I think this depends a lot on the staffing. If you have a 3 person crew, you are unlikely to staff a physician. If you have a dozen or more, I think you should.
Even if you do send a Doctor, physicians do get sick and have accidents, and there is the famous case where the South Pole's Stations Doctor had to operate on herself. And, of course, if your physician dies, you will need a plan B.
Yes, of course, but think of this from an engineering sense. You try and do something for the very first time with a new device and it instantly fails. Now, it is possible that some random error happened to happen just then, but it is much more probably that the failure is connected with the use of new capabilities.
Now, as it happens, the failure is software related, so it is natural to blame a software error. Could be wrong, but that (IMO) is the way to bet.
Yes. I remember one long flyer the Navy put out. It included things like, "drives with the windows down" (might be a drug user, getting rid of the smell) and, then, later on, "drives with the windows up" (wouldn't want the smell to get out). This, note, was in a flyer intended to get people to nark on their co-workers.
Here is a Clue : It's Grail's first video, not anything like the first video.
Never mind Luna 3 in 1959 (which was stills). Never mind Lunar Orbiter (stills) and Apollo (movies). Never mind that Clementine mapped the whole of the Far Side over a decade ago. What about Selene ? It had an HD camera, and sent back video of far side, including cool shots like this one, of Malapert Mt and Shackleton Crater, at the Lunar South Pole, or this video of Tsiolkovsky Crater, deep into the Far Side. These videos are cool, and worth spending some time with.
Where to start. First, go out at night - all those little dots in the sky ? They're called stars, and are all outside our solar system. (This has been known, depending on your point of view, for at least 400 years, and probably for 2 or more millennia.)
Second, it is pretty common for meteorites contain little inclusions of interstellar matter - organic matter, silica, and even (really tiny) diamonds. And, while we are at it, a certain fraction of the micro-meteors observed with radar (to get their orbits) turn out to be interstellar as well. (The fraction of interstellar micro-meteors suggests that there may be a few kg-sized interstellar meteorites waiting to be picked up out of the thousands in the Antarctic meteorite fields, which would be something.)
So, this is nice research, but it is only the first in its area, and it was silly of them to say "for the very first time."
It is sad that USA is now following Germany's example. We are building overly complex, hugely expensive equipment that cannot be easily field serviced, and building them in limited numbers because we cannot afford them in great quantity.
I would not say that there is "virtually no risk" from the X-ray backscatter scanners. The spot is actually fairly dangerous if it dwells on any particular part of you, and it's the software that keeps that from happening. Both the general experience with computers and accidents with high energy medical probes and treatments indicates that that risk is definitely not zero. There is at present no indication at the device to tell you what it's doing, so you are trusting in the system to keep you safe.
I agree with you totally about the zero benefit, but then I think it's all security theater. It's not just that "no study has ever shown that these scanners provide any benefit." It's that the threat model makes no sense, and the machinery doesn't actually mitigate the threat. Terrorists would (IMHO) create more terror by blowing up the line at security than by taking down a plane, and even a perfect scanner wouldn't stop that.
Particularly if they can legally pay the debt in money they print.
But we don't need to go to extremes. We could also cut the defense budget in half and never notice the difference (in foreign affairs - of course, a good portion of the country would basically go broke). There is plenty of money to do this stuff, if we thought it was truly important to do.
I often thought that Kennedy should have said "by 1975." By 1970 made the Saturn V inevitable (unless we had gone for the direct NOVA rocket, which would have been worse). 1975 would have meant that we would have built a space station and likely used nuclear (NERVA) from there to the Moon.
Having said that, it was really the funding, which was slashed (by Nixon and company) once we got to the Moon. If the funding gets slashed in a Government program, well there goes the program. Now, if the Russians had gotten to the Moon first...
(I am assuming that all the unmanned missions would have been flown same as in the real world, and of course that is a big assumption.)
We would know very little about the formation and early evolution of the solar system. Apollo nailed that, and our current knowledge is largely based on Apollo samples. The Soviet Luna samples would help, but I don't think they would be enough.
We also probably wouldn't have any Lunar Laser Ranging (that's a harder call, but all of the early LLR was US, and I don't think that without the Apollo LLR the French would have put retroreflectors on the Lunakhods). That, plus no Apollo ALSEP seimo network, would mean we would know very little about Moon's deep interior, such as whether or not it has a core.
I think that those are the two biggest ones.
Of course, if Apollo had never happened, Alexi Leonid would probably have been the first man on the Moon, but the implications of that are too far outside the reach of my crystal ball.
You can't tell from a press release if what they are planning to do is credible, but the basic outline is, and long overdue. There are certainly enough labs who do, e.g., medical or nuclear power radiology who would not be tied to the TSA's purse strings, so finding an independent lab shouldn't be hard if they want to.
If I was running this study, I would know is going to get attacked every-which-way, so I would do my best to make sure it was credible. Anything less would be a waste of time. But, maybe that's just me.
I am not saying that I am in favor of this, but in software a world without copyright would in many ways be similar to a world where everything had a BSD license.
And, I would argue that the BSD license has been more important to the actual growth of open standards computing and the Internet than GPL, especially GPL v3.
Here is a simpler proposal that would strike fear and loathing in their hearts, and requires no government oversight :
That content creators have a "moral right" to audit the books of those controlling their revenues. (Such rights are generally lacking, especially in the music business, where it is excluded by contract.) I have yet to meet a professional musician who wasn't convinced that their record label was stealing them blind, which, of course, they are, given that no musician can audit their books.
Why the hell do these morons keep tabling impossible and/or extremely EXPENSIVE (compute-wise) proposals without talking to someone who knows ANYTHING about IT and technology FIRST?
They probably did, they just didn't like the answers they got.
Probably not. They look for consultants who tell them what they want to hear. (I have some exposure in that industry, and it is very tough to get consultant jobs if you don't toe the party line.)
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I think this depends a lot on the staffing. If you have a 3 person crew, you are unlikely to staff a physician. If you have a dozen or more, I think you should.
Even if you do send a Doctor, physicians do get sick and have accidents, and there is the famous case where the South Pole's Stations Doctor had to operate on herself. And, of course, if your physician dies, you will need a plan B.
Unless you are planning to live in Deep Space. Then, by all means, proceed.
Yes, of course, but think of this from an engineering sense. You try and do something for the very first time with a new device and it instantly fails. Now, it is possible that some random error happened to happen just then, but it is much more probably that the failure is connected with the use of new capabilities.
Now, as it happens, the failure is software related, so it is natural to blame a software error. Could be wrong, but that (IMO) is the way to bet.
The summary is so contradictory because it quotes from 2 articles, and each of them is completely different.
" A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, (Emerson)
What are the chances chips would fail in a 20-30 minute period just after launch but before Mars transfer orbit insertion ?
No, I bet this was a programming error, coupled with a near total failure to test the software.
That is how opposition parties and groups are supposed to behave - to point out and oppose stupid things being promoted by the other side.
Shear opposition without selection is stupid, but so is a bought-and-paid-for bipartisanship.
Visual Basic. The very thought scares me.
In Russian occupied Poland, with the tsarist secret police, the threat of being sent to Siberia was no joke.
Yes. I remember one long flyer the Navy put out. It included things like, "drives with the windows down" (might be a drug user, getting rid of the smell) and, then, later on, "drives with the windows up" (wouldn't want the smell to get out). This, note, was in a flyer intended to get people to nark on their co-workers.
I remember the loathsome brochures passed around in the Government during the Reagan / G.H.W. Bush drug wars years. They basically boiled down to
- anyone acting strangely might be on drugs, and
- anyone not acting strangely might be on drugs, and covering it up.
Sounds like the DOJ is falling down the same rathole once again.
Here is a Clue : It's Grail's first video, not anything like the first video.
Never mind Luna 3 in 1959 (which was stills). Never mind Lunar Orbiter (stills) and Apollo (movies). Never mind that Clementine mapped the whole of the Far Side over a decade ago. What about Selene ? It had an HD camera, and sent back video of far side, including cool shots like this one, of Malapert Mt and Shackleton Crater, at the Lunar South Pole, or this video of Tsiolkovsky Crater, deep into the Far Side. These videos are cool, and worth spending some time with.
There are heavy elements that the Sun doesn't contain.
Not really, except for the short-lived heavy radionuclides. Even Uranium has been seen in solar spectra.
Where to start. First, go out at night - all those little dots in the sky ? They're called stars, and are all outside our solar system. (This has been known, depending on your point of view, for at least 400 years, and probably for 2 or more millennia.)
Second, it is pretty common for meteorites contain little inclusions of interstellar matter - organic matter, silica, and even (really tiny) diamonds. And, while we are at it, a certain fraction of the micro-meteors observed with radar (to get their orbits) turn out to be interstellar as well. (The fraction of interstellar micro-meteors suggests that there may be a few kg-sized interstellar meteorites waiting to be picked up out of the thousands in the Antarctic meteorite fields, which would be something.)
So, this is nice research, but it is only the first in its area, and it was silly of them to say "for the very first time."
It is sad that USA is now following Germany's example. We are building overly complex, hugely expensive equipment that cannot be easily field serviced, and building them in limited numbers because we cannot afford them in great quantity.
Superiority - by Arthur C. Clarke
I would not say that there is "virtually no risk" from the X-ray backscatter scanners. The spot is actually fairly dangerous if it dwells on any particular part of you, and it's the software that keeps that from happening. Both the general experience with computers and accidents with high energy medical probes and treatments indicates that that risk is definitely not zero. There is at present no indication at the device to tell you what it's doing, so you are trusting in the system to keep you safe.
I agree with you totally about the zero benefit, but then I think it's all security theater. It's not just that "no study has ever shown that these scanners provide any benefit." It's that the threat model makes no sense, and the machinery doesn't actually mitigate the threat. Terrorists would (IMHO) create more terror by blowing up the line at security than by taking down a plane, and even a perfect scanner wouldn't stop that.
Particularly if they can legally pay the debt in money they print.
But we don't need to go to extremes. We could also cut the defense budget in half and never notice the difference (in foreign affairs - of course, a good portion of the country would basically go broke). There is plenty of money to do this stuff, if we thought it was truly important to do.
I often thought that Kennedy should have said "by 1975." By 1970 made the Saturn V inevitable (unless we had gone for the direct NOVA rocket, which would have been worse). 1975 would have meant that we would have built a space station and likely used nuclear (NERVA) from there to the Moon.
Having said that, it was really the funding, which was slashed (by Nixon and company) once we got to the Moon. If the funding gets slashed in a Government program, well there goes the program. Now, if the Russians had gotten to the Moon first...
(I am assuming that all the unmanned missions would have been flown same as in the real world, and of course that is a big assumption .)
We would know very little about the formation and early evolution of the solar system. Apollo nailed that, and our current knowledge is largely based on Apollo samples. The Soviet Luna samples would help, but I don't think they would be enough.
We also probably wouldn't have any Lunar Laser Ranging (that's a harder call, but all of the early LLR was US, and I don't think that without the Apollo LLR
the French would have put retroreflectors on the Lunakhods). That, plus no Apollo ALSEP seimo network, would mean we would know very little about Moon's deep interior, such as whether or not it has a core.
I think that those are the two biggest ones.
Of course, if Apollo had never happened, Alexi Leonid would probably have been the first man on the Moon, but the implications of that are too far outside the reach of my crystal ball.
You have to start somewhere...
You can't tell from a press release if what they are planning to do is credible, but the basic outline is, and long overdue. There are certainly enough labs who do, e.g., medical or nuclear power radiology who would not be tied to the TSA's purse strings, so finding an independent lab shouldn't be hard if they want to.
If I was running this study, I would know is going to get attacked every-which-way, so I would do my best to make
sure it was credible. Anything less would be a waste of time. But, maybe that's just me.
I am not saying that I am in favor of this, but in software a world without copyright would in many ways be similar to a world where everything had a BSD license.
And, I would argue that the BSD license has been more important to the actual growth of open standards computing and the Internet than GPL, especially GPL v3.
Here is a simpler proposal that would strike fear and loathing in their hearts, and requires no government oversight :
That content creators have a "moral right" to audit the books of those controlling their revenues. (Such rights are generally lacking, especially in the music business, where it is excluded by contract.) I have yet to meet a professional musician who wasn't convinced that their record label was stealing them blind, which, of course, they are, given that no musician can audit their books.
Why the hell do these morons keep tabling impossible and/or extremely EXPENSIVE (compute-wise) proposals without talking to someone who knows ANYTHING about IT and technology FIRST?
They probably did, they just didn't like the answers they got.
Probably not. They look for consultants who tell them what they want to hear. (I have some exposure in that industry, and it is very tough to get consultant jobs if you don't toe the party line.)
We are past peak copyright, and they know it, and are desperate.
The WSJ has added an element of tabloid trashiness to it's editorial mix.
It's been there since the Carter Administration. Back then, it was the Panama Canal treaty, but it's always something.