Nuclear is my vote for meeting the needs of the future, but i suppose your millage may vary.
Let me know when you buy and use that nuclear-powered laptop. I want to be the first one to giggle and point and say "Dood, your privates are glowing!" Nuclear power is mostly wonderful, but there are some things it just won't help directly. Laptops and automobiles are just two of them.
The people who are paying attention realize that fuel cells likewise are not a panacea, but may be a good substitute for batteries in many situations.
Also, fuel cells might pollute less than internal combustion engines used in vehicles. Yes, this is less certain, because it depends on what fuel the cell uses, and where that fuel comes from, and how. It is likely that the end-to-end solution using fuel cells could cause less acid rain and smog, but perhaps more carbon dioxide release. Why? They exclude atmospheric nitrogen etc from the "combustion", so compounds such as N02 are not produced. If you make the fuel for the cell at a big refinery somewhere, sophisticated, expensive anti-pollution equipment can be installed at that conveniently central location. But fuel cells might overall emit more carbon, because perhaps we don't have an ideal way of generating the particular fuel that they will require. The carbon might be emitted at the refinery, when coal/oil is turned into H2, some simple hydrocarbon, or an alcohol.
(Note that there are also other issues that muddle the comparisons of use in automobiles. Note the comparative ease of incorporating a regenerative braking system into a fuel cell car versus a traditional car.)
Re:Clever way to select the frequency of light
on
Solar Surgery
·
· Score: 1
Would the correct frequencys of light be strong enough in sunlight though or will the atmosphere filter them out?
That I do not know. Murphy's Law would suggest no.:-)
I'd be worried about somebody doing something like eye surgery on me with this thing. I'm guessing a fancy laser for eye surgery has all sorts of fine control over intensity and duration. The fastest fine controls for sunlight would involve stepper motors adjusting the angle of crossed polarizers, I guess. That's not quite as fast as electronic switching...
Clever way to select the frequency of light
on
Solar Surgery
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
There are several ways to solve this, and one of them is extremely clever. Let the light pass though a lens (rather than strictly using mirrors for all your lenses). Different frequencies (colors) of light will refract slightly differently (well, the ones off-axis), unless you have chosen the lens material carefully to avoid this. (Yes, think of the pretty rainbow that a prism makes from sunlight.) These different colors will focus at different distances from that lens. By positioning the end of the optic fiber at different distances from the lens, you selectively pick up different wavelengths.
There was a Japanese company, which made (makes?) large sun-tracking Fresnel lenses, for placement on rooftops. At the focus of the lens, an optic fiber (maybe more of a light-pipe) collected the light, for piping into your building, so that you could have sunlight in your house. They took advantage of this spectrum-separating effect to exclude UV and IR as desired from the pipe. (Those systems, although certainly quite a fine nerd-toy, were ghastly expensive, IMO. Sorry.)
Ah, yes, to subscribe to a list, the subscriber would need to send an email with a largish amount of postage (double the customary amount) to the list maintainer, who would not refund that postage. This postage is held as a deposit.
Then, the list starts sending to the subscriber, and the subscriber starts automatically refunding the postage on each email that the list sends to the subscriber.
If the subscriber fails to refund postage on a single email sent by the list, that consumes the first stamp.
The second stamp is then immediately consumed by the list server sending an automatic email to the subscriber. This automatic email informs the subscriber that he has been dropped from the list's membership, and why, and how to join the list again.
A normal, correct "unsubscribe" request would result in a "you have been dropped from the list" message with your unused deposit attached as another larger-than-normal postage. (Of course, the subscriber's spam filter is likely to automatically refund that postage... But hey, shouldn't a list maintainer get a small perk every now and then?)
This mailing list scheme hinges on good email connectivity, and spam filtering agents that always promptly refund postage for legitimate email from the list. Otherwise, list subscribers would need to post a deposit ample enough to pay for the largest backlog of unread/undelivered mail that they would ever expect to be sent by the list. So poorly connected subscribers need spam filtering agents always runnable at their ISPs.
If somebody breaks into your list, and sends spam to all your subscribers, the subscribers (actually, their spam filters) will fail to refund the postage on that spam email, and your list server will then boot them from the list. Oops. Don't let that happen, and have the subscribers post a large enough deposit to survive several of those glitches. If their deposits are dwindling, somehow warn them.
This mailing list problem can get tricky. Not all list maintainers can just punt the subscribers who do not refund postage. For example, consider a corporate mailing list for all employees of a company? The employer doesn't really ever want to remove employees from the all-employees mailing list (otherwise, it would cease to be an all-employees mailing list). But sometimes spam does get sent through corporate lists. Does the employer let employees accumulate non-refunded postage when this happens? Does it automagically get deducted from the next paychecks?
Do not bother making spam illegal. Make spam cost money. Make all unwanted email cost money.
How? Here's an idea. (Disclaimer: I haven't spent too much time thinking about this.) All email must come with an "electronic stamp", or some equivalent thing that costs the sender money, or computer time, or something. Make it possible for the recipient to "refund" the sender, or otherwise not charge the sender. Now, tie a spam filter into this, so that wanted email automatically gets sent refunds, and unwanted email automatically does not.
Result? Mail to/from your friends is free. Mailing lists may cost slightly more, if list members sometimes fail to refund the list maintainer. In the unlikely event that you email a sociopath, they will earn the postage from a single email from you. In the unlikely event that you send email to a friend and it is eaten by the spam filter (ie. a false positive) you will notice the lack of refunded postage, and surmise that your letter never got through and react accordingly (or surmise that your "friend" has turned into a cheapskate.) Otherwise, this change will cost you little or nothing. Spammers, on the otherhand, will go out of business rapidly. "Opt in" lists really will be opt in, and the first or second or nth time you decline to refund their postage, perhaps they will count that as you wanting to be off their list. The amount of postage should I guess be something comparable to the rates the US Postal Service charges for bulk mail and presorted first class mail. Perhaps $.25 would be enough. Perhaps you'd require higher postage for people you'd never conversed with before. Mail that has insufficient postage can result in "insufficient postage" notification to the sender; the recipient is not shown the email until sufficient postage is provided.
Of course, woe to you and your wallet if somebody hijacks your account and sends out 1,000,000 emails allegedly from you... But maybe, like an ATM machine, your "electronic stamp" vendor knows not to sell you more than $5 of unrefunded stamps per day, and automatically telephones you, or cuts you off, if you send more than your limit. (Still, that would make hacking profitable. Bad. Maybe the destination of the postage must be traceable, and the recipient must be liable for refunding if a crime was involved in the sending.)
I suppose our spam filters still might get spam from politicians and corporations. For people using spam filters, it will just be money that we can take to the bank. For people without spam filters, but with the sense to press the "no refund" button on the mailer, they will still get to keep the postage, though they will have earned it.
How did these geneticists come up with their estimates for the time to replace the previous gene in the population, and when the replacement occurred?
It sounds to me like they completely pulled these numbers out of their hats, especially the estimate of the time it took this allele to replace the previously dominant one(s). How could they possibly know what this number would be?
They talk about this gene as if there are no other alleles other than those possessed by the non-talking family etc. Are there? This would help me believe (or not) their estimate of when the beneficial mutation occurred. But if there is only one very (completely) dominant form of this gene, how would they measure the age of it? How can these scientists realisticly weigh its genetic advantage? The family in England with the mutant copy; do they have the same version of this gene that is possessed by chimps? (This is the unlikely case, and the interesting one. The chimp version may have been the previously dominant version.) Or do they just have some random, harmful mutation of it? (This is the likely case, and less interesting in gauging the importance of this gene.)
They are doing this because they need to do something, and this is something they can do. Their chips are not so expensive and not so toasty, so putting 2 per box is not too expensive or toasty. They were going to have a top-end motherboard with dual processors anyway, so it's not that much more engineering, manufacturing, and support to put dual lower-speed CPUs on the same board in lesser models.
I'm guessing that it was the arrival (and recent maturity) of OS X that makes the dual procs finally worthwhile to a substantial fraction of the users. I do like the resilience (under load) of a multi-processor Unix box!
Um, not that I want Florida to continue to have zilch for mass-transit, but the state of Florida is 3.76 times that of Switzerland, and it is not at all circular in shape. So we would expect travel times to be higher in Florida. And the population density in Switzerland is probably still 50% greater than Florida, so we'd expect mass transit to be more successful there. And Switzerland's cities and towns are older, and so we'd expect them to be denser than Florida's, which are mostly quite new. (I am aware of the anomalous age of the city of St. Augustine.)
Yeah, and we're not on the first iteration of history repeating itself, either! At a Supercomputer Debugging Workshop in 1991 at Los Alamos National Labs, there were some people who proposed (wait for it) converting the runtime behavior of programs into sounds, as an aid to debugging them.
Their ideas didn't strike me as extremely compelling, given the rather linear nature of the medium, but then again, my eyes still mostly work. -- Ben Chase (Hey there, Richard! I should send you email.)
At a local Q&A session held some months ago by my Virginia legislator, I asked my Virginia legislator to repeal UCITA, because it is hardly "Uniform", seeing as how only two of the fifty states have adopted it, and that the rest are unlikely to do so, given all the opposition to it.
His reply? "Well, has it caused any problems?"
Grrrr. So, the model is that our legislators pass laws willy nilly at the behest of industry, and we wait for things to go wrong? I suppose that he thinks that all sorts of software companies will relocate to Virginia to take advantage of our coddling them. I didn't have the presence of mind (or the rudeness, I guess) to complain at the time that he'd sold my rights for a buck.
W00T! Hey, the following should be a required clause in the Viral and Immutable Gnu Public Warranty: "If you're not completely satisfied, the supplier of this software will refund your full purchase price!" It's just one more way RMS & Co can keep people from charging $$$ for GPL software!:-)
Or maybe "Walking on Broken Glass", by Annie Lennox, off the album Diva:
You were the sweetest thing that I ever knew But I don't care for sugar honey if I can't have you Since you've abandoned me My whole life has crashed Won't you pick the pieces up 'Cause it feels just like I'm walking on broken glass
Walking on walking on broken glass
The sun's still shining in the big blue sky But it don't mean nothing to me Oh let the rain come down Let the wind blow through me I'm living in an empty room With all the windows smashed And I've got so little left to lose That it feels just like I'm walking on broken glass
Walking on walking on broken glass
And if you're trying to cut me down You know that I might bleed Cause if you're trying to cut me down I know that you'll succeed And if you want to hurt me There's nothing left to fear Cause if you want to hurt me You're doing really well my dear
Now everyone of us was made to suffer Everyone of us was made to weep But we've been hurting one another And now the pain has cut too deep... So take me from the wreckage Save me from the blast Lift me up and take me back Don't let me keep on walking... Walking on broken glass
Another piece of office lore, incidently, said that if the florinert used to cool the machines ever boiled (so, if there was an electrical fault that flash-boiled the coolant), it would have the same effect on you as mustard gas.
No, not like mustard gas. Probably more like helium, etc. There may be a reason why they named it fluorINERT. From the 3M website:
Liquid, 3MTM FluorinertTM Electronic
A family of perfluorinated liquids offering unique properties ideally suited to the demanding requirements of electronics manufacturing, heat transfer and other specialized applications. Non-flammable, non-corrosive, low toxicity, compatible with sensitive materials. High dielectric strength.
Perhaps you were thinking of Halon, a gas that was/is often used in fire suppression systems for machine rooms (and aircraft, etc)? They (the people that create rumors) told us that Halon was bad. But I justed surfed, and that says "low toxicity" also.
You'll have to try something else to make it seem sexy to work in a machine room with a Cray. I vote for the waterfall, or the nifty bench seats.
[Three USA/Russian scramjet tests failed to "scram" but,] the main objective was to prove the Hypersonic flying laboratory, "Kholod", which is a package with fuel and telemetry to attach to a rocket so that any experiment can be easily flown on a rocket. This package was successfully tested (ie fuel, power and telemetry were provided to the model)
That sounds awfully much like they retroactively diminished their expectations to match their diminished results.
Yeah, and golly gosh when Congress returns, this highly unneeded piece of legislation will be trapped behind a logjam of other highly unimportant legislation (e.g. inevitable stupidities to restore the droning, mangled recitation by unwitting schoolchildren of the Pledge of Under God Allegiance), as well as another logjam of highly important yet likely doomed legislation (e.g. McCain's plan to count stock options as corporate expenses).
"Hurry, it's an emergency!" Riiiiiight. Suuuure. There are already laws that can be used to prosecute people who try to sell copies of what you broadcast, and other violations of Fair Use. (As if anyone could SELL the dreck that is on broadcast television.)
Oh, yeah, dude, you go riiiight ahead and clip one of those Pioneer 10 batteries to your belt loop. I suspect that it is a thermoelectric generator, kept warm on the inside by a nice big lump of radioactive something.
What is the real story here? 10oz of rock fragments for $2000-8000 per oz = $20-80k, not really a million dollar heist.
I'm guessing that you, and the writer for the Houston Chronicle article, were on the engineering team for that probe that crashed into Mars because they mixed up metric and US units. If you read the article, and convert the units, you learn that the total final asking price of these rocks was more than $566,000, and perhaps much more.
One point on which I don't agree is the idea that we own it forever. Apparently there was some recent disagreement (perhaps discussed here on the
dot?) that involved a moon rock that had changed hands a few times. The first change of hands (from the U.S. to a foreign dignitary) was legit, but one or
more of the later transfers were not legit. I don't agree that the U.S. has a legitimate claim to it.
Well, if you had read the Lunar Materials End User License Agreement that was shrink-wrapped around those rocks, you would know that the Central American government only had a non-transferable license to house and view those rocks; we actually retained ownership. That EULA explicitly prohibits resale and reverse engineering, and disclaims the rocks to be suitable for any purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me know when you buy and use that nuclear-powered laptop. I want to be the first one to giggle and point and say "Dood, your privates are glowing!" Nuclear power is mostly wonderful, but there are some things it just won't help directly. Laptops and automobiles are just two of them.
The people who are paying attention realize that fuel cells likewise are not a panacea, but may be a good substitute for batteries in many situations.
Also, fuel cells might pollute less than internal combustion engines used in vehicles. Yes, this is less certain, because it depends on what fuel the cell uses, and where that fuel comes from, and how. It is likely that the end-to-end solution using fuel cells could cause less acid rain and smog, but perhaps more carbon dioxide release. Why? They exclude atmospheric nitrogen etc from the "combustion", so compounds such as N02 are not produced. If you make the fuel for the cell at a big refinery somewhere, sophisticated, expensive anti-pollution equipment can be installed at that conveniently central location. But fuel cells might overall emit more carbon, because perhaps we don't have an ideal way of generating the particular fuel that they will require. The carbon might be emitted at the refinery, when coal/oil is turned into H2, some simple hydrocarbon, or an alcohol.
(Note that there are also other issues that muddle the comparisons of use in automobiles. Note the comparative ease of incorporating a regenerative braking system into a fuel cell car versus a traditional car.)
That I do not know. Murphy's Law would suggest no. :-)
I'd be worried about somebody doing something like eye surgery on me with this thing. I'm guessing a fancy laser for eye surgery has all sorts of fine control over intensity and duration. The fastest fine controls for sunlight would involve stepper motors adjusting the angle of crossed polarizers, I guess. That's not quite as fast as electronic switching...
There are several ways to solve this, and one of them is extremely clever. Let the light pass though a lens (rather than strictly using mirrors for all your lenses). Different frequencies (colors) of light will refract slightly differently (well, the ones off-axis), unless you have chosen the lens material carefully to avoid this. (Yes, think of the pretty rainbow that a prism makes from sunlight.) These different colors will focus at different distances from that lens. By positioning the end of the optic fiber at different distances from the lens, you selectively pick up different wavelengths.
There was a Japanese company, which made (makes?) large sun-tracking Fresnel lenses, for placement on rooftops. At the focus of the lens, an optic fiber (maybe more of a light-pipe) collected the light, for piping into your building, so that you could have sunlight in your house. They took advantage of this spectrum-separating effect to exclude UV and IR as desired from the pipe.
(Those systems, although certainly quite a fine nerd-toy, were ghastly expensive, IMO. Sorry.)
Then, the list starts sending to the subscriber, and the subscriber starts automatically refunding the postage on each email that the list sends to the subscriber.
If the subscriber fails to refund postage on a single email sent by the list, that consumes the first stamp.
The second stamp is then immediately consumed by the list server sending an automatic email to the subscriber. This automatic email informs the subscriber that he has been dropped from the list's membership, and why, and how to join the list again.
A normal, correct "unsubscribe" request would result in a "you have been dropped from the list" message with your unused deposit attached as another larger-than-normal postage. (Of course, the subscriber's spam filter is likely to automatically refund that postage... But hey, shouldn't a list maintainer get a small perk every now and then?)
This mailing list scheme hinges on good email connectivity, and spam filtering agents that always promptly refund postage for legitimate email from the list. Otherwise, list subscribers would need to post a deposit ample enough to pay for the largest backlog of unread/undelivered mail that they would ever expect to be sent by the list. So poorly connected subscribers need spam filtering agents always runnable at their ISPs.
If somebody breaks into your list, and sends spam to all your subscribers, the subscribers (actually, their spam filters) will fail to refund the postage on that spam email, and your list server will then boot them from the list. Oops. Don't let that happen, and have the subscribers post a large enough deposit to survive several of those glitches. If their deposits are dwindling, somehow warn them.
This mailing list problem can get tricky. Not all list maintainers can just punt the subscribers who do not refund postage. For example, consider a corporate mailing list for all employees of a company? The employer doesn't really ever want to remove employees from the all-employees mailing list (otherwise, it would cease to be an all-employees mailing list). But sometimes spam does get sent through corporate lists. Does the employer let employees accumulate non-refunded postage when this happens? Does it automagically get deducted from the next paychecks?
More like "Scott Culp, manager of the Microsoft Platitude Response Center"
Do not bother making spam illegal. Make spam cost money. Make all unwanted email cost money.
How? Here's an idea. (Disclaimer: I haven't spent too much time thinking about this.) All email must come with an "electronic stamp", or some equivalent thing that costs the sender money, or computer time, or something. Make it possible for the recipient to "refund" the sender, or otherwise not charge the sender. Now, tie a spam filter into this, so that wanted email automatically gets sent refunds, and unwanted email automatically does not.
Result? Mail to/from your friends is free. Mailing lists may cost slightly more, if list members sometimes fail to refund the list maintainer. In the unlikely event that you email a sociopath, they will earn the postage from a single email from you. In the unlikely event that you send email to a friend and it is eaten by the spam filter (ie. a false positive) you will notice the lack of refunded postage, and surmise that your letter never got through and react accordingly (or surmise that your "friend" has turned into a cheapskate.) Otherwise, this change will cost you little or nothing. Spammers, on the otherhand, will go out of business rapidly. "Opt in" lists really will be opt in, and the first or second or nth time you decline to refund their postage, perhaps they will count that as you wanting to be off their list. The amount of postage should I guess be something comparable to the rates the US Postal Service charges for bulk mail and presorted first class mail. Perhaps $.25 would be enough. Perhaps you'd require higher postage for people you'd never conversed with before. Mail that has insufficient postage can result in "insufficient postage" notification to the sender; the recipient is not shown the email until sufficient postage is provided.
Of course, woe to you and your wallet if somebody hijacks your account and sends out 1,000,000 emails allegedly from you... But maybe, like an ATM machine, your "electronic stamp" vendor knows not to sell you more than $5 of unrefunded stamps per day, and automatically telephones you, or cuts you off, if you send more than your limit. (Still, that would make hacking profitable. Bad. Maybe the destination of the postage must be traceable, and the recipient must be liable for refunding if a crime was involved in the sending.)
I suppose our spam filters still might get spam from politicians and corporations. For people using spam filters, it will just be money that we can take to the bank. For people without spam filters, but with the sense to press the "no refund" button on the mailer, they will still get to keep the postage, though they will have earned it.
--- Ben Chase
How did these geneticists come up with their estimates for the time to replace the previous gene in the population, and when the replacement occurred?
It sounds to me like they completely pulled these numbers out of their hats, especially the estimate of the time it took this allele to replace the previously dominant one(s). How could they possibly know what this number would be?
They talk about this gene as if there are no other alleles other than those possessed by the non-talking family etc. Are there? This would help me believe (or not) their estimate of when the beneficial mutation occurred. But if there is only one very (completely) dominant form of this gene, how would they measure the age of it? How can these scientists realisticly weigh its genetic advantage? The family in England with the mutant copy; do they have the same version of this gene that is possessed by chimps? (This is the unlikely case, and the interesting one. The chimp version may have been the previously dominant version.) Or do they just have some random, harmful mutation of it? (This is the likely case, and less interesting in gauging the importance of this gene.)
Details, I want details.
"All your brain are belong to us!"
They are doing this because they need to do something, and this is something they can do. Their chips are not so expensive and not so toasty, so putting 2 per box is not too expensive or toasty. They were going to have a top-end motherboard with dual processors anyway, so it's not that much more engineering, manufacturing, and support to put dual lower-speed CPUs on the same board in lesser models.
I'm guessing that it was the arrival (and recent maturity) of OS X that makes the dual procs finally worthwhile to a substantial fraction of the users. I do like the resilience (under load) of a multi-processor Unix box!
Um, not that I want Florida to continue to have zilch for mass-transit, but the state of Florida is 3.76 times that of Switzerland, and it is not at all circular in shape. So we would expect travel times to be higher in Florida. And the population density in Switzerland is probably still 50% greater than Florida, so we'd expect mass transit to be more successful there. And Switzerland's cities and towns are older, and so we'd expect them to be denser than Florida's, which are mostly quite new. (I am aware of the anomalous age of the city of St. Augustine.)
Yeah, and we're not on the first iteration of history repeating itself, either! At a Supercomputer Debugging Workshop in 1991 at Los Alamos National Labs, there were some people who proposed (wait for it) converting the runtime behavior of programs into sounds, as an aid to debugging them.
Their ideas didn't strike me as extremely compelling, given the rather linear nature of the medium, but then again, my eyes still mostly work.
-- Ben Chase
(Hey there, Richard! I should send you email.)
Dentists with Frickin Lazerz.
At a local Q&A session held some months ago by my Virginia legislator, I asked my Virginia legislator to repeal UCITA, because it is hardly "Uniform", seeing as how only two of the fifty states have adopted it, and that the rest are unlikely to do so, given all the opposition to it. His reply? "Well, has it caused any problems?" Grrrr. So, the model is that our legislators pass laws willy nilly at the behest of industry, and we wait for things to go wrong? I suppose that he thinks that all sorts of software companies will relocate to Virginia to take advantage of our coddling them. I didn't have the presence of mind (or the rudeness, I guess) to complain at the time that he'd sold my rights for a buck.
W00T! :-)
Hey, the following should be a required clause in the Viral and Immutable Gnu Public Warranty: "If you're not completely satisfied, the supplier of this software will refund your full purchase price!" It's just one more way RMS & Co can keep people from charging $$$ for GPL software!
You were the sweetest thing that I ever knew
But I don't care for sugar honey if I can't have you
Since you've abandoned me
My whole life has crashed
Won't you pick the pieces up
'Cause it feels just like I'm walking on broken glass
Walking on walking on broken glass
The sun's still shining in the big blue sky
But it don't mean nothing to me
Oh let the rain come down
Let the wind blow through me
I'm living in an empty room
With all the windows smashed
And I've got so little left to lose
That it feels just like I'm walking on broken glass
Walking on walking on broken glass
And if you're trying to cut me down
You know that I might bleed
Cause if you're trying to cut me down
I know that you'll succeed
And if you want to hurt me
There's nothing left to fear
Cause if you want to hurt me
You're doing really well my dear
Now everyone of us was made to suffer
Everyone of us was made to weep
But we've been hurting one another
And now the pain has cut too deep...
So take me from the wreckage
Save me from the blast
Lift me up and take me back
Don't let me keep on walking...
Walking on broken glass
Walking on walking on broken glass
Nice and airtight maybe, but perfect vacuum no.
No, not like mustard gas. Probably more like helium, etc. There may be a reason why they named it fluorINERT. From the 3M website: Liquid, 3MTM FluorinertTM Electronic A family of perfluorinated liquids offering unique properties ideally suited to the demanding requirements of electronics manufacturing, heat transfer and other specialized applications. Non-flammable, non-corrosive, low toxicity, compatible with sensitive materials. High dielectric strength.
Perhaps you were thinking of Halon, a gas that was/is often used in fire suppression systems for machine rooms (and aircraft, etc)? They (the people that create rumors) told us that Halon was bad. But I justed surfed, and that says "low toxicity" also.
You'll have to try something else to make it seem sexy to work in a machine room with a Cray. I vote for the waterfall, or the nifty bench seats.
Woot, mod parent up!
Shouldn't this have been filed under the "what might go around comes around" department? :-)
[Three USA/Russian scramjet tests failed to "scram" but,] the main objective was to prove the Hypersonic flying laboratory, "Kholod", which is a package with fuel and telemetry to attach to a rocket so that any experiment can be easily flown on a rocket. This package was successfully tested (ie fuel, power and telemetry were provided to the model)
That sounds awfully much like they retroactively diminished their expectations to match their diminished results.
Yeah, and golly gosh when Congress returns, this highly unneeded piece of legislation will be trapped behind a logjam of other highly unimportant legislation (e.g. inevitable stupidities to restore the droning, mangled recitation by unwitting schoolchildren of the Pledge of Under God Allegiance), as well as another logjam of highly important yet likely doomed legislation (e.g. McCain's plan to count stock options as corporate expenses).
"Hurry, it's an emergency!" Riiiiiight. Suuuure. There are already laws that can be used to prosecute people who try to sell copies of what you broadcast, and other violations of Fair Use. (As if anyone could SELL the dreck that is on broadcast television.)
Oh, yeah, dude, you go riiiight ahead and clip one of those Pioneer 10 batteries to your belt loop. I suspect that it is a thermoelectric generator, kept warm on the inside by a nice big lump of radioactive something.
I'm guessing that you, and the writer for the Houston Chronicle article, were on the engineering team for that probe that crashed into Mars because they mixed up metric and US units. If you read the article, and convert the units, you learn that the total final asking price of these rocks was more than $566,000, and perhaps much more.
Well, if you had read the Lunar Materials End User License Agreement that was shrink-wrapped around those rocks, you would know that the Central American government only had a non-transferable license to house and view those rocks; we actually retained ownership. That EULA explicitly prohibits resale and reverse engineering, and disclaims the rocks to be suitable for any purpose.