There are many in the older generations who are anti-Internet and are seemingly afraid that if they even sign up for Internet access their bank balance will disappear and their grandchildren will get kidnapped.
Yeah, I hate it when that happens.
Best solution, if you want to use the internetz, is to not have a bank balance and not have children (thus nicely preventing grandchildren as well). Which seems to be how most slashdottahs do it.
The bill includes specific milestones for an unmanned exploration mission by 2018 and a crewed exploration mission by 2021.
So in other words its a ton of hot air and complete horseshit. At best it's a way to secure funding for NASA under a label that'll be hard to attack
This is the authorization bill, not the funding bill.
It tells NASA what to do. Funding them to do that is separate.
The "unmanned exploration mission by 2018" refers to the Insight lander; the "crewed exploration mission by 2021" probably refers to SLS launch EM-2 (testing the launch system with a crew.)
If you weren't convinced that "25 years to Mars" is a horseshit timeframe, its appearance in a Congressional budget bill should remove all doubt.
Exactly. And why are they still using useless wheeled rovers, instead of LEGGED robots,
Because wheeled locomotion technology is about five thousand years further down the technology development learning curve. Wheeled rovers are reliable compared to any other locomotion technology.
that can move about a hundred times faster,
The speed of rovers is not limited by how fast the wheels can roll.
and be designed to overcome or go around any obstacle, and virtually never get stuck?
Legged rovers that have better capability of traverse over rough ground than wheeled rovers are yet in the future.
You could make tracked rovers with more obstacle traverse capability-- but they are mechanically more complex, and hence less reliable.
Nope. Venus is more interesting in this regard. Mars is WAY smaller than Earth (about halfway between Earth and our moon, actually closer to our moon), so it's pretty obvious what happened, it simply lost its atmosphere due to a lack of gravity to retain it.
Actually, not. That would be Jeans Escape, but that's not how Mars lost atmosphere. It lost its atmosphere primarily due to the lack of a magnetic field, allowing coronal mass ejections from the sun to slowly strip away the outer layers of the atmosphere.
Its orbit is also way more eccentric than ours, it has no liquid core, it's almost outside the "habitable zone" of our sun...
Really, if you want to take a look at what could be our fate, Venus is where you want to go.
Venus is similar to what Earth will be in several billion years.
You're confusing budgeted and actually spent. Wartime expenditures are not restricted to budget.
This is a really good point. In fact, most of the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars was funded off-budget: the Congress would pass their budget not including costs for the wars, and then do a supplement later to fund the wars.
A lot of the cost is not accounted to the war. The cost of munitions, for example (the munitions were bought under general military budget, and when they were used in the war they had already been paid for. Of course, they have to be replaced... but that's not cost accounted to the war.
For example. On paper, we budgeted only a few billion for wartime expenditures between 2001 and 2006, yet the actual money spent was in the trillions. My poli-sci teacher said in those 5 years, we spent enough money on the war to fund all healthcare and college for all of the USA for 10 years.
The real polluter is China, at an official 1/3, and far more likely to be close to 50%.
China 28%, the United States next at 16%. Since America has less than 1/4 the population of China, though, we're still putting out 2.5 times more greenhouse gas per person.
Source: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissio...
alternate source: http://www.ucsusa.org/global_w...
Even now, America is under 33% coal for their electricity, Sadly, theirs continues to rise, while America's continues to drop.
yep, America is about a third:
http://www.eia.gov/energy_in_b...
That's primarily because of the drop in cost of petroleum and natural gas. I don't have good numbers for China, but they do burn a lot of coal.
The one that should be putting their money into dramately lowering their emissions is China.
The answer is "both". Since China already uses only 40% as much fossil fuel per person than the US does, it's going to be 2.5 times easier to reduce the US emissions, of course. But, this is exactly why it is a wicked hard problem: no single actor, no single organization, no single country can solve the problem on its own. The problem is global in scale.
The only things I need my smartphone for are calling people (it actually works as a telephone, did anybody know that?), occasionally looking something up on the web, and using the GPS and mapping function.
Oh, and I occasionally use the camera.
Once I have those loaded, why in the world would I want to download an "app"? To play with Pokemons?
In the words of Leanne Phillips"
"Can a journalist be forced to reveal confidential sources? The answer appears to be no...as long as that journalist is willing to go to jail." https://www.legalzoom.com/arti...
some others:
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/04/10/17678244-journalists-watch-as-reporter-faces-jail-time-for-not-revealing-sources?lite
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/04/08/fox-news-reporter-facing-jail-for-protecting-source-mainstream-media-yawns-raising-questions-of-liberal-bias/
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/press_box/2005/12/lipservice_journalism.html
http://www.rcfp.org/jailed-journalists
The investigation may have been important, but breaking the iPhone absolutely was not important. They knew right from the start that this wasn't the phone that the shooters used to plan the action with-- they used different phones for that, and a different computer, all of which they thoroughly destroyed beyond the ability of the FBI to recover.
Nobody expected anything to be on it, and nothing was.
A cynical person might think that the point of breaking the iPhone security wasn't to see what was on the phone at all, since they were already mostly sure nothing was there, but was to force Apple to break their security in a case where the FBI could shout "terrorism! National security!".
Well, that's a little unfair. What Apple challenged was the FBI's request for the court to order them to write new software to specifications given to them by the FBI, with the function of cracking their own security.
The FBI told them "well, after you break your own security, you can erase the software"... but you do know that there was a whole queue of other police departments and other FBI cases lined up to make the same demand, if they acceded to the first one.
IMO modern sci-fi has been "dumbed" down to just action flicks.
Modern sci-fi is not entirely dumbed-down action flicks; you just have to be a little choosy and spend some time looking. I loved the book The Martian, which has a lot of technology in it (the movie was a bit dumbed down compared to the book, but not entirely). A little older, I also liked Mars Crossing, another sci fi novel about Mars with a lot of realistic details.
Other than those, check out the revelation space series by Alastair Reynolds, an astrophysicist who writes mostly space-opera material, but still holding to the laws of physics. Oh, and Vernor Vinge for hard-SF space opera too, of course. And if you want mind-blowing physics, check out Greg Egan.
I don't object to data caps per se, but I expect the ISP to give you what they sold you. If they sold you a plan with no data cap, they should provide access with no data cap.
Adjustable quality would be a nice user control to have, if you're paying for bandwidth, you should be able to decide how much bandwidth to use on what downloads.
So, they got Ireland's tax authority's "blessing" to not pay taxes to other countries. Isn't that nice. Getting a third party's consent doesn't give you the right to not pay taxes in the place where income is earned.
If I get Ireland's blessing to tell me "you don't have to pay US taxes", that does not affect my IRS income tax bill.
I have only apathy-to-mild-antipathy for Apple, but think it's pretty abusive of these governments to attempt to charge them retroactively for taxes that they were dodging fair and square....
They were lying. I'm not sure that this counts as "dodging taxes fair and square." They were telling one government that their intellectual property was insanely valuable; that's why their offshore subsidiary that didn't make any product could bookkeep tons of profit on that product they didn't make. And they were telling another government that the same intellectual property had little value at all, that's why their offshore subsidiary didn't have to pay licensing fees to the main corporation (which would have been income to Apple.)
When you lie, and get caught at it, you're subject to sanctions. You're not allowed to pretend all your income was earned in a country that does not, actually, produce any product. That's fraud.
God? What in the world are you talking about? You're some sort of weird God-libertarian-fundamentalist?
Basically, governments provide services. These services have to be paid for. This is the price of living in society. "God" has nothing to do with it.
If you don't like it, sorry. A planet with six billion people requires some significant amount of structure. That's the way it is. If you want to move to a place where you don't have to live with other people, you're going to have to find a different planet.
The difficulty is, a minority of people can be a big, big problem.
It's not good enough to have rules that merely work for the "majority" of people in the "majority" of cases. It's not good enough to have rules that assume people are "smart enough to understand the _context_", rules that work except "only a complete idiot would--", or rules that work well except for "the insecurity / immature of people, and mis-use of the picture." People aren't all "smart enough", some people are "complete idiots", people are "insecure", people are "immature", and people "mis-use pictures".
And, worse, you know what? Those people point to you as the one who "isn't smart enough", is "a complete idiot", and "insecure", "immature", and probably "mis-use pictures".
Facebook isn't a news source, it's a communications medium.
Censorship by Facebook is censoring communications. As long as Facebook isn't the only, or the dominant, communications medium, their censorship is irrelevant. To the extent that they are the dominant communciations medium, however, censorship by Facebook is simply: censorship.
In this case, I'll still go with the conclusion that Facebook is not, yet, dominant. So I'm not particularly concerned. Yet.
But, it doesn't matter who is restricting your freedom: government or corporations, restrictions are restrictions.
Is what I'm talking about too complicated for you?
No, the opposite: you're too simple for me.
Your point is basically that censorship is bad when it's done by a government, but anybody else can do it, no problem. The real world is somewhat more complicated. If one particular channel for information is the dominant channel for information exchange, yes, it does matter if they are picking and choosing what opinions they allow to be communicated over their channel.
You may like to shout "freedom, freedom, corporations need to have freedom!" all you like, but in fact, what Facebook is doing, in censoring their information flow, is to take away freedom from their users.
With that said, I think that in this particular case, Facebook has a real reason for their actions. But the belief "it doesn't matter when they restrict our freedoms because we only care about it when the government restricts freedoms" is a poor argument.
No it isn't. Even Italy has declared that certain things are off limits when they involve children.
Exactly. This is the problem when you have inflexible rules: a rule "no naked pictures of 9-year-old girls" sure sounds like a completely uncontroversial rule, one for which it's even reasonable to say "this rule has no exceptions; we just can't allow that kind of naked pictures on our site."
The difficulty is that the opposite, approach, which is to allow human judgement to make exceptions to the rules, is just as bad, and just as subject to abuse.
It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation for them. Making exceptions to rules on naked pictures of children is just as likely to give problems.
Why was it even attached during the test of the engines?
Because they didn't expect this to be anything other than routine.
If they knew it was going to blow up, they wouldn't have had the satellite on the vehicle.
This was the full-up test, verifying everything was ready to go.
The point is: SpaceX is cheaper than other space transport systems because it doen't sell you an insurance. When we compare SpaceX launch cost with (e.g.) ESA launch cost, we compare launch cost against launch and insurance cost.
Launch insurance is bookkept separately from launch cost. And you buy it from insurance companies. It typically costs five or six percent of the launch cost, depending on launch vehicle.
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/09/01...
Slashdot Mirror
There are many in the older generations who are anti-Internet and are seemingly afraid that if they even sign up for Internet access their bank balance will disappear and their grandchildren will get kidnapped.
Yeah, I hate it when that happens.
Best solution, if you want to use the internetz, is to not have a bank balance and not have children (thus nicely preventing grandchildren as well). Which seems to be how most slashdottahs do it.
.... In 2011, subscribers were paying an average of $73.63 for cable or satellite, but now that average stands at roughly $103. From a ...
Just curious, $73.63 and $103 per what?
Per year? Per month?
(I own a TV, but I haven't turned it on since I think maybe 2007 or so, and I have no idea how much people pay for cable access.)
The bill includes specific milestones for an unmanned exploration mission by 2018 and a crewed exploration mission by 2021.
So in other words its a ton of hot air and complete horseshit. At best it's a way to secure funding for NASA under a label that'll be hard to attack
This is the authorization bill, not the funding bill.
It tells NASA what to do. Funding them to do that is separate.
The "unmanned exploration mission by 2018" refers to the Insight lander; the "crewed exploration mission by 2021" probably refers to SLS launch EM-2 (testing the launch system with a crew.)
If you weren't convinced that "25 years to Mars" is a horseshit timeframe, its appearance in a Congressional budget bill should remove all doubt.
This isn't a budget bill.
Exactly. And why are they still using useless wheeled rovers, instead of LEGGED robots,
Because wheeled locomotion technology is about five thousand years further down the technology development learning curve. Wheeled rovers are reliable compared to any other locomotion technology.
that can move about a hundred times faster,
The speed of rovers is not limited by how fast the wheels can roll.
and be designed to overcome or go around any obstacle, and virtually never get stuck?
Legged rovers that have better capability of traverse over rough ground than wheeled rovers are yet in the future.
You could make tracked rovers with more obstacle traverse capability-- but they are mechanically more complex, and hence less reliable.
Nope. Venus is more interesting in this regard. Mars is WAY smaller than Earth (about halfway between Earth and our moon, actually closer to our moon), so it's pretty obvious what happened, it simply lost its atmosphere due to a lack of gravity to retain it.
Actually, not. That would be Jeans Escape, but that's not how Mars lost atmosphere. It lost its atmosphere primarily due to the lack of a magnetic field, allowing coronal mass ejections from the sun to slowly strip away the outer layers of the atmosphere.
Its orbit is also way more eccentric than ours, it has no liquid core, it's almost outside the "habitable zone" of our sun...
Really, if you want to take a look at what could be our fate, Venus is where you want to go.
Venus is similar to what Earth will be in several billion years.
But a billion years is a long time.
cost $123.9 million...per year
You're confusing budgeted and actually spent. Wartime expenditures are not restricted to budget.
This is a really good point. In fact, most of the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars was funded off-budget: the Congress would pass their budget not including costs for the wars, and then do a supplement later to fund the wars. A lot of the cost is not accounted to the war. The cost of munitions, for example (the munitions were bought under general military budget, and when they were used in the war they had already been paid for. Of course, they have to be replaced... but that's not cost accounted to the war.
For example. On paper, we budgeted only a few billion for wartime expenditures between 2001 and 2006, yet the actual money spent was in the trillions. My poli-sci teacher said in those 5 years, we spent enough money on the war to fund all healthcare and college for all of the USA for 10 years.
Good summary here: http://time.com/3651697/afghan...
The real polluter is China, at an official 1/3, and far more likely to be close to 50%.
China 28%, the United States next at 16%. Since America has less than 1/4 the population of China, though, we're still putting out 2.5 times more greenhouse gas per person. Source: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissio... alternate source: http://www.ucsusa.org/global_w...
Even now, America is under 33% coal for their electricity, Sadly, theirs continues to rise, while America's continues to drop.
yep, America is about a third: http://www.eia.gov/energy_in_b... That's primarily because of the drop in cost of petroleum and natural gas. I don't have good numbers for China, but they do burn a lot of coal.
The one that should be putting their money into dramately lowering their emissions is China.
The answer is "both". Since China already uses only 40% as much fossil fuel per person than the US does, it's going to be 2.5 times easier to reduce the US emissions, of course. But, this is exactly why it is a wicked hard problem : no single actor, no single organization, no single country can solve the problem on its own. The problem is global in scale.
Oh, and I occasionally use the camera.
Once I have those loaded, why in the world would I want to download an "app"? To play with Pokemons?
News media's use of confidential sources has been tested and upheld MANY times.
It's been tested many times-- but not always upheld. Most recently, New York Times reporter James Risen faced the threat jail time for refusing to reveal his source for a story: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01... https://www.thenation.com/arti...
In the words of Leanne Phillips" "Can a journalist be forced to reveal confidential sources? The answer appears to be no...as long as that journalist is willing to go to jail." https://www.legalzoom.com/arti...
some others:
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/04/10/17678244-journalists-watch-as-reporter-faces-jail-time-for-not-revealing-sources?lite
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/04/08/fox-news-reporter-facing-jail-for-protecting-source-mainstream-media-yawns-raising-questions-of-liberal-bias/
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/press_box/2005/12/lipservice_journalism.html
http://www.rcfp.org/jailed-journalists
Nobody expected anything to be on it, and nothing was.
A cynical person might think that the point of breaking the iPhone security wasn't to see what was on the phone at all, since they were already mostly sure nothing was there, but was to force Apple to break their security in a case where the FBI could shout "terrorism! National security!".
The FBI told them "well, after you break your own security, you can erase the software"... but you do know that there was a whole queue of other police departments and other FBI cases lined up to make the same demand, if they acceded to the first one.
IMO modern sci-fi has been "dumbed" down to just action flicks.
Modern sci-fi is not entirely dumbed-down action flicks; you just have to be a little choosy and spend some time looking. I loved the book The Martian, which has a lot of technology in it (the movie was a bit dumbed down compared to the book, but not entirely). A little older, I also liked Mars Crossing, another sci fi novel about Mars with a lot of realistic details.
Other than those, check out the revelation space series by Alastair Reynolds, an astrophysicist who writes mostly space-opera material, but still holding to the laws of physics. Oh, and Vernor Vinge for hard-SF space opera too, of course. And if you want mind-blowing physics, check out Greg Egan.
Adjustable quality would be a nice user control to have, if you're paying for bandwidth, you should be able to decide how much bandwidth to use on what downloads.
So, they got Ireland's tax authority's "blessing" to not pay taxes to other countries. Isn't that nice. Getting a third party's consent doesn't give you the right to not pay taxes in the place where income is earned.
If I get Ireland's blessing to tell me "you don't have to pay US taxes", that does not affect my IRS income tax bill.
I have only apathy-to-mild-antipathy for Apple, but think it's pretty abusive of these governments to attempt to charge them retroactively for taxes that they were dodging fair and square....
They were lying. I'm not sure that this counts as "dodging taxes fair and square." They were telling one government that their intellectual property was insanely valuable; that's why their offshore subsidiary that didn't make any product could bookkeep tons of profit on that product they didn't make. And they were telling another government that the same intellectual property had little value at all, that's why their offshore subsidiary didn't have to pay licensing fees to the main corporation (which would have been income to Apple.)
When you lie, and get caught at it, you're subject to sanctions. You're not allowed to pretend all your income was earned in a country that does not, actually, produce any product. That's fraud.
God? What in the world are you talking about? You're some sort of weird God-libertarian-fundamentalist?
Basically, governments provide services. These services have to be paid for. This is the price of living in society. "God" has nothing to do with it.
If you don't like it, sorry. A planet with six billion people requires some significant amount of structure. That's the way it is. If you want to move to a place where you don't have to live with other people, you're going to have to find a different planet.
Libertarians aren't actually interested in making us more free, but they like to tout their party line as saying that it does.
> The difficulty is that the opposite,
You're begging the question.
For the majority of people ...
Exactly. The majority.
Maybe even the overwhelming majority of people.
The difficulty is, a minority of people can be a big, big problem.
It's not good enough to have rules that merely work for the "majority" of people in the "majority" of cases. It's not good enough to have rules that assume people are "smart enough to understand the _context_", rules that work except "only a complete idiot would--", or rules that work well except for "the insecurity / immature of people, and mis-use of the picture." People aren't all "smart enough", some people are "complete idiots", people are "insecure", people are "immature", and people "mis-use pictures".
And, worse, you know what? Those people point to you as the one who "isn't smart enough", is "a complete idiot", and "insecure", "immature", and probably "mis-use pictures".
I will agree, restrictions are restrictions... and I find them icky. However, my point was that there's nothing illegal about it.
I don't recall anybody suggesting that it was illegal. Undesirable, possibly-- but not illegal.
Facebook isn't a news source, it's social media.
Facebook isn't a news source, it's a communications medium.
Censorship by Facebook is censoring communications. As long as Facebook isn't the only, or the dominant, communications medium, their censorship is irrelevant. To the extent that they are the dominant communciations medium, however, censorship by Facebook is simply: censorship.
In this case, I'll still go with the conclusion that Facebook is not, yet, dominant. So I'm not particularly concerned. Yet.
But, it doesn't matter who is restricting your freedom: government or corporations, restrictions are restrictions.
Is what I'm talking about too complicated for you?
No, the opposite: you're too simple for me.
Your point is basically that censorship is bad when it's done by a government, but anybody else can do it, no problem. The real world is somewhat more complicated. If one particular channel for information is the dominant channel for information exchange, yes, it does matter if they are picking and choosing what opinions they allow to be communicated over their channel.
You may like to shout "freedom, freedom, corporations need to have freedom!" all you like, but in fact, what Facebook is doing, in censoring their information flow, is to take away freedom from their users.
With that said, I think that in this particular case, Facebook has a real reason for their actions. But the belief "it doesn't matter when they restrict our freedoms because we only care about it when the government restricts freedoms" is a poor argument.
No it isn't. Even Italy has declared that certain things are off limits when they involve children.
Exactly. This is the problem when you have inflexible rules: a rule "no naked pictures of 9-year-old girls" sure sounds like a completely uncontroversial rule, one for which it's even reasonable to say "this rule has no exceptions; we just can't allow that kind of naked pictures on our site."
The difficulty is that the opposite, approach, which is to allow human judgement to make exceptions to the rules, is just as bad, and just as subject to abuse.
It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation for them. Making exceptions to rules on naked pictures of children is just as likely to give problems.
If Facebook is considered a 'mainstay of democratic society' you know the news media is complete fucking disconnected from reality.
Free and uncensored communication is the mainstay of democratic society.
Facebook just happens to be the medium that a very large fraction of people are using to accomplish this, right at the moment.
Why was it even attached during the test of the engines?
Because they didn't expect this to be anything other than routine. If they knew it was going to blow up, they wouldn't have had the satellite on the vehicle.
This was the full-up test, verifying everything was ready to go.
The point is: SpaceX is cheaper than other space transport systems because it doen't sell you an insurance. When we compare SpaceX launch cost with (e.g.) ESA launch cost, we compare launch cost against launch and insurance cost.
Launch insurance is bookkept separately from launch cost. And you buy it from insurance companies. It typically costs five or six percent of the launch cost, depending on launch vehicle. http://www.cnbc.com/2016/09/01...