacy.
Actually - I have a very high expectation of privacy for that postcard. Why shouldn't I? It's not on public display and at no point in its transit from sender to recipient is it ever in a state where a casual member of the public can gain acess to it to read it.
In fact, it takes abnormal conditions (mailbox fails in some manner and the postcard ends up on the ground) or deliberate malfeasance (somone reaches into the mailbox or delivery vehicle) for it to become exposed to a third party. Furthermore, a letter in an envelope has exactly the same privacy failure modes with the trivial requirement of opening the envelople required.
Regular email as we mostly know it is like a postcard
Precisely - regular email cannot be acessed by a third party absent accident or malfeasance.
One difference might be that people sort of think of email more like a letter than a postcard. A court could find that email has protections similar to a letter. As a techie, I would disagree with that, exactly because of what the GP said: it's so easy to sniff around and see emails that it's difficult to say it's a protected medium.
This is precisely why your analogy fails - it's easy to sniff around if the person has privileged acess _or_ deliberately utilizes tools to perform the sniffing. Just like a physical letter (or postcard) it takes either a systematic failure or deliberate action to view the contents of an email, it is virtually impossible to do so casually.
The "regular" titles and ranks have been abused much more often, in medieval times especially. People bought knighthoods, earldoms and baronies on a regular basis. True, they did in Margret Thatcher's time, and Tony Blair has been investigated for it as well, but modern abuses have been relatively rare.
Modern purchases of titles and ranks are irrelevant really - as neither power nor authority conveys with such a purchase.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really. There's nothing visible from the far side of the moon that can't be seen from the Earth's surface or LEO. What makes a lunar telescope tantalizing is the size theoretically possible, not the location itself.
Actually the answer is: it's taken a long time for a convergence of cheap and ubiquitous computing, reasonably priced (and fairly small) mechanical actuators, machine vision (cheap and ubiquitous small digital cameras), software, etc... etc... Robotics, like a lot of other things (*cough* fusion, AI, *cough*) has turned out in the real world to be a whole lot more difficult than it was thought back in the 50's.
To the Anonymous Coward who claims it was a student protest that did the deed: If that were true, then we should be seeing robots with the dexterity and robustness required of the fruit picking robot coming from places other than Stanford. Stanford isn't the only place in the US (or the world) doing robotics research, and those other places have a twenty year odd headstart if you (and your mates) 'stopped' this research at Stanford back in the 80's.
Such robots are noticeable by their absence.
Actually, no. Truly old-school nerds were (mostly) guys with a deep and abiding interest in some unusual hobby or academic subject (or both). (Mine back in the 70's was model rocketry and space travel.) This was, almost 100% of the time, combined with dysfunctional social skills (except with fellow nerds and geeks).
The stereotype of a nerd or a geek being a shallow gadget freak and member of an obsessive fanboy community is a recent one. (I.E., like the term 'hacker', the terms 'nerd' and 'geek' have been greatly debased.)
Your second sentence contains the real truth - they shut their phones off before their TV's not primarily for a love of TV, but because shutting off the phones allows them to dodge creditors. (If they aren't paying their cable bill, you can damm sure bet they aren't paying their other bills either.)
At least in the US, you _can_ do most of those things at 18. (The minimum age for enlistment without parental consent.) I think drinking is the only thing you universally cannot, while smoking and driving vary by state (and most states are either 16 or 18 for the latter).
Just because it is targeted at kids - doesn't mean that kids are buying. Kids have this thing called 'parents', remember?
That's a waste of time and money - because the material can have an activity level an order of magnitude below the counters detection threshold, and still have enough activity to be threatening to the film on the timescale of years. It's the accumulated (chronic) damage that matters here, not the acute damage.
[snippage about how the real world didn't live up to his dreams]
I felt the same way about the first girl I had a crush on too... When she rejected me, it hurt like hell, but I grew up and got over it. You need to grow up too. Nobody ever promised you that your dreams would be fulfilled.
Probably fairly few know either - especially since the former was a group project and the latter a process that took place over time. With regards to the atomic bomb, most people probably associate Einstein with the bomb, even though he had nothing to with the Manhattan Engineer District and nothing to do with the larger concept of atomic weapons besides lending his name and fame to a letter urging research into them.
Hardly. President Johnson announced it's existence in 1964, I saw pictures of one back in the mid 70's, and it wasn't retired until 1998.
Why not? The B-71/A-12 (later modified into the SR-71 and the Oxcart) launched weapons at Mach 3 back in the early 60's. Not to mention the relative wind at 100kft at Mach 6 is going to be on the order of a few hundred MPH (because of the lower atmospheric pressure). You certainly won't be dropping by gravity, but ejector/launch systems were pioneered back in the 50's. (And are in use today.)
There will be some R&D work - but the basic concepts are well known.
The Shuttle (which accelerates relatively gently) hits 100kft in about a minute and a half or thereabouts. (The SRB's are jettisoned at roughly 150kft at two minutes into the flight.) With they higher acceleration available to an unmanned vehicle you can fairly easily cut that to under a minute. (Back in the 1960's/70's Sprint could do it roughly 15 seconds, but that's a fairly extreme design.)
Yeah, I would believe they would do so. Mostly because there is no reason to do otherwise and historically they have not done so.
Who care where you live? I live near an SSBN base - but I'm knowledgeable to near expert levels not because I live where I do, but because I served on 'em for ten years and have spent twenty years studying them.
It's not going to look anything like a missile - because a ballistic missiles trajectory is pretty near vertical. An aircraft flies horizontally.
Those are Google searches - not the definitions or opinions of Google itself (or it's constituent personell).
I hate to reply to myself, but I forgot to add;
I've been advocating for years that space station, lunar base, and Mars mission crews should be recruited from the submarine community rather than from fighter pilots. An awful lot of skills and experiences those types of missions would require are part and parcel of the daily life of a bubble head.
Extreme isolation? Check. Low to zero probability of rescue if something goes badly wrong? Check. Used to operating and maintaining complicated electrical, electronic, hydraulic, and pneumatic systems? Check. Used to an implacably hostile enviroment? Check. Used to living and working in cramped spaced? Check. Trained reflexes for dealing with emergencies? Check. Etc... Etc...
Haven't spent any time in simulations like this have you? (I have, and you are quite wrong. This is nothing like playing a 'simulator' on your PC.)
I can't speak to Mir, but so far as Skylab goes - you have the order of events exactly backwards, and the actual events somewhat garbled. Mission Control created an impossible work schedule (mostly for the third crew on the basis of Mission Control's experience with the overachieving first and second crew) - which lead not to 'collusion to grumble', but to an outright strike/work stoppage.
Never in history have we had people secluded in this manner - not only secluded from their fellows but living in an implacably hostile enviroment for years. On a ship, you can go topside and see the sun and sea. In Antartica you can go on the surface in the summer - and it's not impossible to do so in the winter.
I'm sure the ESA (and NASA) would be glad of any cites you can provide.
Precisely. Because that's what Mars bound astronauts will be doing - staying in a can. Wintering over in Antartica is an entirely different psychological environment and not really applicable. (Not to mention the exponentially greater logistics cost of supporting this experiment in Antartica rather than in a warehouse in a suburb.)
Not everyone is like you, you couldn't get me to do a winterover except as a matter of (my) life and death. OTOH - seventeen months in isolation? Feh - that's the equivalent of six SSBN patrols, and I did four with no problems at all. Two of my friends have over a dozen apiece. One of my friends just returned from his sixteenth. (And none of us are particularly uncommon.)
I can't speak to the EU, but here in the US a quick trip to the United States Submarine Veterans association will likely yield them enough applicants that they'll have to beating them off with sticks.
Why should NASA hire them when they've already got people with "hydroponics" listed as a profession on their resume?
Hydroponics is a (fairly) well understood field with decades of experience behind them - hydroponics in zero-G however is a very differnt ballgame.
Which isn't (AIUI) typically unusual in a criminal investigation currently - to question relatives, neighbors, teachers, etc...
I've even had this happen to me. I have a slightly unusual last name, and last year a very nice police detective from Seattle called me to find out if I knew the whereabouts of an individual who shared the name and had been spotted over in my neck of the woods across the Sound. I told him, since my family is from the South and, except for me and my sister in California, we all remain there - I had no knowledge of the individual. The detective thanked me, hung up, and that was the end of that.
Whoever this fellow is, he's a bit of a cad and a bounder - as I've gotten calls about him from police, private detectives, and collection agencies every couple of years ever since I moved here.
I doubt they'd even bother - as evidence in a criminal case requires a fairly strict chain-of-custody. DNA mailed in from $JOE_RANDOM with no strict identity verification by the recieving authority (Ancestry.com) and (very likely) without strict handling and accountability will be pretty much useless as evidence.
Actually - I have a very high expectation of privacy for that postcard. Why shouldn't I? It's not on public display and at no point in its transit from sender to recipient is it ever in a state where a casual member of the public can gain acess to it to read it.
In fact, it takes abnormal conditions (mailbox fails in some manner and the postcard ends up on the ground) or deliberate malfeasance (somone reaches into the mailbox or delivery vehicle) for it to become exposed to a third party. Furthermore, a letter in an envelope has exactly the same privacy failure modes with the trivial requirement of opening the envelople required.
Precisely - regular email cannot be acessed by a third party absent accident or malfeasance.
This is precisely why your analogy fails - it's easy to sniff around if the person has privileged acess _or_ deliberately utilizes tools to perform the sniffing. Just like a physical letter (or postcard) it takes either a systematic failure or deliberate action to view the contents of an email, it is virtually impossible to do so casually.
Try reading my message, where I specifically set aside nepotism and influence and explain the reasons why.
Modern purchases of titles and ranks are irrelevant really - as neither power nor authority conveys with such a purchase.
Which proves my point - it wasn't an ongoing thing, but an occasional thing.
Wrong. Royalty claims come under Federal law. Period.