For some wierd reason you gotta jump through hoops to download anything good from NASA.
That's because each NASA laboratory and department within each lab does things their own way. It's usually easy getting hold of NASA software when you know where to look, but it's that "knowing where to look" that's a real bitch.
But if you don't like it, don't look to the constitution for a right to it, because it ain't there.
To which constitution are you referring? The one for my country says:
Article the eleventh [Amendment IX]
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Article the twelfth [Amendment X]
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Unless the State in which you live in says you have no right to privacy, then you pretty much have a right to privacy, according to the constitution.
Now, we also all know that the constitution means approximately squat today, so your point is still well-taken.
In other words, by the time the first explorers (that's you) arrive, there will already be 150 Starbucks franchises on the planet, the planet will be launching its own missions to further stars, and you will be turned back at the spaceport for not having the right Visas in your passport.
So, what you do before setting out in your first generation colony ship is to form an organization back an Earth whose mission it is to manage a trust/foundation and apply newer technology as it becomes available to support your colonization mission. So that when you get there, there may be 150 Starbuck's franchises, but you own them all.
That itself could be another interesting SF story about the changes a colony goes through when the owners/founders finally arrive after it's been operating for several generations.
Hint 1: MER A is in Gusev Crater (14.6 degrees south, 175.3 degrees east). MER B is in Terra Meridiani (2.0 degrees south, 354.1 degrees east). Mars has a radius of about 3400 kilometers. Do the math.
Hint 2: Try to get water to exist as a liquid at.01 atmospheres pressure and below zero temperatures.
Hint 3: Try to clean micron fine dust off a smooth surface with a dry squeegee.
Hint 4: If you think you can overcome all this, engineer the system such that it can survive
thermal vac and vibration tests. How much does it cost?
You are indeed fortunate then. It seems like everyone around me wants to be some showy card shark and dazzle me with their mad poker skills these days. It's not laxity, though. It's just a different rule to say it's okay to say "I'll see you and raise %f". If I ever came to your house, I'd play by your rules.
Off-topic? I don't mind. I've got karma to burn. With that said, I'll post without my karma bonus.:-)
Well, you can wave your hands and say "whatever" all you want, but the fact of the matter is you said that (and I quote) 'When people suggest we should "do away with patents", an equivalent statement is, "Gee, living in a communist society would be great."' You made a false equivocation, I gave a counter-example.
You didn't even say anthing about a "fascist economy" in the post I was refuting. You are aware that fascist economics and communist economics, while both being socialist in nature, are in fact quite different things?
I also never said anything about you thinking the current system was perfect. You're changing your argument as you go, while making an assertion to which you have not given any sort of defense. When I present a fairly cogent counterexample to your assertion, you just walk away.
Erm, I only referred to the sandwich patent as an example. The only thing I was trying to refute is being anti-patent is automatically a communist (or a fascist... people seem to mix the two up a lot. There are similarities, but they're quite different.) position. I was merely demonstrating that a laissez-faire (just about the antithesis of communism) argument does exist against patents.
I agree with you totally that they don't have a chance. I haven't lived in Michigan my entire life, but when I was a kid I did live in Oak Park for three years (my dad managed the Kresge at 8 Mile Road and Dequindre) and remember the pasty fairly well.
You have engaged in the following logical fallacy:
False Dichotomy
By stating that one cannot be against patents unless they are a communist.
A patent is a rule that states that I can't do certain things with my property and labour. for example: make a sealed crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwich and sell it to a willing customer. Absent the patent, this is legal. But the patent system, a collective body of rules limiting the forms of commerce I may engage in with my customers using my property and my labour, states that this is illegal behaviour unless I first acquire a licence from the patent holder. This is therefore a restraint of free market economics, as a third party may now use state coercion to enforce an unnatural monopoly that interferes with the voluntary exchange of goods and services. Therefore the state has been granted more power to direct my labor and capital.
You can certainly disagree with the previous paragraph, and I have a few issues with it myself, but it is an anti-patent statement that is certainly not communist, as it holds paramount the individual right of ownership of capital and labour. If memory serves, communists aren't big fans of that.
leave it to this nations great Lawyer population to force me to own many items which can be construed as "Ball Warmers."
Just remember, behind every scummy lawyer is an scummier client. The lawsuit would be brought by the recipient of the vasectomy, in this case, you. You personally might not, but the doctor isn't taking chances. The odds are (from his point of view) you will change your mind.
I was 26 when I had mine done, and I already had a kid and the doc still grilled me about it before assenting. He told me point blank that if I didn't have any kids at all he wouldn't do it because most blokes change their minds when they get older. He said "80 to 90 percent". Whether that's true or not, it was his perception, and it's not like you can (or should) force a doctor to perform a procedure against his better judgment.
With all that said, I respect your judgment with respect to your life, and if you find a urologist who will do the procedure for you, then by all means, do so. Have kids, or don't. I remember after having our one, people would nag us "oh, you should have more". Christ in a chariot-driven sidecar, for some people parenting is like a cult! When people are especially obnoxious about it, going so far as to imply that I'm not a real parent until I have at least 2, I get misty-eyed and tell them "Well, honestly, we want that more than anything, but the doc said that if my wife got pregnant again, she would likely die and lose the baby too."
That usually shuts the smug little breeders right the fuck up.
I was told as a youngster that virtually every question that begins with "why don't [they/we]" or "why aren't [they/we]" is adequately if simplistically answered with the word: "money".
There are exceptions, but that rule of thumb as served me well for a while now.
Bug Name: Tog knows nothing about the history of the web.
Duration: Just discovered, but probably years.
Supplier: Tog
Alias: "I'm trying to impress you because I used the web WAY before you chowderheads did."
Product: Tog's Design Flaws list
Bug: Tog's incorrect memory of history.
Principle: "I will spout off knowing nothing about what I'm talking about."
Proposed Fix: Lateral Cranial Impact Enhancer of your choice.
Discussion: Claims to have reported URL space bugs to Netscape in 1991 and Microsoft in 1992. However, Microsoft didn't have a web browser until 1995 and Netscape didn't even exist in 1991.
Bug First Observed: Today.
Observer: Hopefully, the greater part of the Slashdot readership.
But when I read "Principle: The user is in charge and should be free to carry out any activity at any time without fear of reprisals" I just about lost my lunch.
And people wonder why software engineers get testy with designers sometimes. We're supposed to engineer systems that let users do whatever they want without reprisal. I can't think of anything else I use where I have that guarantee... even something as simple as using of humankind's oldest tools, the knife.
Apparently you have no idea what kind of infrastructure is involved with a MMO.
And as a customer, he has no need to be. He's just specifying the conditions under which he will part with his money to play these games. If nobody can meet his conditions and make a profit, then he doesn't buy the games and they don't get his business.
I'd be willing to bet all of us are ignorant about the infrastructure involved in many (and maybe even most) of the things we purchase. That doesn't disqualify us from making individual decisions about what we consent to buy. If I decide that something is uneconomical for me to indulge in, giving me a detailed accounting of why it is as expensive as it is may be informative, but doesn't really change my balance sheet at all. This is the very basis of the free market, and it is a good thing.
Gravity will pull it closer to the sun, but it will not pull it into the sun. If you drop your speed relative to the sun, all you will get is a closer orbit around the sun. Witness the wacky path we took with Mariner 10 and the even longer and even crazier path we're using for MESSENGER. And that's just to get to Mercury.
The grandparent is right. You basically need a velocity of about 31.8 km/sec [Gurzadyan 1996, Theory of Interplanetary Flights, pp. 58-60] to actually get to the sun from Earth, unless you use a gravity assist from other solar bodies.
Orbits just don't "decay" in the sense that radioactive materials decay. Some are stable, some are instable, and some are affected by interactions with atmospheres or collisions with other particles. All are affected (however slightly) by the gravitation of everything else. This makes long term precise orbital calculations in the real world very difficult. Bank shotting radioactive material around the solar system sounds pretty dangerous to me. Even if we had rocket motors that could get us to Sol directly, there's a chance you could miss and put the stuff on a highly elliptical orbit with aphelion near the Earth's orbit. We could shoot ourselves nicely with that.
I don't believe in intelligent design but given the way body seems to function and all the failure modes it seems to have, I'm willing to give "unintelligent design" the benefit of the doubt.
Er, buoyancy? I don't think we're floating things here.
The atmospheric drag would not be so great that this scenario would happen with little warning. Long before this happened, parts of the cable would break up and vaporise in the atmosphere. It's quite a bit of energy needed to deorbit something with many tonnes of mass at geostationary orbit to actually impact Earth. Getting to that point in a short period of time (say less than 1 day) would require massive rockets or nuclear explosions. For a time frame larger than a day, I would like to think there will be contingencies for this sort of thing. The asteroid/station base at the top will certainly need station keeping thrusters to account for small errors in mass flow up and down the cable. Those thrusters would be sufficient to keep the station in a safe orbit for an indefinite but very long period of time.
Much more likely you are left with a trashed cable at the Earth end and something in a not quite geostationary orbit at the other. A big mess? Certainly. Bad for you if you happen to be ascending the cable at that point? You bet. Cataclysmic? Not bloody likely.
Slashdot Mirror
For clarity: That link is to TES, which flies on the Mars Global Surveyor. The instrument on the rovers is called Mini-TES and does similar things.
I work at the lab responsible for both.
It could be a terrible miscalculation in scale. Good thing there are no small dogs on Mars.
That's because each NASA laboratory and department within each lab does things their own way. It's usually easy getting hold of NASA software when you know where to look, but it's that "knowing where to look" that's a real bitch.
To which constitution are you referring? The one for my country says:
Article the eleventh [Amendment IX]
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Article the twelfth [Amendment X]
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Unless the State in which you live in says you have no right to privacy, then you pretty much have a right to privacy, according to the constitution.
Now, we also all know that the constitution means approximately squat today, so your point is still well-taken.
If the cops can put a GPS tracker device on my car without a warrant...
Then if I find it, I can take it apart and use it in my own projects because that fucker's mine!
So, what you do before setting out in your first generation colony ship is to form an organization back an Earth whose mission it is to manage a trust/foundation and apply newer technology as it becomes available to support your colonization mission. So that when you get there, there may be 150 Starbuck's franchises, but you own them all.
That itself could be another interesting SF story about the changes a colony goes through when the owners/founders finally arrive after it's been operating for several generations.
Here's just the thing for you.
It wound up becoming this movie instead.
Hint 1: MER A is in Gusev Crater (14.6 degrees south, 175.3 degrees east). MER B is in Terra Meridiani (2.0 degrees south, 354.1 degrees east). Mars has a radius of about 3400 kilometers. Do the math.
Hint 2: Try to get water to exist as a liquid at .01 atmospheres pressure and below zero temperatures.
Hint 3: Try to clean micron fine dust off a smooth surface with a dry squeegee.
Hint 4: If you think you can overcome all this, engineer the system such that it can survive thermal vac and vibration tests. How much does it cost?
You are indeed fortunate then. It seems like everyone around me wants to be some showy card shark and dazzle me with their mad poker skills these days. It's not laxity, though. It's just a different rule to say it's okay to say "I'll see you and raise %f". If I ever came to your house, I'd play by your rules.
Off-topic? I don't mind. I've got karma to burn. With that said, I'll post without my karma bonus. :-)
The current rage for poker has apparently destroyed the old neighborhood friendly game of poker (where such things were said all the time) forever.
This (plus the popularity of Texas Hold Em commie-pinko poker) is why I don't play anymore.
Given where Walmart's headquarters are, you'd actually get booted out of Dogpatch USA.
Well, you can wave your hands and say "whatever" all you want, but the fact of the matter is you said that (and I quote) 'When people suggest we should "do away with patents", an equivalent statement is, "Gee, living in a communist society would be great."' You made a false equivocation, I gave a counter-example.
You didn't even say anthing about a "fascist economy" in the post I was refuting. You are aware that fascist economics and communist economics, while both being socialist in nature, are in fact quite different things?
I also never said anything about you thinking the current system was perfect. You're changing your argument as you go, while making an assertion to which you have not given any sort of defense. When I present a fairly cogent counterexample to your assertion, you just walk away.
Erm, I only referred to the sandwich patent as an example. The only thing I was trying to refute is being anti-patent is automatically a communist (or a fascist... people seem to mix the two up a lot. There are similarities, but they're quite different.) position. I was merely demonstrating that a laissez-faire (just about the antithesis of communism) argument does exist against patents.
I agree with you totally that they don't have a chance. I haven't lived in Michigan my entire life, but when I was a kid I did live in Oak Park for three years (my dad managed the Kresge at 8 Mile Road and Dequindre) and remember the pasty fairly well.
You have engaged in the following logical fallacy:
False Dichotomy
By stating that one cannot be against patents unless they are a communist.
A patent is a rule that states that I can't do certain things with my property and labour. for example: make a sealed crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwich and sell it to a willing customer. Absent the patent, this is legal. But the patent system, a collective body of rules limiting the forms of commerce I may engage in with my customers using my property and my labour, states that this is illegal behaviour unless I first acquire a licence from the patent holder. This is therefore a restraint of free market economics, as a third party may now use state coercion to enforce an unnatural monopoly that interferes with the voluntary exchange of goods and services. Therefore the state has been granted more power to direct my labor and capital.
You can certainly disagree with the previous paragraph, and I have a few issues with it myself, but it is an anti-patent statement that is certainly not communist, as it holds paramount the individual right of ownership of capital and labour. If memory serves, communists aren't big fans of that.
Yeah, the only problem was the 80" screen looked to be about half a mile away.
Just remember, behind every scummy lawyer is an scummier client. The lawsuit would be brought by the recipient of the vasectomy, in this case, you. You personally might not, but the doctor isn't taking chances. The odds are (from his point of view) you will change your mind.
I was 26 when I had mine done, and I already had a kid and the doc still grilled me about it before assenting. He told me point blank that if I didn't have any kids at all he wouldn't do it because most blokes change their minds when they get older. He said "80 to 90 percent". Whether that's true or not, it was his perception, and it's not like you can (or should) force a doctor to perform a procedure against his better judgment.
With all that said, I respect your judgment with respect to your life, and if you find a urologist who will do the procedure for you, then by all means, do so. Have kids, or don't. I remember after having our one, people would nag us "oh, you should have more". Christ in a chariot-driven sidecar, for some people parenting is like a cult! When people are especially obnoxious about it, going so far as to imply that I'm not a real parent until I have at least 2, I get misty-eyed and tell them "Well, honestly, we want that more than anything, but the doc said that if my wife got pregnant again, she would likely die and lose the baby too."
That usually shuts the smug little breeders right the fuck up.
I was told as a youngster that virtually every question that begins with "why don't [they/we]" or "why aren't [they/we]" is adequately if simplistically answered with the word: "money".
There are exceptions, but that rule of thumb as served me well for a while now.
Or another Tog bug, based on 5.
Bug Name: Tog knows nothing about the history of the web.
Duration: Just discovered, but probably years.
Supplier: Tog
Alias: "I'm trying to impress you because I used the web WAY before you chowderheads did."
Product: Tog's Design Flaws list
Bug: Tog's incorrect memory of history.
Principle: "I will spout off knowing nothing about what I'm talking about."
Proposed Fix: Lateral Cranial Impact Enhancer of your choice.
Discussion: Claims to have reported URL space bugs to Netscape in 1991 and Microsoft in 1992. However, Microsoft didn't have a web browser until 1995 and Netscape didn't even exist in 1991.
Bug First Observed: Today.
Observer: Hopefully, the greater part of the Slashdot readership.
Bug reported to supplier: Ha!
Bug on list since: about now.
And people wonder why software engineers get testy with designers sometimes. We're supposed to engineer systems that let users do whatever they want without reprisal. I can't think of anything else I use where I have that guarantee... even something as simple as using of humankind's oldest tools, the knife.
And as a customer, he has no need to be. He's just specifying the conditions under which he will part with his money to play these games. If nobody can meet his conditions and make a profit, then he doesn't buy the games and they don't get his business.
I'd be willing to bet all of us are ignorant about the infrastructure involved in many (and maybe even most) of the things we purchase. That doesn't disqualify us from making individual decisions about what we consent to buy. If I decide that something is uneconomical for me to indulge in, giving me a detailed accounting of why it is as expensive as it is may be informative, but doesn't really change my balance sheet at all. This is the very basis of the free market, and it is a good thing.
Gravity will pull it closer to the sun, but it will not pull it into the sun. If you drop your speed relative to the sun, all you will get is a closer orbit around the sun. Witness the wacky path we took with Mariner 10 and the even longer and even crazier path we're using for MESSENGER. And that's just to get to Mercury.
The grandparent is right. You basically need a velocity of about 31.8 km/sec [Gurzadyan 1996, Theory of Interplanetary Flights, pp. 58-60] to actually get to the sun from Earth, unless you use a gravity assist from other solar bodies.
Orbits just don't "decay" in the sense that radioactive materials decay. Some are stable, some are instable, and some are affected by interactions with atmospheres or collisions with other particles. All are affected (however slightly) by the gravitation of everything else. This makes long term precise orbital calculations in the real world very difficult. Bank shotting radioactive material around the solar system sounds pretty dangerous to me. Even if we had rocket motors that could get us to Sol directly, there's a chance you could miss and put the stuff on a highly elliptical orbit with aphelion near the Earth's orbit. We could shoot ourselves nicely with that.
I really try to avoid the CVS checkins of my favorite movies, and wait until they distribute it.
I don't believe in intelligent design but given the way body seems to function and all the failure modes it seems to have, I'm willing to give "unintelligent design" the benefit of the doubt.
Er, buoyancy? I don't think we're floating things here.
The atmospheric drag would not be so great that this scenario would happen with little warning. Long before this happened, parts of the cable would break up and vaporise in the atmosphere. It's quite a bit of energy needed to deorbit something with many tonnes of mass at geostationary orbit to actually impact Earth. Getting to that point in a short period of time (say less than 1 day) would require massive rockets or nuclear explosions. For a time frame larger than a day, I would like to think there will be contingencies for this sort of thing. The asteroid/station base at the top will certainly need station keeping thrusters to account for small errors in mass flow up and down the cable. Those thrusters would be sufficient to keep the station in a safe orbit for an indefinite but very long period of time.
Much more likely you are left with a trashed cable at the Earth end and something in a not quite geostationary orbit at the other. A big mess? Certainly. Bad for you if you happen to be ascending the cable at that point? You bet. Cataclysmic? Not bloody likely.