With the seemingly never-ending erosion of privacy these days, congress needs to pass a constitutional amendment
Want to know why are privacy is eroding? Because of people who didn't take Civics classes, or failed to retain them - and because of people who think Congress should do all the work.
So anyhow, I didn't RTFA but if they're talking about using this device on a long-term basis to keep teens away from somewhere, this is tantamount to torture.
Then maybe you should RTFA and UYFB (use your effing brain). The teens in question won't be standing around hearing the noise - that's the bloody idea of the device. They hear it, and they go away from a place they don't really have any business hanging about in the first place. The situation is entirely different from yours.
It's not really Vonage's fault that they provide misleading emails and promotional material and instructions that lead one to believe they are providing 911 service - when they actually are not? That's the point here - Not the PSAP's, not the RBOC's, but Vonage misleading people into believing that they provide the same functionality as a POTS 911.
Vonage did what the could and routed to the only thing they had access to.
And then they called that service '911' - when it isn't. And lead to a child dying because they (Vonage) routed an emergency call to a non emergency number - exactly the opposite behavior from that expected of 911. They lied to their subscribers.
I work in the industry. Personally I don't recommend giving up a land line for convience if you want to always be sure 911 will work. Wireless and VOIP will not work reliably during a disaster.
Heck, even POTS won't always work reliably in a disaster.
With cell phones, they know where all the towers are and can set up 911 appropriately. With VOIP, they have no way to know where you're physically connecting from, so they have to base it off your billing address, which may be unhelpful if you're not at home.
There is still a little weirdness in the system, but they are slowly working it out... Until recently one side of my county was served by cell towers across the inlet - 4 miles away as the crow flies and 90 miles as the car drives. If you made a 911 call in some areas in the county, the call would be routed to the wrong dispatcher.
Vonage.ca has 911. You just have to tell them where your primary residence is.
That's not E911 - which is what the FCC is requiring. E911 provides the 911 call center with your current location - If I call 911 on my cell phone while standing in the mall food court, the E911 system will give the mall's adress, not my primary residence. Ditto for the local park, Burger King, my best friends house, the movie theatre, etc... etc...
Wait... I just got an e-mail on the 26th that says;
We have completed 911 Dialing activation for your Vonage line...
Now when you dial 911, Vonage will route your call to a general number at your nearest emergency response center, based on the address below:
So what gives?
What gives? Vonage is lying to you. (The funny part is that if Microsoft tried this, the geek community would be up in arms - but Vonage like Google seems to get a pass on all manner of malfeasance.)
If you actually read the email closely, you'll note where it says "Vonage will will route your call to a general number...." That's not the actual 911 port, but a general information number that may or may not be manned 24/7 and may or may not be able to patch your call to the actual emergency operators. It almost certainly will not be able to provide E911 service. (Which provides the 911 operator with your adress/physical location.)
It's this exact behavior that lead to Vonage being sued by the State of Florida, which lead to the FCC's action. (A child died because Vonage routed a 911 call in the wee hours to a Sheriff's office information number that was not manned outside of normal working hours.)
Okay, I'll bite. Since you quoted it, I'm assuming you realize l specifically said Diesel is "essentially the same" as Kerosene, Fuel Oil, Jet Fuel, and what sells here at the Paint Store under the Exxon brand name Varsol but consists entirely of standard grade Kerosene.
I did not say it was essentially the same as Pariffin, motor oil, or gasoline.
No, you didn't say it - but what you did say obscured the differences between them.
And there's a reason why, because you can substitute any of the items I specifically mentioned one for the other without issues, but you can't substitute gasoline for diesel without damaging someone or something.
Um - no, you cannot. Try putting Kerosene into a heater designed for household grade fuel oil - and you could be in for a surprise, and vice versa. They are different weights, with different flashpoints, different viscosity, etc... etc... They are only 'essentially the same' at the gross chemical level.
How about "all the time". How about the specific fuels I mentioned are listed in the manual of jet airplane engines as being suitable emergency replacements with no implications regarding warranty, time between overhaul, or damage. You don't even have to tell anyone you used them.
If it were truly 'all the time' then they would not be listed as emergency fuels - but would be listed as acceptable fuels. Aviation is picky that way.
However, Pratt & Whitney does say that if you substitute gasoline for JET-A, the time between overhaul for a PT6A goes from 3,000 hours to 4 hours. That's spending five figures to correct the engine damage with gasoline versus going for a normal amount of time with Kerosene, with zero engine damage beyond normal wear. Because they are "essentially the same" , like I said they were, and Gasoline is not, like you implied I said when I most certainly did not.
The problem is - you did say it, but you don't realize it. That frequently happens when you parrot things from websites and manuals. The things you claim are 'essentially the same', really aren't.
Why would it only last 90 days? I dont have expertise in battery power, but I figured that since it has solar panels it can recharge its batteries. Having said that, I would imagine the battery would last longer than 90 days.,
It's the solar panels that were expected to be the maint limiting factor. It was thought that they would get covered with dust and thus be unable to recharge the battery sufficiently as the insolation decreased during the Martian winter. This didn't happen.
Diesel is essentially the same as the kerosene in your camp light, the fuel oil in your home heating unit, the jet fuel in the airplane you last rode in, and the solvent you might have cleaned your paint brushes in.
For suitably large values of 'essentially the same'. Kerosene is lighter, and paint thinner is lighter still. Jet fuel is refined to a much tighter set of specs, and fuel oil to a lesser (and heavier) spec.
IOW, pretty much every petroleum derived liquid is 'essentially' the same, so long as you ignore the differences. (And the differences are significant - else there wouldn't be differences.) For that matter gasoline is 'essentially' the same as diesel, but then so is pariffin and motor oil.
And any one of them would light up just fine in a diesel or jet engine without modification, and it's hardly news that people do, from time to time, use alternate fuels in those engines when necessity arises.
Certainly they do so from time-to-time, generally in an emergency situation, or whenever no other real choice exists. Sometimes the engine even survives without damage. Those various fuels are refined to specified centane/octane/viscosity/etc.../etc.. rating, and few engines take kindly to running fuels outside of the range they are designed to for any length of time.
Re:Already done with mold
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Space Lichens
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· Score: 1
I think they already did this experiment under another name: MIR.
Not the same thing - the mold on MIR was on the crew compartment, inside the station. The mold in TFA was exposed to space.
My understanding is the primary reason they brought MIR down rather than rehabilitate it was the presence of mold that they could not kill using means that weren't also toxic to the cosmonauts.
No. MIR was brought down because it's systems were increasingly unreliable and it could not be overhauled on orbit.
I think Hackleman's reason for championing the Savonius design had nothing to do with efficiency - instead, it was all about cost, simplicity and durability. Fits right into the microgrid idea - a small village in the third world could assemble a few of the cheap homemade versions of these and link them to a battery bank to get themselves some simple, reliable electricity for whatever they needed to power.
Leaving aside the question of how a village that can't afford a commercial windmill can afford to buy and ship they heavy and expensive battery bank...
A quick search on arxiv.org for 'International Space Station' yields four papers.
For comparison, a search for 'Hubble Space Telescope' gives over 200 papers.
Not a definitive result, but it seems to indicate that there's not much science being done anyway.
Would you expect a telescope under construction and without a main mirror to produce any significant papers? Would you expect a linear accelerator with only half it's magnets installed to produce physics results? Would you expect a new distributed computing cluster to be useable when it's component CPU's are still sitting in their manufacturers boxes?
Why then do you hold the ISS to a different standard?
Nice? The photographs are a bunch of small white dots! Does anyone else see real photographs? I guess he is referring to the "artistic conceptual drawings"
I disagree. For those of us who get excited about these things, they are actually really cool. For anyone who spends much time in front of a telescope, these are quite exciting.
And there is the problem with the public and science/space in general. They've come to believe that unless it's flashy - it's boring and pointless.
The first announcement (few hours ago) was that the satellite failed to get a signal, and I had given it up for dead. Good thing it was easily fixed.
Now... for the results, please.
There won't be any real results - as there aren't any real experiments. This is a 'feel good' excercise, not a research program.
Re:Ma Bell? Yo no entiendo - SHORT VERSION
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Ma Bell is Back
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· Score: 1
I don't see any reason the the telephone monopoly would have ever gladly spawned the cellular telephone network. They were in fact actively researching the ways and means to do just that - because more phones means more revenue. And Ma Bell never turned down revenue.
They might have developed it yes, but they would have had no impetus to provide good coverage and reasonable rates.
Ma Bell had a corporate history of doing both things.
Legend has it that when 2001: A Space Odyssey was first shown to NASA employees, they were awed by the vision of space exploration the movie portrayed. Up to that point, it is said that NASA was thinking in terms of sensor and robotic exploration.
In some fantasy world maybe. Here in this ficton the NASA of 1968 was deep in getting ready for landing on the Moon, planning manned landings on Mars, and has just completed planning for a manned flyby of Venus. Orion's were still (somewhat) on the table. Unmanned budgets were getting cut back left and right.
Because there isn't an assembly line, and never was. The build and design team has been scattered for a couple of years now.
But the plans still exist.
So what? That still doesn't make it possible to mass produce them. Mass production requires an assembly line - and there isn't one for these rovers. (Among other problems.)
Unless NASA pulled another Apollo and destroyed them for political reasons.
The problem with this delusional fantasy is that the plans still exist. (They aren't much good as many of the components, materials, and processes are obsolesent or obsolete - but they do still exist.)
Any reasonably successful corporation would know that preserving the knowledge of that team is critical to future operations, and would attempt to retain the employees, ensure they had kept good records of their work, and in general done everything possible to "remember" how everything was done. With NASA the SOP seems to be "thanks for the great work, maybe we'll see you again sometime".
More delusion fantasy. The engineers on the MER team came from the Pathfinder team and built on decades of (documented) research work by JPL on planetary rovers. Currently they are scattered on other researh projects or working on engineering the next generation of rovers.
The two MER rovers are optimized for use on Mars - they are useless to rove other worlds without what amounts to a complete redesign. They are also highly optimized for a specific geologic mission - again, an extensive (and expensive) redesign and requalification would be needed to use them for another mission.
Not true. If I recall correctly, they were tested in earth gravity and earth atmosphere prior to embarkation for Mars.
So what? Mars and Earth have atmosphere - the Moon doesn't.
The thermal swing on the moon is wider (colder) but given the extra power available due to sunlight an electric heater could be fitted.
MER is already electricity limited - and the higher insolation on the Moon won't make that much difference. (Not to mention the batteries on MER are nowhere near large enough to keep it warm through the lunar night.) Adding radioisotope heaters means completely redoing the thermal design, as the rover will then be far too hot during the lunar day.
Even limited to the equator, we could put a couple thousand probes on Mars and not see everything. We're also not limited to keeping exactly the same design... some improvements could be made, things tweaked, that might allow wider exploration.
And each improvement and tweak means an expensive review and requalification process. It's not as simple as you seem to think.
All of this also doesn't consider the benefits of bulk production of rovers on earth. How much would public opinion of science and space exploration be swayed by seeing multiple moon launches on the TV at night, and pictures coming back from the moon?
About as much as it's been swayed by the pictures coming back from Mars - Little to none. (Not to mention the fact that all the pictures would be pretty repetitive. Also, the areas of the Moon the rovers can reach has essentially zero geologic interest.)
How much would we benefit from the practice we'd gain by learning to operate small vehicles in moon terrain, and continually refining and launch testing our space vehicles?
You'd gain a lot of experience in operating small vehicles - which doesn't transfer to anything but operating more small vehicles. The launchers are already well tested.
My original statement remains valid, even through the numerous "See here sonny, you don't understand engineering" posts in this thread. The existing rover design is well proven, and with minimal changes it
Mass production depends on simple operations performed by unskilled or semiskilled operators (and as little labor as possible per unit). The rovers each require hundreds of thousands of man hours by highly skilled workers performing complex tasks.
That is just false. The processor in your computer is more complex than those rovers and what's it cost to make that?
Apples and oranges. CPU's are small items almost entirely manufactured by automated machinery. Rovers are large and complex assemblies that do not lend themselves to automation.
I am not saying we are going to get rovers for 1000 bux each but we certainly could cut their cost cut by 75% or more.
An ungrounded assumption. I'd welcome any contrary evidence.
It's all very interesting and clever.. but I think Google are taking their eyes off the ball here. When Google stop concentrating on trying to search the web and start concentrating on rebuilding it then you're looking at a company playing a high risk game.
As a commercial enterprise, it seems that Google is in danger of forgetting exactly what its core business really is.
No, it's more a case of the geeks not understanding what Google's core business really is - advertising. Their whole business model depends of getting eyes on ads. Branding (I.E. developing apps like Maps that are largely redundant to what's already out there) is a key part of that strategy.
They are a multi-billion dollar company not because of search, but because they deliver the clicks.
The first year was kind of exciting beacuase everything they were finding was new.
Ah - the Madison avenue mentality, "if it isn't now and new it's boring". This is the stunt/Star Trek mentality that holds us back in space exploration.
However Spirit is pretty much just seeing the same slightly altered basalt rocks on Sol 600 as it was on Sol 10, 100, 200, 300, 400 and 500.
It may not be exciting to you - but it's important to understanding the geology of Mars. You can't understand the significance of geologic features unless you know their size.
I wonder how much better a job would have been done if something like this were handled "x prize" style.
Probably it couldn't have been handled at all. Burt Rutan won the X-prize because he, A) had funding, and B) had experience building medium performance stunt aircraft. Note how far the other teams, who had niether, didn't get.
This is the same question I keep asking since the rovers success. I would have thought with the plans they had, you could mass produce them and save a lot on costs.
Mostly because they *can't* be mass produced. Mass production depends on simple operations performed by unskilled or semiskilled operators (and as little labor as possible per unit). The rovers each require hundreds of thousands of man hours by highly skilled workers performing complex tasks. You'd need to build a couple of hundred to bring the unit costs down below the current ones - but we don't need a couple of hundred. (Maybe a dozen, maybe two, tops.)
Mass production isn't a magic wand.
Then send an army of them to mars or the moon.
An army of them on Mars would be pretty pointless, at best they could explore about 5% of the planets surface - the rest is either too rough, too cold, or too far from the equator. On the Moon, they'd die within hours of landing - the thermal enviroment is much harsher there than on Mars.
So, why aren't we applauding these things louder, and mass producing twenty or thirty more?
Because there isn't an assembly line, and never was. The build and design team has been scattered for a couple of years now.
They're a raging success, a proven concept, and surely cheaper than developing a completely new exploration system for other worlds.
The two MER rovers are optimized for use on Mars - they are useless to rove other worlds without what amounts to a complete redesign. They are also highly optimized for a specific geologic mission - again, an extensive (and expensive) redesign and requalification would be needed to use them for another mission.
We should take the plans and use them to build an army of rovers for mars, then put an equal number on the moon...
We could use another couple for Mars, sure. But they'd fail on the Moon - the thermal and dust enviroments are much, much harsher. There's also large parts of Mars they can't reach because the terrain is too rough. (Where they are on Mars is actually pretty benign.) Another major limit is the capacity of the DSN (Deep Space Network), you'd have to spend billions upgrading it, building new dishes, etc... before you could operate more than a couple of them. (Or cancel every other probe.)
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Besides, how else are you going to reset/reboot the electronics on something so small. Cycling power is a perfectly reasonable UI choice.
If you actually read the email closely, you'll note where it says "Vonage will will route your call to a general number...." That's not the actual 911 port, but a general information number that may or may not be manned 24/7 and may or may not be able to patch your call to the actual emergency operators. It almost certainly will not be able to provide E911 service. (Which provides the 911 operator with your adress/physical location.)
It's this exact behavior that lead to Vonage being sued by the State of Florida, which lead to the FCC's action. (A child died because Vonage routed a 911 call in the wee hours to a Sheriff's office information number that was not manned outside of normal working hours.)
IOW, pretty much every petroleum derived liquid is 'essentially' the same, so long as you ignore the differences. (And the differences are significant - else there wouldn't be differences.) For that matter gasoline is 'essentially' the same as diesel, but then so is pariffin and motor oil.
Certainly they do so from time-to-time, generally in an emergency situation, or whenever no other real choice exists. Sometimes the engine even survives without damage. Those various fuels are refined to specified centane/octane/viscosity/etc.../etc.. rating, and few engines take kindly to running fuels outside of the range they are designed to for any length of time.Why then do you hold the ISS to a different standard?
Homebrew methods for something so important seems a bit risky.
So what? That still doesn't make it possible to mass produce them. Mass production requires an assembly line - and there isn't one for these rovers. (Among other problems.)
The problem with this delusional fantasy is that the plans still exist. (They aren't much good as many of the components, materials, and processes are obsolesent or obsolete - but they do still exist.)
More delusion fantasy. The engineers on the MER team came from the Pathfinder team and built on decades of (documented) research work by JPL on planetary rovers. Currently they are scattered on other researh projects or working on engineering the next generation of rovers.
So what? Mars and Earth have atmosphere - the Moon doesn't.
MER is already electricity limited - and the higher insolation on the Moon won't make that much difference. (Not to mention the batteries on MER are nowhere near large enough to keep it warm through the lunar night.) Adding radioisotope heaters means completely redoing the thermal design, as the rover will then be far too hot during the lunar day.
And each improvement and tweak means an expensive review and requalification process. It's not as simple as you seem to think.
About as much as it's been swayed by the pictures coming back from Mars - Little to none. (Not to mention the fact that all the pictures would be pretty repetitive. Also, the areas of the Moon the rovers can reach has essentially zero geologic interest.)
You'd gain a lot of experience in operating small vehicles - which doesn't transfer to anything but operating more small vehicles. The launchers are already well tested.
They are a multi-billion dollar company not because of search, but because they deliver the clicks.
Mass production isn't a magic wand.
An army of them on Mars would be pretty pointless, at best they could explore about 5% of the planets surface - the rest is either too rough, too cold, or too far from the equator. On the Moon, they'd die within hours of landing - the thermal enviroment is much harsher there than on Mars.