Agency management do look at how many publications cite the project when considering further funding. Allowing competing projects to beat us to publication using our own data and not our analysis is seen as detrimental to continued operations.
The obvious solution is, look at how many publications cite papers that used the data you gathered; not how many publications cite your project. That would be a meritocracy where the projects that gather the most valuable data are guaranteed to enjoy continued operations -- and there'd be no need to restrict access to said data.
The donut has already been examined enough for NASA to think it's boring
Really? Dr. Squyres says the rock has a "strange composition, different from anything we have seen before... We are still working this out. We are making measurements right now. This is an ongoing story of discovery."
humanity was born in the ice ages of the Pleistocene we've never experienced a planet as warm as the dinosaurs... Humans will survive a warmer earth I have no doubt, but the potential for massive disruption to the food supply is there and if that happens there's going to be some really ugly war that humanity might not survive. The reason to be scared of global warming is because of those changing fertile zones, humanity goes batshit crazy when starvation is eminent.
Humanity has experienced the whole gamut of climates, from hot deserts to frozen Arctic lands. Civilization is very tenuous at those northern fringes (see the Vikings who ended up having to abandon their colonies in Greenland and Newfoundland).
Guess you haven't thought about the fact that there are vast tracts of land in northern Canada, Alaska, and Siberia that will become viable farmland if the growing season gets a little longer. If the predictions of global warming alarmists come to pass (and so far they have not), I'll be concerned about inundation of coastal cities; but given the large net increase in viable farmland, there should be no concerns about starvation. Global warming is much more likely to exacerbate the obesity epidemic.
this rock appears to be a fairly pedestrian example
There must be some planetary scientists who disagree with you, because NASA has already acknowledged that this is "a very special rock, with rare properties."
The vast majority of images acquired by space probes have been released directly to the public, not as part of a published scientific paper.
If the data weren't acquired 100% at taxpayer expense, let the owners of the data sit and ruminate on it for as long as they please. But that's not the case, so there's not much justification for no timely release of the data to the taxpayers who paid for it.
Dr. Squyres and his team have already chosen to spend lots of time and effort investigating this object.
How would releasing this data to the public, through existing channels that have already conveyed thousands of photos to the public, be a waste of NASA's time?
NASA has already acknowledged that this is "a very special rock, with rare properties." Therefore, shouldn't it, at a matter of course, release more data about this rock than it releases about the average Mars rock?
Dr. Squyres says that if this object has been recently flipped over, "we are seeing the surface, the underside of a rock, that hasn't seen the Martian atmosphere for perhaps billions of years."
Trouble is, unless he's proposing that the underside of this rock was somehow vacuum-sealed against atmospheric influence, it has very much been exposed to the gases of the Martian atmosphere.
The undersides of rocks experience a different environment due to less exposure to wind erosion and the UV component of sunlight. But as far as being exposed to the gases that make up the atmosphere, the undersides are about as exposed at the topsides.
Most if not all of the minerals observed on Mars have been seen before, on Earth. Can you think of a terrestrial example of a rock whose underside has a significantly different chemical composition than its topside? I can't.
Rising real estate prices are good for every homeowner -- even these who don't realize it.
I'd love it if the price of my house rose 1000%. If increased property taxes are a hardship for anyone, they can simply take out a reverse mortgage, and use a small fraction of their increased property value to pay the higher taxes. They will still be far ahead of the game, compared to a scenario where their property value remained flat.
If you think rising real estate prices are bad, conversely you should think falling real estate prices are good. Nope... we tried that in 2008; it was called the Great Recession.
Renters are a somewhat different story. People who can't afford to rent in chic and tony neighborhoods don't rent in chic and tony neighborhoods. What if the neighborhood around them is transformed into a chic and tony neighborhood while they're living there? They might have to move to a neighborhood that's not chic and tony. Other than the inconvenience of moving, they're no worse off than before. Nowhere is it written that renters who start out unable to afford chic and tony neighborhoods have a right to stay in their neighborhood after it becomes chic and tony -- especially because enforcing such a rule would prevent all neighborhoods, everywhere, from improving.
Buying health insurance is certainly a good choice. The philosophical question is, to what extent should people be free to make bad choices? I just drank 12 oz. of Coca-Cola. Some would say that was a bad choice. Should this product be banned?
You don't care that leaders at the highest level are basing far-reaching policies on, in your words, a "silly argument"? I do. I would greatly prefer that they make policy based on sound arguments.
If you start taxing people on the basis of things they're not doing
That's the exact logic Chief Justice John Roberts used to rule that Obamacare was constitutional: he said that not buying health insurance is a taxable activity, and the courts can't interfere with Congress' power to tax.
The tax that's assessed if you choose not to buy health insurance will be collected by the IRS. Before the issue went to the Supreme Court, the president insisted this was a fine, not a tax, telling George Stephanopoulus, "I absolutely reject the notion" that it's a tax. But when its constitutionality depended on it being a tax, he suddenly no longer objected to calling it a tax. And then a few short months after the Supreme Court decision, the sheeple forgot what its constitutionality depended on, and the White House reverted to calling it a "fine" again.
Yes, learning how to properly structure queries is vital, but it doesn't help that Google keeps changing the rules and doesn't always respect your query elements.
But what's worse than that: sometimes Google just plain ignores the quotation marks you put in your query. They're supposed to mean that each search result must contain the search term that you've surrounded with quotes. Nope, lately I've been getting a lot of search results that just don't contain the term in quotes.
Other search capabilities are going away, too. For example, eBay dropped support for wildcard searches... and posted some lame workarounds that just don't get the job done: http://blog.ebay.com/working-a...
Please help fight against this trend toward dumbed-down search!
The wind on Mars is not "strong" enough to move rocks on the surface. Even though winds on Mars can probably reach large speeds, the atmospheric density is so low, that the force the wind can impose on a rock is quite small. For instance, a wind of 10 meters per second (about 20 miles per hour) here on Earth produces a force which is four times stronger than does a 50 meter per second wind (a bit more than 100 miles per hour) on the surface of Mars. So, since a 20 mile per hour wind here on Earth does not generally move rocks about on the surface (though it does raise dust), the winds on Mars don't move rocks on the surface either.
Dr. Squyres said the object is "like nothing we've ever seen before."
The Mars rovers have examined thousands of rocks. If this were just some random rock kicked into position by one of the rover's wheels, it's highly improbable that it would also be "like nothing we've ever seen before."
OSCAR WILDE:
Your Majesty, you're like a big jam doughnut with cream on the top. THE PRINCE OF WALES:
I beg your pardon? OSCAR WILDE:
Um..... It was one of Whistler's. JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER:
I didn't say that. OSCAR WILDE:
You did, James, you did. THE PRINCE OF WALES:
Well, Mr. Whistler? JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER:
I- I meant, Your Majesty, that, uh, like a doughnut your arrival gives us pleasure and your departure merely makes us hungry for more.
there is some evidence that strains bred specifically for a high THC content could be more likely to cause psychotic event or temporary psychosis-like states.
It's said that strains being sold here in Colorado are far higher in THC than the stuff that was being smoked in the 1960s.
it would be in everyone's best interest to keep most of the unemployed population stoned every day to reduce petty crime... plow the money you were putting into police and prisons into treatment programs for people who voluntarily want to stop.
Be consistent, mate: if it's in everyone's best interest to keep people stoned, it's definitely not in our interest to pay for treatment programs (after which, they won't be stoned anymore).
The historical record shows that automation always creates more jobs than it destroys: there are currently more humans employed than at any other time in history. Most of them are employed in fields that didn't exist before certain enabling technologies were invented. And there has been a healthy trend away from unskilled physical labor, toward skilled employment.
Fact is, if you think the economy is bad now, it will be far worse if everyone's motivation and/or ability to performed skilled work is sacked by being stoned.
You complained that more-efficient processes were destroying jobs. I can only conclude that you believe less-efficient processes would create jobs.
But please learn a thing or two from the historical record. It shows that back when things were done inefficiently -- for example, the locomotives of 1860 converted the chemical energy in coal into mechanical energy with 1% efficiency -- far fewer jobs existed than exist today. The more powerful a technology is, the more disruptive it is, and the more jobs it will create. A pessimist who focuses only on the smaller number of jobs destroyed, and refuses to look at the greater number of jobs created, will mistakenly conclude that technological disruptions cause net reductions in employment. When people put blinders on themselves like that, it would be merely sad if it weren't also dangerous: if a critical mass of people come to adopt that Luddite view, there will be an economic collapse.
Are you seriously proposing that we should intentionally introduce inefficiencies into processes, in order to boost employment?
That's not how it works. Improved productivity is what results in higher standards of living and more jobs. New technologies create disruptions, to be sure, where workers have to shift out of fields that are no longer in demand (your TV repair example) -- but in spite of this, the fact is that there are currently more employed humans than at any other time in history. Every new technology creates far more jobs than it destroys.
To introduce inefficiencies -- in other words, to intentionally lower worker productivity -- is an incredibly short-sighted idea that will doom us all to lower standards of living.
In the classic example of workers building a dam, the superficial analysis is that you'll employ more of them if you take away their heavy equipment, and force them to dig with teaspoons. But the correct analysis is that you'll employ none of them, because without the efficiencies of heavy equipment, the authority that wants to build the dam no longer has enough funds, and has to cancel the project altogether.
It is true that some new jobs are created, but they are fewer than the ones replaced. The only solution, really, is some sort of socialist system
You couldn't be more wrong, and if there's one thing that will doom the human race it is this mentality.
The fact is, there are currently more humans employed than at any time in history. And the vast majority of them are employed in fields that did not exist before certain enabling technologies were invented, whether they be electric power, or internal combustion engines, or mechanical hair clippers (a favorite technology of my barber -- without which I would not be able to afford his services as often). Every new technology creates far more jobs than it destroys. There are far more people working in the auto industry than ever worked in the buggy-making industry. Do you imagine that there were more telegraph operators in 1905 than IT workers in 2014? No: every new technology creates far more jobs than it destroys.
The more disruptive a technology is, the more jobs it will create (and the more it will be condemned by Luddites who just don't grok how the synergistic cumulative effects of small efficiency improvements in myriad industries add up to huge improvements in humans' standard of living). If your standard of living is better than that of your great-grandparents, who likely physically toiled in agricultural occupations with not a lot of assistance from machinery, you have technology to thank. Don't dream that weak technologies, with their weak job-creating effects, are better than the really disruptive technologies.
it used to be a single lawyer with a big case would hire an auditorium full of paralegals just to study case law and review documents. Those days are gone, that job is done by a small handful of people. An entire auditorium reduced to maybe 2-4 people.
Whenever fewer people are needed to perform service X, the cost of service X goes down and people who need to purchase service X emerge in better financial shape than they otherwise would have. The bad news for people in the service X industry is far outweighed by the good news for everyone else.
There are far more people working in the auto industry than ever worked in the buggy-making industry. Every new technology creates far more jobs than it destroys. Do you imagine that there were more telegraph operators in 1905 than IT workers in 2014? No, every new technology creates far more jobs than it destroys.
Failure to grok this makes people resist innovations that drive greater efficiency, and ironically, their resistance causes unemployment to be higher than it otherwise would be, and causes the general standard of living to be lower than it otherwise would be.
ticket, so they ended up going back to cramming as many seats in the plane they could.
Many airlines give you a choice. I often fly Frontier, and for $35 Frontier will give me a legroom upgrade. So far, I have decided I'd rather have $35 extra dollars in my pocket than that upgrade, but someday I might change my mind. Having that choice available to me is the best of both worlds. Not everyone wants or needs the extra legroom, so the asset (the aircraft) gets optimal utilization by allowing each passenger to choose. If the day comes that I want to use more of the aircraft's capacity than the next guy, I'll be happy to pay marginally more money for that marginally better ticket.
Bravo... may all of us be as capable as you, and posting gems like this to Slashdot, at age 79. I mean, being able to spell hyaluronan correctly is, in and of itself, quite a feat.
It's been said that one way to ensure good behavior of all passengers is to issue a piece to every adult passenger. Would having a few amateur air marshals on every flight prevent more trouble than it causes? Finding out would be a good experiment.
Now if I may pick your brain... is there some inexpensive signal strength meter I can carry with me up onto the roof when pointing a residential TV antenna? As I understand it, the pros use fancy, expensive spectrum analyzers. Is there a sub-$100 solution that you can recommend?
(I'm a fan of taking advantage of those free over-the-air signals. It's surprising how many people aren't even aware that those signals are there for the taking... they seem to think that when the cable-TV networks were built out decades ago, over-the-air broadcasts were discontinued.)
Really, what happens if a broadcast engineer attempts to check a bag full of sophisticated tools on a commercial flight? Are you more worried about the TSA stealing/damaging your tools, than the private security companies who performed the same function before the TSA existed?
Slashdot Mirror
Agency management do look at how many publications cite the project when considering further funding. Allowing competing projects to beat us to publication using our own data and not our analysis is seen as detrimental to continued operations.
The obvious solution is, look at how many publications cite papers that used the data you gathered; not how many publications cite your project. That would be a meritocracy where the projects that gather the most valuable data are guaranteed to enjoy continued operations -- and there'd be no need to restrict access to said data.
The donut has already been examined enough for NASA to think it's boring
Really? Dr. Squyres says the rock has a "strange composition, different from anything we have seen before... We are still working this out. We are making measurements right now. This is an ongoing story of discovery."
He doesn't sound bored.
With a geode, the inside is different from the outside, which is not at all the same phenomenon as the topside being different from the underside.
humanity was born in the ice ages of the Pleistocene we've never experienced a planet as warm as the dinosaurs... Humans will survive a warmer earth I have no doubt, but the potential for massive disruption to the food supply is there and if that happens there's going to be some really ugly war that humanity might not survive. The reason to be scared of global warming is because of those changing fertile zones, humanity goes batshit crazy when starvation is eminent.
Humanity has experienced the whole gamut of climates, from hot deserts to frozen Arctic lands. Civilization is very tenuous at those northern fringes (see the Vikings who ended up having to abandon their colonies in Greenland and Newfoundland).
Guess you haven't thought about the fact that there are vast tracts of land in northern Canada, Alaska, and Siberia that will become viable farmland if the growing season gets a little longer. If the predictions of global warming alarmists come to pass (and so far they have not), I'll be concerned about inundation of coastal cities; but given the large net increase in viable farmland, there should be no concerns about starvation. Global warming is much more likely to exacerbate the obesity epidemic.
this rock appears to be a fairly pedestrian example
There must be some planetary scientists who disagree with you, because NASA has already acknowledged that this is "a very special rock, with rare properties."
The vast majority of images acquired by space probes have been released directly to the public, not as part of a published scientific paper.
If the data weren't acquired 100% at taxpayer expense, let the owners of the data sit and ruminate on it for as long as they please. But that's not the case, so there's not much justification for no timely release of the data to the taxpayers who paid for it.
Dr. Squyres and his team have already chosen to spend lots of time and effort investigating this object.
How would releasing this data to the public, through existing channels that have already conveyed thousands of photos to the public, be a waste of NASA's time?
NASA has already acknowledged that this is "a very special rock, with rare properties." Therefore, shouldn't it, at a matter of course, release more data about this rock than it releases about the average Mars rock?
Dr. Squyres says that if this object has been recently flipped over, "we are seeing the surface, the underside of a rock, that hasn't seen the Martian atmosphere for perhaps billions of years."
Trouble is, unless he's proposing that the underside of this rock was somehow vacuum-sealed against atmospheric influence, it has very much been exposed to the gases of the Martian atmosphere.
The undersides of rocks experience a different environment due to less exposure to wind erosion and the UV component of sunlight. But as far as being exposed to the gases that make up the atmosphere, the undersides are about as exposed at the topsides.
Most if not all of the minerals observed on Mars have been seen before, on Earth. Can you think of a terrestrial example of a rock whose underside has a significantly different chemical composition than its topside? I can't.
Rising real estate prices are good for every homeowner -- even these who don't realize it.
I'd love it if the price of my house rose 1000%. If increased property taxes are a hardship for anyone, they can simply take out a reverse mortgage, and use a small fraction of their increased property value to pay the higher taxes. They will still be far ahead of the game, compared to a scenario where their property value remained flat.
If you think rising real estate prices are bad, conversely you should think falling real estate prices are good. Nope... we tried that in 2008; it was called the Great Recession.
Renters are a somewhat different story. People who can't afford to rent in chic and tony neighborhoods don't rent in chic and tony neighborhoods. What if the neighborhood around them is transformed into a chic and tony neighborhood while they're living there? They might have to move to a neighborhood that's not chic and tony. Other than the inconvenience of moving, they're no worse off than before. Nowhere is it written that renters who start out unable to afford chic and tony neighborhoods have a right to stay in their neighborhood after it becomes chic and tony -- especially because enforcing such a rule would prevent all neighborhoods, everywhere, from improving.
Buying health insurance is certainly a good choice. The philosophical question is, to what extent should people be free to make bad choices? I just drank 12 oz. of Coca-Cola. Some would say that was a bad choice. Should this product be banned?
You don't care that leaders at the highest level are basing far-reaching policies on, in your words, a "silly argument"? I do. I would greatly prefer that they make policy based on sound arguments.
If you start taxing people on the basis of things they're not doing
That's the exact logic Chief Justice John Roberts used to rule that Obamacare was constitutional: he said that not buying health insurance is a taxable activity, and the courts can't interfere with Congress' power to tax.
The tax that's assessed if you choose not to buy health insurance will be collected by the IRS. Before the issue went to the Supreme Court, the president insisted this was a fine, not a tax, telling George Stephanopoulus, "I absolutely reject the notion" that it's a tax. But when its constitutionality depended on it being a tax, he suddenly no longer objected to calling it a tax. And then a few short months after the Supreme Court decision, the sheeple forgot what its constitutionality depended on, and the White House reverted to calling it a "fine" again.
Yes, learning how to properly structure queries is vital, but it doesn't help that Google keeps changing the rules and doesn't always respect your query elements.
For example, you can read about how Google replaced the plus-sign operator with quotation marks: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/goo...
But what's worse than that: sometimes Google just plain ignores the quotation marks you put in your query. They're supposed to mean that each search result must contain the search term that you've surrounded with quotes. Nope, lately I've been getting a lot of search results that just don't contain the term in quotes.
Other search capabilities are going away, too. For example, eBay dropped support for wildcard searches... and posted some lame workarounds that just don't get the job done: http://blog.ebay.com/working-a...
Please help fight against this trend toward dumbed-down search!
How much magnesium/manganeese is in the metal the skycrane/parachute that delivered curiousity to mars
Doesn't matter, because the Curiosity rover, and the Opportunity rover that discovered this object, are on opposite sides of the planet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_rover#Image_map_of_Mars_landings
Also, Opportunity has traveled 24 miles from its landing site. http://marsrover.nasa.gov/mission/status_opportunityAll.html
The wind on Mars is not "strong" enough to move rocks on the surface. Even though winds on Mars can probably reach large speeds, the atmospheric density is so low, that the force the wind can impose on a rock is quite small. For instance, a wind of 10 meters per second (about 20 miles per hour) here on Earth produces a force which is four times stronger than does a 50 meter per second wind (a bit more than 100 miles per hour) on the surface of Mars. So, since a 20 mile per hour wind here on Earth does not generally move rocks about on the surface (though it does raise dust), the winds on Mars don't move rocks on the surface either.
Jim Murphy
Mars Pathfinder ASI/MET Science Team
Source: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/mars/ask/atmosphere/Feel_of_Wind_on_Mars.txt
Dr. Squyres said the object is "like nothing we've ever seen before."
The Mars rovers have examined thousands of rocks. If this were just some random rock kicked into position by one of the rover's wheels, it's highly improbable that it would also be "like nothing we've ever seen before."
OSCAR WILDE: ..... It was one of Whistler's.
Your Majesty, you're like a big jam doughnut with cream on the top.
THE PRINCE OF WALES:
I beg your pardon?
OSCAR WILDE:
Um
JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER:
I didn't say that.
OSCAR WILDE:
You did, James, you did.
THE PRINCE OF WALES:
Well, Mr. Whistler?
JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER:
I- I meant, Your Majesty, that, uh, like a doughnut your arrival gives us pleasure and your departure merely makes us hungry for more.
there is some evidence that strains bred specifically for a high THC content could be more likely to cause psychotic event or temporary psychosis-like states.
It's said that strains being sold here in Colorado are far higher in THC than the stuff that was being smoked in the 1960s.
it would be in everyone's best interest to keep most of the unemployed population stoned every day to reduce petty crime... plow the money you were putting into police and prisons into treatment programs for people who voluntarily want to stop.
Be consistent, mate: if it's in everyone's best interest to keep people stoned, it's definitely not in our interest to pay for treatment programs (after which, they won't be stoned anymore).
The historical record shows that automation always creates more jobs than it destroys: there are currently more humans employed than at any other time in history. Most of them are employed in fields that didn't exist before certain enabling technologies were invented. And there has been a healthy trend away from unskilled physical labor, toward skilled employment.
Fact is, if you think the economy is bad now, it will be far worse if everyone's motivation and/or ability to performed skilled work is sacked by being stoned.
I didn't offer up inefficiency as a solution.
You complained that more-efficient processes were destroying jobs. I can only conclude that you believe less-efficient processes would create jobs.
But please learn a thing or two from the historical record. It shows that back when things were done inefficiently -- for example, the locomotives of 1860 converted the chemical energy in coal into mechanical energy with 1% efficiency -- far fewer jobs existed than exist today. The more powerful a technology is, the more disruptive it is, and the more jobs it will create. A pessimist who focuses only on the smaller number of jobs destroyed, and refuses to look at the greater number of jobs created, will mistakenly conclude that technological disruptions cause net reductions in employment. When people put blinders on themselves like that, it would be merely sad if it weren't also dangerous: if a critical mass of people come to adopt that Luddite view, there will be an economic collapse.
Are you seriously proposing that we should intentionally introduce inefficiencies into processes, in order to boost employment?
That's not how it works. Improved productivity is what results in higher standards of living and more jobs. New technologies create disruptions, to be sure, where workers have to shift out of fields that are no longer in demand (your TV repair example) -- but in spite of this, the fact is that there are currently more employed humans than at any other time in history. Every new technology creates far more jobs than it destroys.
To introduce inefficiencies -- in other words, to intentionally lower worker productivity -- is an incredibly short-sighted idea that will doom us all to lower standards of living.
In the classic example of workers building a dam, the superficial analysis is that you'll employ more of them if you take away their heavy equipment, and force them to dig with teaspoons. But the correct analysis is that you'll employ none of them, because without the efficiencies of heavy equipment, the authority that wants to build the dam no longer has enough funds, and has to cancel the project altogether.
It is true that some new jobs are created, but they are fewer than the ones replaced. The only solution, really, is some sort of socialist system
You couldn't be more wrong, and if there's one thing that will doom the human race it is this mentality.
The fact is, there are currently more humans employed than at any time in history. And the vast majority of them are employed in fields that did not exist before certain enabling technologies were invented, whether they be electric power, or internal combustion engines, or mechanical hair clippers (a favorite technology of my barber -- without which I would not be able to afford his services as often). Every new technology creates far more jobs than it destroys. There are far more people working in the auto industry than ever worked in the buggy-making industry. Do you imagine that there were more telegraph operators in 1905 than IT workers in 2014? No: every new technology creates far more jobs than it destroys.
The more disruptive a technology is, the more jobs it will create (and the more it will be condemned by Luddites who just don't grok how the synergistic cumulative effects of small efficiency improvements in myriad industries add up to huge improvements in humans' standard of living). If your standard of living is better than that of your great-grandparents, who likely physically toiled in agricultural occupations with not a lot of assistance from machinery, you have technology to thank. Don't dream that weak technologies, with their weak job-creating effects, are better than the really disruptive technologies.
it used to be a single lawyer with a big case would hire an auditorium full of paralegals just to study case law and review documents. Those days are gone, that job is done by a small handful of people. An entire auditorium reduced to maybe 2-4 people.
Whenever fewer people are needed to perform service X, the cost of service X goes down and people who need to purchase service X emerge in better financial shape than they otherwise would have. The bad news for people in the service X industry is far outweighed by the good news for everyone else.
There are far more people working in the auto industry than ever worked in the buggy-making industry. Every new technology creates far more jobs than it destroys. Do you imagine that there were more telegraph operators in 1905 than IT workers in 2014? No, every new technology creates far more jobs than it destroys.
Failure to grok this makes people resist innovations that drive greater efficiency, and ironically, their resistance causes unemployment to be higher than it otherwise would be, and causes the general standard of living to be lower than it otherwise would be.
ticket, so they ended up going back to cramming as many seats in the plane they could.
Many airlines give you a choice. I often fly Frontier, and for $35 Frontier will give me a legroom upgrade. So far, I have decided I'd rather have $35 extra dollars in my pocket than that upgrade, but someday I might change my mind. Having that choice available to me is the best of both worlds. Not everyone wants or needs the extra legroom, so the asset (the aircraft) gets optimal utilization by allowing each passenger to choose. If the day comes that I want to use more of the aircraft's capacity than the next guy, I'll be happy to pay marginally more money for that marginally better ticket.
Bravo... may all of us be as capable as you, and posting gems like this to Slashdot, at age 79. I mean, being able to spell hyaluronan correctly is, in and of itself, quite a feat.
It's been said that one way to ensure good behavior of all passengers is to issue a piece to every adult passenger. Would having a few amateur air marshals on every flight prevent more trouble than it causes? Finding out would be a good experiment.
Now if I may pick your brain... is there some inexpensive signal strength meter I can carry with me up onto the roof when pointing a residential TV antenna? As I understand it, the pros use fancy, expensive spectrum analyzers. Is there a sub-$100 solution that you can recommend?
(I'm a fan of taking advantage of those free over-the-air signals. It's surprising how many people aren't even aware that those signals are there for the taking... they seem to think that when the cable-TV networks were built out decades ago, over-the-air broadcasts were discontinued.)
Really, what happens if a broadcast engineer attempts to check a bag full of sophisticated tools on a commercial flight? Are you more worried about the TSA stealing/damaging your tools, than the private security companies who performed the same function before the TSA existed?
Just wondering