The 9/11 hijackers had lots of connections in Germany. That's the kind of stuff they are looking for because Germany doesn't have the means or will to do it themselves. The US is not trying to topple the German government by engineering internal conflicts within the Bundestag based on interoffice email. They are trying to keep bad stuff from happening by listening to communications of terrorists lodging in Germany.
You can call me a fascist or whatever but if letting a supercomputer cluster sift through my meaningless personal emails (which it will disregard) is the price I have to pay for not getting planes crashed on me, then I'll pay it.
In all likelihood this is an anomaly of the highest order. They probably got this from some data mining software that processes internet traffic. I'm not surprised that a program would pick this up and not realize that it's a fictional character.
Anyway, you have to expect that no system is perfect and that mistakes will be made from time to time. This was just one of those wacky mistakes. I'd sleep easy. The rest of what they are doing is probably accurate and affective. We'll just never know one way or the other. But since the country isn't a pile of ashes right now, I think the intelligence community is doing their job pretty well.
It all depends on the mission parameters. for a science outpost, you don't want them wasting their time trying to get the beans to grow. In that case, it's worth the investment to launch a bunch of food up there. a lot of the cost of launch goes into the engineering of the probe/craft. If it's just a glorified FedEx, it will probably be "cheap". That is, $25 million as opposed to $800 million.
for a colony of 50 people it makes sense to send them some starter food and the machinery to build a biosphere/habitat. Something like a plastics factory, mini-foundry and nuclear reactor. Given the proper starter supplies, power sources and smart, tough people you could make a pretty nifty and mostly self-sustaining settlement.
as far as food goes, there's stuff you can synthesize like you mentioned. If you have a functional greenhouse and a botanist along, you can grow a balanced diet too. If you want protein from animals, that requires some kind of small mars-farm which would probably be a souped up greenhouse with chickens and bunnies running around.
That's all settlement type stuff. The initial missions (here's hoping that there will be) will probably just ship dried and powdered food. a few tons of that should be able to hold over a 6 person crew for a couple years. Just send a cheap dumb cargo launch to land before the humans.
Oxygen can also come from reacting CO2 with hydrogen. It gives you graphite and water. split the water again, breathe the oxygen, hydrate the CO2 and repeat. a small supply of hydrogen that you can get from the air or polar caps is all you need. That and power.
Yeah. That is true. But are they growing their own food?
They could if they wanted to. It's just that submarines are war machines. If for some reason they wanted to retrofit all the weapon systems with greenhouses and UV lamps, I'm confident that they could stay submerged for years.
really though, submarines and a mars colony are apples and oranges. I'm just making a point that a self sustaining martian colony is totally possible as long as you have an energy source, local resources and a little smarts.
Another idea is ocean habitats. It seems very strange to me that we haven't 'prototyped' long-term human sustenance studies by building an "International Ocean Station" somewhere in the Marianas trench or something... Perhaps we have, perhaps its not useful, but it sure would be interesting to see all the details about human sustenance that an underwater, sealed 'biosphere X' kind of project could provide...
The Navy has been using submarines with nuclear power sources and life support systems for decades.
In my sharp shooting class (yes really) the instructor was telling us about Kevlar. Apparently, it works by distributing the force of impact because it's a lattice of stiff plasticy stuff. Problem is, if you hit it or drop it, you crack that lattice and if you get hit in that spot, the Kevlar won't do much.
He was bemoaning the fact that the army went from 25 cent metal helmets to $50 Kevlar ones because all you had to do was drop it a few times to render it useless. Over the course of a few years, it's pretty likely that it will get banged around quite a bit.
Back to the point, this stuff sounds like it's still linked to Kevlar. I wonder if it still relies on Kevlar's properties and is vulnerable to the same problems.
Dude, I'm not dictating, I'm just expressing my opinion that weddings themed after tacky sci-fi and fantasy stuff is depressing and pathetic. They are certainly entitled to do whatever they want but I'm also entitled to say that they have their senses of appropriateness and priorities way out of whack.
Costumes and make-believe are for birthday parties and comic book conventions. Making promises free of goblins, robots and other silly shit is for weddings. Again, just my opinion.
I'm all about going on role-playing benders and seeing space/robot/magic movies on opening night (and then again the day after) but when I see people getting married in Klingon garb (movies and next generation, not the original series) it makes me want to give them wedgies and go join the football team.
I am married and I did it without Vulcan ears, blaster pistols, wizards or trolls. We got hitched in a church. We made a promise to each other and God that we would be together. That's something meaningful and solemn and we couldn't be happier with our marriage.
We then had a reception where we all got tipsy and silly. My groomsmen and I geeked out and everyone had a fun, carefree time.
There are some things that you can take with a light heart and some things that you should take seriously. My wedding vows are serious. I can't imagine having something that important in my life being tied to some crappy '70s TV show or some board game played by sweaty, greasy teenagers.
Would you go to a bar mitzvah or baptism in bunny ears?
They don't pay overtime and haven't in a while. Sometimes I do 5 or 10 hours over 40 but I'm salaried so I just take it as part of the job.
Also, if I do something really heroic, I usually get some kind of merit-based bonus. $200 or $300.
Perhaps I work as a company who spoils me but I'm not troubled too much by not getting overtime. If I thought I was being taken advantage of though, I'd start hitting the monster boards.
This is probably just me but I find all of this really mortifying and stupid. I'm a big geek. I can count in klingon and I know backstories of Star Wars characters that appeared on screen for 2 seconds.
Still, it really rubs be the wrong way to think that people can be so into this that they will taint an important day like that with it. I mean really, you're making a promise to spend your life with someone and they basically make a joke of it. Why would you do that? It's supposed to be a solem occasion. Do you want to show pictures of that to your kids? Why not just dress up as clowns and get married by a hedgehog?
Get silly at your reception but the idea of getting married with lightsabers or in elvish really gives me the creeps.
I can see paying for something like Lexus Nexus or some kind of medical information. In that case it might be worth paying for accountable, up to date data that you would have to work very hard to find the traditional ways. Looking for a particular procedure or precedent could take seconds online as opposed to looking through stacks of books.
General interest stuff like your friend seems to be pedaling should be and is free.
Since the disc is made out of paper, and the current number of optical discs is about 20 billion per year, it is easy to use even more trees.
so you prefer to use hydrocarbons to make the disks rather than trees? Last time I checked, it's faster to grow a tree than conjure up oil from biomass.
So Are manned ones in the right context like Mars.
Humans can run out of food and air, and get tired and homesick.
On Mars humans can make their own air water and food provided a power source like a portable nuclear reactor and the air and ground around them. It's called living in-situ. As long as you don't send flakes, the homesickness isn't an issue. They're allowed to sleep and would have more waking time than the rovers so I wouldn't worry about them getting "tired".
Robots can run basically forever, until something breaks or they run out of juice.
You just contradicted yourself there.
If these things prove 1/50 as durable as Galileo did, they'll provide science more than we ever could have hoped for.
Perhaps but humans on the surface would have been able to work faster and smarter these probes. Galileo was well suited to its mission and a human would not have been. In the case of Mars, humans are much better suited.
My point is that if we have something that allows users to say that a copy is ok, that gets you off the hook in the legal sense. It's not an airtight privacy thing as we've both pointed out but if you have some sort of log showing how the data was copied, you can cover your ass in court by showing that you got the chatlog in a legal manner.
This could be taken care of with a little work on the app. Perhaps have a setting that says "I allow others to record my conversations". Have it checked by default. Kind of like an EULA option.
If a remote user hits ctrl-a, it only highlights text where the other person has the "record" option checked. This might actually find some fans in the tinfoil hat crowd since it would be a kind of privacy measure.
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Naw, hippies and PETA folks usually just give a shit about animals if they are cute, magestic or they think they are smart.
The 9/11 hijackers had lots of connections in Germany. That's the kind of stuff they are looking for because Germany doesn't have the means or will to do it themselves. The US is not trying to topple the German government by engineering internal conflicts within the Bundestag based on interoffice email. They are trying to keep bad stuff from happening by listening to communications of terrorists lodging in Germany.
You can call me a fascist or whatever but if letting a supercomputer cluster sift through my meaningless personal emails (which it will disregard) is the price I have to pay for not getting planes crashed on me, then I'll pay it.
In all likelihood this is an anomaly of the highest order. They probably got this from some data mining software that processes internet traffic. I'm not surprised that a program would pick this up and not realize that it's a fictional character.
Anyway, you have to expect that no system is perfect and that mistakes will be made from time to time. This was just one of those wacky mistakes. I'd sleep easy. The rest of what they are doing is probably accurate and affective. We'll just never know one way or the other. But since the country isn't a pile of ashes right now, I think the intelligence community is doing their job pretty well.
It all depends on the mission parameters. for a science outpost, you don't want them wasting their time trying to get the beans to grow. In that case, it's worth the investment to launch a bunch of food up there. a lot of the cost of launch goes into the engineering of the probe/craft. If it's just a glorified FedEx, it will probably be "cheap". That is, $25 million as opposed to $800 million.
for a colony of 50 people it makes sense to send them some starter food and the machinery to build a biosphere/habitat. Something like a plastics factory, mini-foundry and nuclear reactor. Given the proper starter supplies, power sources and smart, tough people you could make a pretty nifty and mostly self-sustaining settlement.
cool, I hadn't considered that.
as far as food goes, there's stuff you can synthesize like you mentioned. If you have a functional greenhouse and a botanist along, you can grow a balanced diet too. If you want protein from animals, that requires some kind of small mars-farm which would probably be a souped up greenhouse with chickens and bunnies running around.
That's all settlement type stuff. The initial missions (here's hoping that there will be) will probably just ship dried and powdered food. a few tons of that should be able to hold over a 6 person crew for a couple years. Just send a cheap dumb cargo launch to land before the humans.
Unless someones found a decent source of water on Mars, we ain't going there.
The thousands of cubic kilometers of water on both poles of the planet aren't enough for you? You must take long showers.
Oxygen can also come from reacting CO2 with hydrogen. It gives you graphite and water. split the water again, breathe the oxygen, hydrate the CO2 and repeat. a small supply of hydrogen that you can get from the air or polar caps is all you need. That and power.
Yeah. That is true. But are they growing their own food?
They could if they wanted to. It's just that submarines are war machines. If for some reason they wanted to retrofit all the weapon systems with greenhouses and UV lamps, I'm confident that they could stay submerged for years.
really though, submarines and a mars colony are apples and oranges. I'm just making a point that a self sustaining martian colony is totally possible as long as you have an energy source, local resources and a little smarts.
Another idea is ocean habitats. It seems very strange to me that we haven't 'prototyped' long-term human sustenance studies by building an "International Ocean Station" somewhere in the Marianas trench or something ... Perhaps we have, perhaps its not useful, but it sure would be interesting to see all the details about human sustenance that an underwater, sealed 'biosphere X' kind of project could provide...
The Navy has been using submarines with nuclear power sources and life support systems for decades.
I would have posted the Onion link but they went and hid all their archives unless you pay them money.
We grow tired of your insolence. Prepare for WAR!
Nifty stuff, although it seems that its resistance to stabbing has to be called into question when you consider that it's also sewable.
not getting into situations where it breaks down to a knife fight is probably the best defense against that.
In my sharp shooting class (yes really) the instructor was telling us about Kevlar. Apparently, it works by distributing the force of impact because it's a lattice of stiff plasticy stuff. Problem is, if you hit it or drop it, you crack that lattice and if you get hit in that spot, the Kevlar won't do much.
He was bemoaning the fact that the army went from 25 cent metal helmets to $50 Kevlar ones because all you had to do was drop it a few times to render it useless. Over the course of a few years, it's pretty likely that it will get banged around quite a bit.
Back to the point, this stuff sounds like it's still linked to Kevlar. I wonder if it still relies on Kevlar's properties and is vulnerable to the same problems.
In seriousness, there are the 4 million brits who stand to lose their homes,
God didn't create Holland, the dutch did.
Dude, I'm not dictating, I'm just expressing my opinion that weddings themed after tacky sci-fi and fantasy stuff is depressing and pathetic. They are certainly entitled to do whatever they want but I'm also entitled to say that they have their senses of appropriateness and priorities way out of whack.
Costumes and make-believe are for birthday parties and comic book conventions. Making promises free of goblins, robots and other silly shit is for weddings. Again, just my opinion.
I'm all about going on role-playing benders and seeing space/robot/magic movies on opening night (and then again the day after) but when I see people getting married in Klingon garb (movies and next generation, not the original series) it makes me want to give them wedgies and go join the football team.
I am married and I did it without Vulcan ears, blaster pistols, wizards or trolls. We got hitched in a church. We made a promise to each other and God that we would be together. That's something meaningful and solemn and we couldn't be happier with our marriage.
We then had a reception where we all got tipsy and silly. My groomsmen and I geeked out and everyone had a fun, carefree time.
There are some things that you can take with a light heart and some things that you should take seriously. My wedding vows are serious. I can't imagine having something that important in my life being tied to some crappy '70s TV show or some board game played by sweaty, greasy teenagers.
Would you go to a bar mitzvah or baptism in bunny ears?
They don't pay overtime and haven't in a while. Sometimes I do 5 or 10 hours over 40 but I'm salaried so I just take it as part of the job.
Also, if I do something really heroic, I usually get some kind of merit-based bonus. $200 or $300.
Perhaps I work as a company who spoils me but I'm not troubled too much by not getting overtime. If I thought I was being taken advantage of though, I'd start hitting the monster boards.
This is probably just me but I find all of this really mortifying and stupid. I'm a big geek. I can count in klingon and I know backstories of Star Wars characters that appeared on screen for 2 seconds.
Still, it really rubs be the wrong way to think that people can be so into this that they will taint an important day like that with it. I mean really, you're making a promise to spend your life with someone and they basically make a joke of it. Why would you do that? It's supposed to be a solem occasion. Do you want to show pictures of that to your kids? Why not just dress up as clowns and get married by a hedgehog?
Get silly at your reception but the idea of getting married with lightsabers or in elvish really gives me the creeps.
I can see paying for something like Lexus Nexus or some kind of medical information. In that case it might be worth paying for accountable, up to date data that you would have to work very hard to find the traditional ways. Looking for a particular procedure or precedent could take seconds online as opposed to looking through stacks of books.
General interest stuff like your friend seems to be pedaling should be and is free.
Since the disc is made out of paper, and the current number of optical discs is about 20 billion per year, it is easy to use even more trees.
so you prefer to use hydrocarbons to make the disks rather than trees? Last time I checked, it's faster to grow a tree than conjure up oil from biomass.
Can you think of a more cost-effective way for NASA to spend that money?
They could publish another report that says "saftey is great. Let's be safe."
Can you think of a more cost-effective way for NASA to spend that money?
Hire a better administrator.
Unmanned missions are great.
So Are manned ones in the right context like Mars.
Humans can run out of food and air, and get tired and homesick.
On Mars humans can make their own air water and food provided a power source like a portable nuclear reactor and the air and ground around them. It's called living in-situ. As long as you don't send flakes, the homesickness isn't an issue. They're allowed to sleep and would have more waking time than the rovers so I wouldn't worry about them getting "tired".
Robots can run basically forever, until something breaks or they run out of juice.
You just contradicted yourself there.
If these things prove 1/50 as durable as Galileo did, they'll provide science more than we ever could have hoped for.
Perhaps but humans on the surface would have been able to work faster and smarter these probes. Galileo was well suited to its mission and a human would not have been. In the case of Mars, humans are much better suited.
My point is that if we have something that allows users to say that a copy is ok, that gets you off the hook in the legal sense. It's not an airtight privacy thing as we've both pointed out but if you have some sort of log showing how the data was copied, you can cover your ass in court by showing that you got the chatlog in a legal manner.
This could be taken care of with a little work on the app. Perhaps have a setting that says "I allow others to record my conversations". Have it checked by default. Kind of like an EULA option.
If a remote user hits ctrl-a, it only highlights text where the other person has the "record" option checked. This might actually find some fans in the tinfoil hat crowd since it would be a kind of privacy measure.
Of course it wouldn't prevent screenshots.