coming back and not colliding against anything else are way more worrisome
Actually the bigger worry would be *not* colliding with anything, and drifting off into deep space. At both ends of the trip, you want to collide with the atmosphere of your target so that you don't need to expend the propellant to brake yourself into orbit. In between? Well, to quote the Hitchiker's Guide. "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."
The probability of running into anything out there is somewhere between 0 and nil, it's far more likely you're going to suffer a failure of your equipment than run into something, especially once out of LEO.
Sorry, but in Space, navigation is all about gravity and dealing with it. Yes, you're weightless when not under thrust, but that doesn't meant hat gravity isn't having an effect. To reach Mars from Low Earth Orbit, you need about 4.3km/s of Delta-V. That is you need to be able to increase your speed by 4300m/s. That takes propellant and energy.
Right now, the standard Falcon 9 has just enough power to put a geostationary communications satellite into its transfer orbit. To go from LEO to Geostationary Transfer Orbit takes about 2.5km/s. In the case of Intelsat 35E, just getting the payload to a (super synchronous) GTO meant there wasn't enough propellant left to perform a landing, so the mission was flown expendable.
Anyhow the whole point here is that the FH lets you impart enough velocity into a larger payload that it will make it to Mars. In the case of the demo mission, it's only launching Elon's roadster, which is pretty lightweight, so there is plenty of margin left, but in the case of a larger payload, they'll need every bit of performance they can get.
http://www.kodomobile.ca/ / just make usre your location is set to BC or Alberta. Huge threads on this on redflagdeals. For most of them you have to either go to the shop or call in, it's a flash sale, and not generally available through their online cart stuff.
So just as this was posted, there is a $60/mo promo going on with all the carriers in BC and AB, $60/mo for 10GB data, unlimited nationwide text/talk, BYOD. Some of the carriers (and probably soon all) are also offering it in ON. Get on it while you can.
I always thought that a rocket wasn't human-rated until the paperwork and documentation for the rocket weighed more than the wet mass of the rocket itself...
This is where I wish that TV/short form entertainment would go the same way as music. Have broad/permissive licensing. Any service can stream it out, they just pay a royalty like you do with music. Netflix could happily provide GoT, or The Expanse, or whatever, and just pay the appropriate people a normal, non-discriminatory royalty for the play.
I buy "The Expanse" from iTunes because I enjoy the show, and want to support it, but I'll still snag episodes to add to my media player because, well, the iTunes version dones't play everywhere, and often comes out several days later.
That said, it's lower payload to orbit than FH, and lacks the reuseability. The soviets never built a rocket like this. yes, they have plenty of rockets with strap-on liquid fueld boosters (such as Soyuz), but the boosters are of radically different design than the center core.
What you're probably getting crossed in your mind is the issues the soviets had with their N1 rocket. They had significant combustion stability, and ignition stability issues with the 30 engines on its first stage. The difference was that all 30 engines were at the base of a single stage, not broken up between rocket cores. The propellant plumbing to feed fuel and oxidizer to 30 engines is enormously complex, and hard to get right. Conversely, with a design such as FH, from a fuel delivery perspective it really is 3 independent boosters, all of which have propellant feed systems that are well known and tested at this point.
What is as equally complex is the control systems and thrust control/vectoring to keep the whole thing stable. Keeping your thrust vector going through your CoM is the hard part, and that's what I'll be interested in seeing with the launch of FH.
This is why split horizon DNS was developed. DNS server answers differently depending on where the request came from. Comes from your internal network, or the VPN? answer one way. Comes from the public internet? answer the other.
The only real solution, which will never happen, is to force a full separation of service and content. This should apply to both Internet service, and video/TV services.
Commercials actually aren't that much higher volume than the rest of the show, it's that traditionally they've made heavy use of compression (in the audio sense, not the data sense) to make them seem louder. This basically shrinks the difference between the quietest sound and the loudest sound so that it's much more uniform. It's the same trick that was used by record companies during the "Loudness Wars" that ruined so many albums released on CD since the late 90s.
Anyhow, this is fairly easy to detect with analog electronics, and is likely how my parent's VCR did the same thing a long time ago. After recording an episode, it would scan back through the tape, and mark the commercials, then auto-fastforward through them. It worked pretty reliably.
That said, if it is sand, we should also be seeing a build-up of these darker sands at the bottom of the slopes which we are not seeing either.
A possibility, though, is that the sand is weathering once exposed to the Martian atmosphere. I don't know what the chemical process would be. All it would take is a change to the composition of the material directly on the surface, and it would look different from above.
AFAIK they only found water ice in a few under ground deposites
Mars Odyssey, which is in orbit around Mars, has instruments onboard that have detected large quantities of Hydrogen in the upper few meters of most of the Martian surface. They basically work by measuring the radiation emitted after cosmic rays strike the surface, and based on that data and the pattern of these events, you can determine the element that was hit.
Anyhow, given the unstable nature of Hydrogen, and what we already know about the chemistry and mineralogy of Mars, the most likely explanation is that the Hydrogen is there in the form of Water Ice, and the concentrations in many locations are such that it's probably best described as ice with soil mixed in, rather than frozen/permafrost soil.
While it hasn't happened yet, one of the proposed missions to Mars includes an autonomous drilling rig that will be able to bore several meters into the surface, and analyze what's down there.
I calculated once how much light was put out in London during the gas light era. It turns out the total number of lumens emitted to light the largest and most brightly lit city in the world at the time (four million people) is equal to the amount of light used to illuminate one football field for a night game.
As I mentioned in another thread, I work with a camp that operates in a wilderness area. The skies are spectacular, and we've been very careful about our outdoor lighting. It's highly effective, but very dim, all done with fixtures that have tight cutoffs and what not.
Anyhow, a number of years ago, during the Perseid Meteor Shower (which was particularly strong that year), we mysteriously had a power outage for about an hour. People were wanding around wondering what was going on, and those of us there were just "sit down, look up, and enjoy the show". What had actually happened is that someone had bribed the guy who runs our (privately owned/operated) power plant to head out there and shut it down for an hour. It was worth the case of beer.
Similar experience here regarding the eclipse. A couple of buddies and I putted on out to the Salmon Challis National Forest in Idaho for the eclipse. We finally found a spot to setup camp at 11pm, and the first thing that we noticed after shutting down the Westfalia was... oh my God the stars are incredible. I've spent a lot of time in the area around Lake Chelan, and that is good dark sky territory (the Milky Way is quite obvious there), but it had nothing on that spot in Idaho.
The only time I've seen better is when I've been out crewing a yacht in the open ocean. When it's calm, the infinity of the sky above you is mind blowing, and the trail of phosphorescence behind you is stunning.
Your typical person just doesn't get what you can see when it's truly dark.
I work with an organization that operates at a wilderness site, some 50+ miles from the nearest population center. We ourselves are very careful with our outdoor lighting, providing just enough illumination to be safe, and no more than that. As such, our skies are absolutely incredible.
One of the things I love to do is if I run into someone new on a clear night is to basically go "So.... have you looked up?" in so many cases, they haven't yet, and are simply blown away. It's really quite sad how many people have never seen the Milky Way with their own eyes. The amusing thing, though, is that there are so many stars that it is actually rather difficult to pick out the normal constellations.
The thing that really pisses me off, though, is the people who insist on walking everywhere with a headlamp or a flashlight. Just let your eyes dark adjust; after a minute or two, even starlight is enough to safely make your way around on well maintained roads/paths.
Well, if the small ones are the ones a year younger that haven't had a chance to reproduce yet, then it makes a certain modicum of sense. Around here, at least, a number of the fish have a window in the middle. Keepers are only over a given size, and under the other.
Low grade desktop and laptop vendor. Decent servers.
The ProLiant division lives with HPE... They're dead to me now that they started requiring you to have a support contract in order to get firmware updates. Otherwise, it's still solid, well built gear. Next time 'round I'll probably look at Dell or Lenovo.
Basically, who's to say what clearly disqualifies somebody? I've seen it pointed out several times that just about any serious crime should probably disqualify somebody from being alone in a tiny, high speed vehicle that probably has the ability to control whether the passenger leaves or not (child locks). And that's before we start talking about whether someone with a history of DUI/DWI should be allowed to drive professionally.
Ok, lets say you're someone who's been convicted of Fraud. You made the mistake, paid the price, done your time, and are now released. Why should something like that prevent you from driving for Uber, or doing other tasks that do not have fiduciary responsibility? Same thing, let's say you were caught with a big bag 'o weed in your late teens and went up the river. You've grown out of that, cleaned up your act, etc...
At some point there needs to be a way for someone to get their life back on track. It should be a justice system, not a vengeance system.
Unfortunately the real geniuses at HP left when they spun off Agilent... Test & Measurement was really the heart and soul of the company, and the real brains behind the operation.
I've said this multiple times on slashdot, but in my experience, the best option is to resolve this issue at the County/PUD level. My favourite example is what is available in Chelan and Douglas counties, in Eastern Washington state. In both of these counties, the PUDs have built out nearly ubiquitous FTTH networks.
The trick is that the PUDs only provide the last mile service, they don't provide the content (in the case of TV) or Internet service. When a local resident wants to sign up, they have the choice of some 8 or 9 ISPs, and 6+ TV providers, all of whom in turn transport that service over the County network. Businesses can also buy transport from Zayo, Cogent, and some other peering provider. For the resident, it's easy... Their bill for TV or Internet (or both), has something like a $6/mo line access charge which covers the fiber connection, and the rest is for service. On the flip side, the service provider doesn't need to maintain the last mile.
The PUDs themselves are responsible to their residents through elections, and from my observation are very responsive to faults in their systems. I was involved in the summer of 2015 when a wildfire burned through and knocked out a significant chunk of their infrastructure, both power and fiber. They had the fiber truck rolling right behind the power trucks, and had the system back up and running as soon as they could source and plant 50+ replacement power poles.
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coming back and not colliding against anything else are way more worrisome
Actually the bigger worry would be *not* colliding with anything, and drifting off into deep space. At both ends of the trip, you want to collide with the atmosphere of your target so that you don't need to expend the propellant to brake yourself into orbit. In between? Well, to quote the Hitchiker's Guide. "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."
The probability of running into anything out there is somewhere between 0 and nil, it's far more likely you're going to suffer a failure of your equipment than run into something, especially once out of LEO.
Sorry, but in Space, navigation is all about gravity and dealing with it. Yes, you're weightless when not under thrust, but that doesn't meant hat gravity isn't having an effect. To reach Mars from Low Earth Orbit, you need about 4.3km/s of Delta-V. That is you need to be able to increase your speed by 4300m/s. That takes propellant and energy.
Right now, the standard Falcon 9 has just enough power to put a geostationary communications satellite into its transfer orbit. To go from LEO to Geostationary Transfer Orbit takes about 2.5km/s. In the case of Intelsat 35E, just getting the payload to a (super synchronous) GTO meant there wasn't enough propellant left to perform a landing, so the mission was flown expendable.
Anyhow the whole point here is that the FH lets you impart enough velocity into a larger payload that it will make it to Mars. In the case of the demo mission, it's only launching Elon's roadster, which is pretty lightweight, so there is plenty of margin left, but in the case of a larger payload, they'll need every bit of performance they can get.
The problem is that Freedom's coverage is seriously lacking, and besides they're now owned by shaw, who is just as evil as Telus, Bell, and rogers.
Your crystal set radio also doesn't work with FM broadcast either, only AM.
http://www.kodomobile.ca/ / just make usre your location is set to BC or Alberta. Huge threads on this on redflagdeals.
For most of them you have to either go to the shop or call in, it's a flash sale, and not generally available through their online cart stuff.
So just as this was posted, there is a $60/mo promo going on with all the carriers in BC and AB, $60/mo for 10GB data, unlimited nationwide text/talk, BYOD. Some of the carriers (and probably soon all) are also offering it in ON. Get on it while you can.
I always thought that a rocket wasn't human-rated until the paperwork and documentation for the rocket weighed more than the wet mass of the rocket itself...
A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure...
This is where I wish that TV/short form entertainment would go the same way as music. Have broad/permissive licensing. Any service can stream it out, they just pay a royalty like you do with music. Netflix could happily provide GoT, or The Expanse, or whatever, and just pay the appropriate people a normal, non-discriminatory royalty for the play.
I buy "The Expanse" from iTunes because I enjoy the show, and want to support it, but I'll still snag episodes to add to my media player because, well, the iTunes version dones't play everywhere, and often comes out several days later.
ULA's Delta IV Heavy does this, and has been flying since 2004. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
That said, it's lower payload to orbit than FH, and lacks the reuseability. The soviets never built a rocket like this. yes, they have plenty of rockets with strap-on liquid fueld boosters (such as Soyuz), but the boosters are of radically different design than the center core.
What you're probably getting crossed in your mind is the issues the soviets had with their N1 rocket. They had significant combustion stability, and ignition stability issues with the 30 engines on its first stage. The difference was that all 30 engines were at the base of a single stage, not broken up between rocket cores. The propellant plumbing to feed fuel and oxidizer to 30 engines is enormously complex, and hard to get right. Conversely, with a design such as FH, from a fuel delivery perspective it really is 3 independent boosters, all of which have propellant feed systems that are well known and tested at this point.
What is as equally complex is the control systems and thrust control/vectoring to keep the whole thing stable. Keeping your thrust vector going through your CoM is the hard part, and that's what I'll be interested in seeing with the launch of FH.
This is why split horizon DNS was developed. DNS server answers differently depending on where the request came from. Comes from your internal network, or the VPN? answer one way. Comes from the public internet? answer the other.
The only real solution, which will never happen, is to force a full separation of service and content. This should apply to both Internet service, and video/TV services.
Commercials actually aren't that much higher volume than the rest of the show, it's that traditionally they've made heavy use of compression (in the audio sense, not the data sense) to make them seem louder. This basically shrinks the difference between the quietest sound and the loudest sound so that it's much more uniform. It's the same trick that was used by record companies during the "Loudness Wars" that ruined so many albums released on CD since the late 90s.
Anyhow, this is fairly easy to detect with analog electronics, and is likely how my parent's VCR did the same thing a long time ago. After recording an episode, it would scan back through the tape, and mark the commercials, then auto-fastforward through them. It worked pretty reliably.
That said, if it is sand, we should also be seeing a build-up of these darker sands at the bottom of the slopes which we are not seeing either.
A possibility, though, is that the sand is weathering once exposed to the Martian atmosphere. I don't know what the chemical process would be. All it would take is a change to the composition of the material directly on the surface, and it would look different from above.
AFAIK they only found water ice in a few under ground deposites
Mars Odyssey, which is in orbit around Mars, has instruments onboard that have detected large quantities of Hydrogen in the upper few meters of most of the Martian surface. They basically work by measuring the radiation emitted after cosmic rays strike the surface, and based on that data and the pattern of these events, you can determine the element that was hit.
Anyhow, given the unstable nature of Hydrogen, and what we already know about the chemistry and mineralogy of Mars, the most likely explanation is that the Hydrogen is there in the form of Water Ice, and the concentrations in many locations are such that it's probably best described as ice with soil mixed in, rather than frozen/permafrost soil.
While it hasn't happened yet, one of the proposed missions to Mars includes an autonomous drilling rig that will be able to bore several meters into the surface, and analyze what's down there.
Neither of those have anything to do with the federal government.
What was your point again?
They're costing the employer more to route around them, it's having an impact on the employer.
I calculated once how much light was put out in London during the gas light era. It turns out the total number of lumens emitted to light the largest and most brightly lit city in the world at the time (four million people) is equal to the amount of light used to illuminate one football field for a night game.
As I mentioned in another thread, I work with a camp that operates in a wilderness area. The skies are spectacular, and we've been very careful about our outdoor lighting. It's highly effective, but very dim, all done with fixtures that have tight cutoffs and what not.
Anyhow, a number of years ago, during the Perseid Meteor Shower (which was particularly strong that year), we mysteriously had a power outage for about an hour. People were wanding around wondering what was going on, and those of us there were just "sit down, look up, and enjoy the show". What had actually happened is that someone had bribed the guy who runs our (privately owned/operated) power plant to head out there and shut it down for an hour. It was worth the case of beer.
Similar experience here regarding the eclipse. A couple of buddies and I putted on out to the Salmon Challis National Forest in Idaho for the eclipse. We finally found a spot to setup camp at 11pm, and the first thing that we noticed after shutting down the Westfalia was... oh my God the stars are incredible. I've spent a lot of time in the area around Lake Chelan, and that is good dark sky territory (the Milky Way is quite obvious there), but it had nothing on that spot in Idaho.
The only time I've seen better is when I've been out crewing a yacht in the open ocean. When it's calm, the infinity of the sky above you is mind blowing, and the trail of phosphorescence behind you is stunning.
Your typical person just doesn't get what you can see when it's truly dark.
I work with an organization that operates at a wilderness site, some 50+ miles from the nearest population center. We ourselves are very careful with our outdoor lighting, providing just enough illumination to be safe, and no more than that. As such, our skies are absolutely incredible.
One of the things I love to do is if I run into someone new on a clear night is to basically go "So.... have you looked up?" in so many cases, they haven't yet, and are simply blown away. It's really quite sad how many people have never seen the Milky Way with their own eyes. The amusing thing, though, is that there are so many stars that it is actually rather difficult to pick out the normal constellations.
The thing that really pisses me off, though, is the people who insist on walking everywhere with a headlamp or a flashlight. Just let your eyes dark adjust; after a minute or two, even starlight is enough to safely make your way around on well maintained roads/paths.
Well, if the small ones are the ones a year younger that haven't had a chance to reproduce yet, then it makes a certain modicum of sense. Around here, at least, a number of the fish have a window in the middle. Keepers are only over a given size, and under the other.
Low grade desktop and laptop vendor. Decent servers.
The ProLiant division lives with HPE... They're dead to me now that they started requiring you to have a support contract in order to get firmware updates. Otherwise, it's still solid, well built gear. Next time 'round I'll probably look at Dell or Lenovo.
Basically, who's to say what clearly disqualifies somebody? I've seen it pointed out several times that just about any serious crime should probably disqualify somebody from being alone in a tiny, high speed vehicle that probably has the ability to control whether the passenger leaves or not (child locks). And that's before we start talking about whether someone with a history of DUI/DWI should be allowed to drive professionally.
Ok, lets say you're someone who's been convicted of Fraud. You made the mistake, paid the price, done your time, and are now released. Why should something like that prevent you from driving for Uber, or doing other tasks that do not have fiduciary responsibility? Same thing, let's say you were caught with a big bag 'o weed in your late teens and went up the river. You've grown out of that, cleaned up your act, etc...
At some point there needs to be a way for someone to get their life back on track. It should be a justice system, not a vengeance system.
Unfortunately the real geniuses at HP left when they spun off Agilent... Test & Measurement was really the heart and soul of the company, and the real brains behind the operation.
I've said this multiple times on slashdot, but in my experience, the best option is to resolve this issue at the County/PUD level. My favourite example is what is available in Chelan and Douglas counties, in Eastern Washington state. In both of these counties, the PUDs have built out nearly ubiquitous FTTH networks.
The trick is that the PUDs only provide the last mile service, they don't provide the content (in the case of TV) or Internet service. When a local resident wants to sign up, they have the choice of some 8 or 9 ISPs, and 6+ TV providers, all of whom in turn transport that service over the County network. Businesses can also buy transport from Zayo, Cogent, and some other peering provider. For the resident, it's easy... Their bill for TV or Internet (or both), has something like a $6/mo line access charge which covers the fiber connection, and the rest is for service. On the flip side, the service provider doesn't need to maintain the last mile.
The PUDs themselves are responsible to their residents through elections, and from my observation are very responsive to faults in their systems. I was involved in the summer of 2015 when a wildfire burned through and knocked out a significant chunk of their infrastructure, both power and fiber. They had the fiber truck rolling right behind the power trucks, and had the system back up and running as soon as they could source and plant 50+ replacement power poles.
This kind of thing really does work.