Some things get simpler with humans around, but many also get harder. Remember that manned missions to Mars cost something like 100 times more than unmanned. Measuring how much you get out of it per billion dollars is the interesting measure, not how much you get per mission.
The dried out floodbed looking feature is running downhill to Gusev, so regardless of how much water the meteor may have contained, it did not flow in the other direction.
The law is frequently wrong. Reporting about questionable results from laws and arguing for repeal of laws are entirely legitimate and important activities of the press.
Furthermore, even if a law is good, there is still a story to be told about those breaking it.
Maybe that's how it's supposed to work, but that you can lose tens of thousands of dollars of equipment, and quite possibly your livelihood, on mere suspicion doesn't strike me as a very fair and just system.
For actual police work, all they would need is to take, or even copy the hard drives. Confiscating all this property is just harassment, or possibly incompetence.
It looks more like night frost to me. During the cold night, frost settles on the ground. Sun light melts it in the morning. It lingers the longest in the shaded valley floors.
That's how it works on earth, at least. Why not on Mars?
I don't think there is any food we really fully understand.
There is food we're used to, but that's a whole other thing, as proved by how we keep discovering that stuff we've eaten for generations can give us deadly diseases - or help cure them.
If a spacecraft fails and falls on your house, you're dead whether it had radioactive components or not.
If it falls somewhere else, the material is either easily recoverable, or spread in the atmosphere in an utterly insignificant concentration.
When it works as intended, in 99.9% of the cases, it will remove radioactive material from the planet, so in the interest of decreasing radiation, on balance it will be a gain.
Most software is pretty bad. It was written by not very skilled or motivated people under unfavorable conditions.
This is often taken as a reason to rewrite the system.
But what people always seem to forget, is the the rewriters are just as unskilled and unmotivated, and the conditions just as unfavorable as when the first version was written.
So, naturally, you end up with a completely new system that is just as bad as the old one.
No, it's not hard, and it's easy to comprehend. But you still have to think about it. If things never moved, you could just unconsciously do it without even thinking, much as you don't think about how to move your feet when walking.
It's a small thing, but all the small things add up.
I've had it with the airline industry and their rather poor attempt at feel-good security (which isn't security at all).
Surely (almost) all of these things are done by government, not the airlines? The airlines are left to implement them, since they're forced to by law, but that doesn't mean they're to blame.
Can someone please explain to me when this became a land where we had to determine what a voter intended and not what he actualy voted for (or in this case didn't vote for).
Forget about the intent, we don't know what they actually voted for either, since there is no record of the votes!! Hopefully this resulted from voter incompetence, but there is no way to know.
Aside from possible technical errors, there is always the suspicion that someone tampered with the results. If so, it is the perfect crime, since there is no way to uncover it in this system.
Remember when conservatives were all about limiting government spending? Wow. what the hell ever happened to that party?
What happpened was they got into power. Government always expands. It's inherent in the system, and the personal convictions of the people currently manning the controls doesn't matter all that much.
"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism
by those who have not got it." -- George Bernard Shaw
Bush is really scaring me in many ways. With the drastic lowering of taxes and drastic increase in both military and other spending, the US is heading into the biggest budget deficits in history.
And this is the time he proposes to spend a few dozen more billions of borrowed money? Someone cut this guy's credit card!! As much as I hate taxes, I have to say I prefer "tax and spend" to borrow and spend".
This obviously can't go on. Don't believe for a second that this won't start crashing, hard, soon after the election!
I don't think they're slave labor in any meaningfull way. Bad working conditions are not slavery, they're just part of working in a poor country, like the low pay and long hours.
Slavery is when you can buy and sell people and force them to work whether they want or not. The Chinese have something like that in their prison camp system, which may produce a few of the cheap stuff you see in your super market. And there is still black slavery in North Africa, but it doesn't affect trade. The vast majority of these jobs are offered to people on a fairly free labor market, just like in the west, and people take them since thery're the best they can get.
The uncomfortable fact is that no country has become rich without "sweat shops", excepting a few oil countries. You don't just do a quantum leap from total poverty to US minimium wage and working conditions with no intermediate steps. What seems like awful conditions to us is a big improvement to the starving and disease that came before it.
Refusing to trade with the poor until they become rich, and not allowing them to become rich they way we did, hurts both them and us. To us it mean that we'll have to pay more for some goods. But to them it often means death.
You wouldn't, but my point is that those unconstrained companies are likely to beat the ones laboring under your proposed rules in the world market, making them lose (say) 2/3 of their sales.
And thus your cherished American jobs will move abroad anyway, only through a more complex route.
You can, but only for the US market, which is no more than about 20% of the world market. Major mulitnational companies like HP get most of their revenue from sales outside the US.
Blackmail in the sense of "threatening" to do something legal unless you get paid is simply a business proposal, and should not be illegal in a just society. The "victim" can simply refuse to pay and be no worse off than if the threat had never been made.
It's hard to tell from the article if this is such a case, but I don't see any mention of anything crimnal.
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Some things get simpler with humans around, but many also get harder. Remember that manned missions to Mars cost something like 100 times more than unmanned. Measuring how much you get out of it per billion dollars is the interesting measure, not how much you get per mission.
The dried out floodbed looking feature is running downhill to Gusev, so regardless of how much water the meteor may have contained, it did not flow in the other direction.
The law is frequently wrong. Reporting about questionable results from laws and arguing for repeal of laws are entirely legitimate and important activities of the press.
Furthermore, even if a law is good, there is still a story to be told about those breaking it.
I have no expert knowledge, but I hear the Mars polar ice caps are made up of carbon dioxide, so I would assume that's what it is.
Looking into the temperaturees involved would be a good sanity check. Freezing point for CO2, and nighttime Mars temperatures, that is.
Maybe that's how it's supposed to work, but that you can lose tens of thousands of dollars of equipment, and quite possibly your livelihood, on mere suspicion doesn't strike me as a very fair and just system.
For actual police work, all they would need is to take, or even copy the hard drives. Confiscating all this property is just harassment, or possibly incompetence.
It looks more like night frost to me. During the cold night, frost settles on the ground. Sun light melts it in the morning. It lingers the longest in the shaded valley floors.
That's how it works on earth, at least. Why not on Mars?
So in little longer than Spirit has moved about 4 steps, Express has mapped the entire planet? Not bad...
As for the "better than earth" maps, I think they include the 70% of our planet that is under water.
I don't get it. Why did they name it aftel the famous actol and voice ovel altist?
I don't think there is any food we really fully understand.
There is food we're used to, but that's a whole other thing, as proved by how we keep discovering that stuff we've eaten for generations can give us deadly diseases - or help cure them.
If a spacecraft fails and falls on your house, you're dead whether it had radioactive components or not.
If it falls somewhere else, the material is either easily recoverable, or spread in the atmosphere in an utterly insignificant concentration.
When it works as intended, in 99.9% of the cases, it will remove radioactive material from the planet, so in the interest of decreasing radiation, on balance it will be a gain.
Most software is pretty bad. It was written by not very skilled or motivated people under unfavorable conditions.
This is often taken as a reason to rewrite the system.
But what people always seem to forget, is the the rewriters are just as unskilled and unmotivated, and the conditions just as unfavorable as when the first version was written.
So, naturally, you end up with a completely new system that is just as bad as the old one.
Point 4 specifically...
No, it's not hard, and it's easy to comprehend. But you still have to think about it. If things never moved, you could just unconsciously do it without even thinking, much as you don't think about how to move your feet when walking.
It's a small thing, but all the small things add up.
I've had it with the airline industry and their rather poor attempt at feel-good security (which isn't security at all).
Surely (almost) all of these things are done by government, not the airlines? The airlines are left to implement them, since they're forced to by law, but that doesn't mean they're to blame.
Can someone please explain to me when this became a land where we had to determine what a voter intended and not what he actualy voted for (or in this case didn't vote for).
Forget about the intent, we don't know what they actually voted for either, since there is no record of the votes!! Hopefully this resulted from voter incompetence, but there is no way to know.
Aside from possible technical errors, there is always the suspicion that someone tampered with the results. If so, it is the perfect crime, since there is no way to uncover it in this system.
Note that it generates the article on the fly. Reload and get a whole new one, just as brilliantly incomprehensible as the last.
This truly is anti-intellectualism at its smartest!
Remember when conservatives were all about limiting government spending? Wow. what the hell ever happened to that party?
What happpened was they got into power. Government always expands. It's inherent in the system, and the personal convictions of the people currently manning the controls doesn't matter all that much.
"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism
by those who have not got it." -- George Bernard Shaw
Spain reluctantly sends Columbus to America.
No, they sent him to India. He just mistook America for it..
Perhaps the Mars explorers will bump into some other, currently unknown object, and colonize that with much resulting merriment.
Bush is really scaring me in many ways. With the drastic lowering of taxes and drastic increase in both military and other spending, the US is heading into the biggest budget deficits in history.
And this is the time he proposes to spend a few dozen more billions of borrowed money? Someone cut this guy's credit card!! As much as I hate taxes, I have to say I prefer "tax and spend" to borrow and spend".
This obviously can't go on. Don't believe for a second that this won't start crashing, hard, soon after the election!
I don't think they're slave labor in any meaningfull way. Bad working conditions are not slavery, they're just part of working in a poor country, like the low pay and long hours.
Slavery is when you can buy and sell people and force them to work whether they want or not. The Chinese have something like that in their prison camp system, which may produce a few of the cheap stuff you see in your super market. And there is still black slavery in North Africa, but it doesn't affect trade. The vast majority of these jobs are offered to people on a fairly free labor market, just like in the west, and people take them since thery're the best they can get.
The uncomfortable fact is that no country has become rich without "sweat shops", excepting a few oil countries. You don't just do a quantum leap from total poverty to US minimium wage and working conditions with no intermediate steps. What seems like awful conditions to us is a big improvement to the starving and disease that came before it.
Refusing to trade with the poor until they become rich, and not allowing them to become rich they way we did, hurts both them and us. To us it mean that we'll have to pay more for some goods. But to them it often means death.
You wouldn't, but my point is that those unconstrained companies are likely to beat the ones laboring under your proposed rules in the world market, making them lose (say) 2/3 of their sales.
And thus your cherished American jobs will move abroad anyway, only through a more complex route.
Sure you can, you can tax imports.
You can, but only for the US market, which is no more than about 20% of the world market. Major mulitnational companies like HP get most of their revenue from sales outside the US.
However, you can impose your standards on corporations which are based in your own country.
Then again, you can not protect them from then being outcompeted by foreign companies not under such restrictions.
Either way the jobs will eventually go to those who will perform them with the most bang per buck.
He's not allowed to see a lawyer. If he is ever released it will very likely be on condition he doesn't sue.
How do you imagine Padilla would be able to sue someone when he is locked up with no contact to the outside world of any kind?
Blackmail in the sense of "threatening" to do something legal unless you get paid is simply a business proposal, and should not be illegal in a just society. The "victim" can simply refuse to pay and be no worse off than if the threat had never been made.
It's hard to tell from the article if this is such a case, but I don't see any mention of anything crimnal.
Walter Block of "Defending the undefendable" fame has an article outlining the arguments.