Woz did many of these things as an adult. He was certainly a young twenty-something adult that was foolish, but none the less an adult or at least a teen for some of these exploits.
Martha Stewart got in trouble for her position as a member of the board of trustees for the New York Stock Exchange and manipulating that market to help "a friend" get some sort of special advantage. That she was less than forthright about what she was doing when pressed by a federal agent was her eventual undoing... hence the official "obstruction of justice" charge.
It was an investigation into insider trading though that got her nailed. I'm hardly sympathetic, although it is too bad that other people who do far worse don't get into legal trouble because they usually cover their tracks much better. Certainly members of Congress and their staffers, much less folks within the Federal Reserve do things that certainly amount to insider trading and manipulation of the markets.
True, but that is still illegal and against SEC regulations for insider trading. This was the kind of stuff that got Martha Stewart into deep trouble, not to mention many other people who have been convicted on similar charges. What *should* have happened is that everybody possessing this information prior to the official release should have maintained an embargo on the information (in the case of journalists) and certainly not spread that information further. They are also criminally liable for anybody else they shared this information prematurely and it would have been a conflict of interest to even act upon that information.
As to if the SEC will even bother doing a formal investigation on this matter and even bother to file charges, that is a completely separate story. None the less, it is pretty obvious that somebody broke the law regardless. Since these first trades are patently obvious that they had prior knowledge, they would be easy targets to go after and burn a whole bunch of people in the process... if anybody in the SEC would bother.
My bet is that somebody in the Obama administration is going to claim that sequestration is the cause for no prosecution or investigation. It would be an easy out at least.
And investing is in my humble opinion the true value and purpose of the stock market.
It certainly isn't a universal opinion though, and not everybody trades on exchanges for the same reason. The actual investment happens for the most part when the IPO (or subsequent offerings) happen, and the rest is simply exchanging shares for perceived value in those shares.
Ultimately, the value of the company should be (but isn't always) the "market cap" of that particular issue. The problem is that events happen which change that value, thus the intense competition to be first to act upon even the most tenuous little piece of data. In the case of an announcement from the Federal Reserve (because of its position in the national economy and by design in terms of how the Fed is set up), it can substantially change the value of not just one but nearly every company on the exchange.
That volume and volatility is actually a good thing though. With all of that trading up & down on so many issues of stock, it means ordinary folks who want to buy or sell shares of a company can easily do so because *somebody* is trading those shares. Hopefully when you make a move like that, you are more interested in what that company is going to do (or not do) over the course of a year or more instead of getting caught up in day trading where you are competing against this kind of action of the big boys.
There is always advanced artificial intelligence doing text parsing off of key word combinations and patterns. That is still some pretty beefy AI that would need more than a few thousand CPU cycles to process that information through. The data must also be sent across several busses inside of the computer chassis to be sent into the computer as well.
Most press releases and other documents from the Fed, while in English, have a pretty typical format and "standard" kinds of statements in those documents which can be seen from previous documents already in the public domain. While I wouldn't trust billions of dollars on such software arbitrarily deciding how to set up important trades, it certainly is something that has the potential of being automated and isn't even "new technology".
It would still take making some educated guesses about what kinds of potential things might be said in such a press release ahead of time and setting up each possible alternative. If the Fed would have announced something really off the wall like discontinuing the U.S. Dollar as currency or having the Fed become insolvent (just to suggest some really crazy possibilities as examples), these kind of trades would likely not happen and would require human intervention. Suggesting that they would or would not continue quantitative easing, raising or lowering the discount rate, or other more typical things that certainly were anticipated would be very easy to automatically spot.
The problem is that somebody human would have needed to actually read this kind of information and then click "buy" or "sell" after the roughly 15 seconds to do a quick glance through the data with trades that are pre-programmed off of likely things found in such a press release. I suppose that you might have some very good artificial intelligence that can do a text parsing through a press release and glean that some key piece of information that would certainly be able to shave off a few additional seconds... there certainly is money to hire software developers to develop such AI systems too.
This really is a smoking gun that somebody got this data ahead of the public release, thus really set up the trades ahead of time. I agree with you that trades for other "hard data" which can be generated from common trade data (especially data generated by the stock exchanges themselves) is something that has brokers and traders investing in laser data links literally crossing Wall Street to shave the milliseconds or even picoseconds difference instead of using copper cables going up and down the buildings. Moving computers next to the exchange servers when possible is also done and other tricks too. None the less, some time simply must elapse in order for these trades to happen and be honest.
Do you know what power lets Congress (yes, this is federal) make that illegal? Interstate Commerce. Because I *might* sell it out of state. Tesla *does* sell out of state. It *will* fall under interstate commerce and Federal law. It's that simple.
No, the power that Congress has to regulate the production and sales of alcoholic beverages is contained in the 21st Amendment to the Constitution, not even the interstate commerce clause.
I dare say it is you who is utterly ignorant on this matter and doesn't understand that interstate commerce is that commerce which actually crosses state lines. While I will agree that federal law does apply here so far as what Tesla does in Texas and elsewhere, this can be seen as a completely internal matter. Yes, there is Wickard v. Filburn that seems to indicate that the federal government effectively has universal authority over commerce anywhere over anything in America. That isn't what the authors of the U.S. Constitution intended, but at this point that particular side argument is irrelevant.
What you are also missing in your previous analysis that completely missed the mark is that these dealer associations could also use the state court systems to force an unfavorable (to Tesla) outcome that could completely bypass any precedent used on the federal level. It would be the dealers, not Tesla, that would argue that any federal court jurisdiction on this matter would be inappropriate and outside of that court's jurisdiction. California itself is a sovereign entity unto itself.
What is being done in both Texas and Massachusetts is that there are auto dealers who are in fact trying to force Tesla in to accepting their companies as distributors of Tesla products... a relationship that Tesla simply doesn't want to have. Tesla is willing to work with local governments in terms of having company owned assets that conform to local laws, but what it is fighting is having those governments force an unwanted business relationship onto them that amounts to be a tax lining the pockets of a well connected local businessman in those areas.
The situation that really caused the problem is that Tesla has been going to strip malls and botique outlets to set up a store rather than the traditional 10 acre dealership lot as well. Some of this is also an attempt to force Tesla to buy that fancy real estate and huge buildings.
The thing is that most people are familiar with kilowatt-hours as that is how energy is measured in most homes.... even in Europe and elsewhere. It is also an easy to understand unit of energy, as you comprehend that a kilowatt-hour is literally running ten 100 watt lightbulbs for an hour (or just one of those for ten hours).
It really isn't all that bastardized of a unit as things go, and it is in the realm of human experience, while megajoules simply aren't something people can grasp from typical experience.
It sure isn't an imperial unit, which would be BTUs instead.
The one thing that might impact what happens in California though (as opposed to Texas, Massachusetts, or other states) is that Tesla is a California corporation with a California manufacturing plant and California-based network servers. In other words, it could be considered an intrastate matter and something not even under the jurisdiction of a federal court, but rather just the state court system. Of course they also can appeal to the state constitution of California as well, which in many ways offers even more protection in terms of individual liberties than does the federal version and is certainly a two edged sword in a matter like this.
Unfortunately it is a matter of national policy that companies are outsourcing departments, or for that matter so much manufacturing has gone outside of America. The laws and regulations are such that most companies can't avoid fighting the trend. It wasn't that long ago (in fact in my lifetime and I'm not a senior citizens) when you could go to a department or grocery store and 95%-99% of the items found there would be made or grown in America. There of course were specialty boutiques and things like foreign automobile dealerships, but those were exotic and rather uncommon and only found in small numbers in the largest of cities.
Right now you would be hard pressed to go to ordinary hardware or grocery stores and find anything actually made in America. That companies are not only buying tons of imported goods, but also having most of their employees come from outside of America should be of little surprise. In fact, for many of these utility companies you are talking about, a great many of them aren't even owned by Americans in America, and those which actually have American corporate headquarters will likely have substantial "foreign" ownership. That would make any attempt to force something like keeping IT departments in America something more of a joke.
Preemptive notification works out great..... as long as you have the cardboard boxes already set upon every desk, have disconnected all electronic devices from the offices (including telephones), and have armed guards waiting to escort each employee individually into the office for their personal effects. Possibly if you want to be nice as an employer, you will have contacted the local employment agencies and have employment counselors on hand.
Basically you need to let them know immediately that their jobs are over. Of course give "generous" severance packages when it is happening too, but it should pretty much be a foregone conclusion that they are going.
Oh yeah, the outsourcing contract had better be pretty firm. Possibly offer to employees some sort of "consulting" work if they care (some might be willing to help), but you shouldn't plan on anybody taking up the offer. Yes, somebody doing this is a jerk, but at least the company will be solvent afterward.
Is it a correlation though? If the sun spends the majority of its time in such configurations, it should be that most events happen in this configuration. The probability that it is just chance is 5% (lambda=0.6, k=n=6). So there is tentative evidence for a correlation at best.
Does the Sun spend the majority of its time in such a configuration?
The problem is that the hypothesis that somehow the Earth itself and specifically mass extinction events on the Earth is the trigger mechanism for the creation of spiral arms in galaxies is suspect. Over the course of the history of the Earth, through the geologic record, mass extinction events are rather rare, but the paper in question suggests there may be some periodic nature to them happening. Suggesting that the mass extinctions are the cause of something still doesn't deal with triggering mechanisms in the event in the first place.... but if this hypothesis is correct it would be a wonderful indicator of life in the universe and substantially alter the Drake equation.
Of course I know it is a stupid hypothesis, but then the question that begs to be asked is why? It certainly would make for an interesting discussion among college freshmen, and those who think they understand science.
I should add that the items in the Cygnus spacecraft is mainly a bunch of food, what amounts to be toilet paper for the sanitary facilities in the ISS, personal items for the astronauts on this and future missions, and a new computer printer to replace one that broke down on board the station as well as some minor spare parts needed for station maintenance.
You would be hard pressed to find this whole load of cargo to be worth more than a hundred thousand dollars, although its value is important for the people on the ISS and the fact that it is so expensive to haul anything up to that altitude. Hopefully a competitive cargo delivery service can improve that cost as an issue.
As others have said, this is rocket science, and rocket science has the reputation it does for a reason.
Building something that gets into orbit successfully, much less performing a rendezvous with another object already in orbit, is something that has such a thin margin of error that almost anything can prevent success and a whole lot of things can cause a failure.
I see this more as a glass is half-full kind of thing where it is just freaking amazing that Orbital has been able to get this far and even get near the ISS, much less be in a position to actually dock. Not only that, but this is the very first time that this launch vehicle + spacecraft has done something like this. And you expect it to be perfect on the very first try?
The cargo itself isn't all that valuable BTW, so "hundreds of millions of taxpayer funds" are not on the line. Orbital is only going to be paid for cargo delivered, although NASA did send them some money earlier for meeting previous manufacturing objectives. It should also be pointed out that Orbital wasn't even the original contractor who was supposed to be taking cargo into space, but rather Kistler Aerospace. NASA justifiably dumped that service contract and awarded it instead to Orbital after some pretty stiff competition from some other very worthy alternatives.
If anything, it sure is a heck of a lot cheaper in terms of the few hundred million dumped into the COTS program than the tens of billions that have been wasted on Constellation and SLS, where there has yet to be anything even close to flying. Those were both programs that were supposed to be operational before the Space Shuttle flights ended, but instead won't even be considered for an initial flight before 2017, and likely will be delayed well past 2020. Without this program, the $100+ billion dumped on the ISS would be wasted because the ISS would have to be splashed by now. That 1000x difference in orders of magnitude for these programs really makes the amount spent by NASA on Orbital to be real chump change and insignificant, especially with the results that have already been earned by Orbital.
We use the most up to date Milky Way model and solar orbit data in order to test the hypothesis that the Sun's galactic spiral arm crossings cause mass extinction events on Earth.
That is how the authors of this paper reported their findings in the actual article's abstract. As for how some random Slashdot poster reported this idea, does it really matter? If you are complaining about Slashdot itself and lame editorship on the part of those who review these stories on the Slashdot staff, that is something else entirely and not something to complain about to the paper's authors.
Besides, they claim it is a causation, or that events which somehow happen during those crossings in turn trigger these extinction events. Unfortunately we have a data sample of one solar system to compare against right now to see if there might be any substance to the mechanism.
It could be worse.... we could simply be falling into the galactic core and passing within a few light years of the central galactic black hole every few million years. Instead, the orbit of the Sun is roughly circular and stays in the main galactic disk.
The other possibility is that the Earth could fly into intergalactic space and the Sun could go in a different direction. That would make things very comfortable.
I would agree with you. A thousand years from now people would be looking at the ISS like we look at a Norse longboat and wonder how anybody put up with such a vessel to cross the North Atlantic Ocean. Such vessels have been found from archaeological digs, or even something much more recent like the H L Hunley and have been restored at huge expense, certainly more than it cost to originally build those vessels.
While a replica may be built too, I think it has some deeper meaning to have the actual equipment there for future generations to see. The cost of pushing the ISS up to a higher orbit certainly is something that is in the realm of an affordable mission in the here and now.
It isn't as if using ion engines on the ISS is a new concept. The idea has been kicking around for some time and mainly needs some funding. The idea to put one of those engines on the ISS has been discussed simply to maintain the current orbit as it needs to be boosted periodically anyway.
I would even go so far as to suggest that the required delta-v to put the ISS at L5 has likely been already applied simply to keep the station where it is at instead of crashing down back onto the Earth over its current lifetime. A similar kind of energy will need to be applied over the next 15 or so years anyway, so why not build a system that can also work as an end-of-life termination system too?
Another issue with the ISS is that it is so huge that any effort to deorbit the station will most certainly result in a debris field regardless of how much effort you put into breaking it up prior to re-entry. Even splashing it down has a great many complications where it might even be cheaper and certainly offer much less risk to people here on the Earth if it was pushed up to a higher orbit as well. There is definitely going to be a cost to deorbit above and beyond just the delta-v issues.
It is a professor at UC Berkley who has been pioneering general printing of semi-conductors and circuits, and he includes a demo of 3D printing with his talk that also includes some interesting discussion about some of the substrates and physics involved with those processes. If you are interested in this kind of thing, I definitely think this video would be worthy of your time.
It is interesting in the lecture how he addresses specifically what at least he thinks of printed IC circuits and especially microprocessors.
Slashdot Mirror
Woz did many of these things as an adult. He was certainly a young twenty-something adult that was foolish, but none the less an adult or at least a teen for some of these exploits.
Martha Stewart got in trouble for her position as a member of the board of trustees for the New York Stock Exchange and manipulating that market to help "a friend" get some sort of special advantage. That she was less than forthright about what she was doing when pressed by a federal agent was her eventual undoing... hence the official "obstruction of justice" charge.
It was an investigation into insider trading though that got her nailed. I'm hardly sympathetic, although it is too bad that other people who do far worse don't get into legal trouble because they usually cover their tracks much better. Certainly members of Congress and their staffers, much less folks within the Federal Reserve do things that certainly amount to insider trading and manipulation of the markets.
And you really think this is just about T-bills? Or that those security laws about insider trading only apply to stocks and corporate bonds?
True, but that is still illegal and against SEC regulations for insider trading. This was the kind of stuff that got Martha Stewart into deep trouble, not to mention many other people who have been convicted on similar charges. What *should* have happened is that everybody possessing this information prior to the official release should have maintained an embargo on the information (in the case of journalists) and certainly not spread that information further. They are also criminally liable for anybody else they shared this information prematurely and it would have been a conflict of interest to even act upon that information.
As to if the SEC will even bother doing a formal investigation on this matter and even bother to file charges, that is a completely separate story. None the less, it is pretty obvious that somebody broke the law regardless. Since these first trades are patently obvious that they had prior knowledge, they would be easy targets to go after and burn a whole bunch of people in the process... if anybody in the SEC would bother.
My bet is that somebody in the Obama administration is going to claim that sequestration is the cause for no prosecution or investigation. It would be an easy out at least.
Unlike some regular readers of Slashdot, he just got laid. I think his grin is well deserved.
And investing is in my humble opinion the true value and purpose of the stock market.
It certainly isn't a universal opinion though, and not everybody trades on exchanges for the same reason. The actual investment happens for the most part when the IPO (or subsequent offerings) happen, and the rest is simply exchanging shares for perceived value in those shares.
Ultimately, the value of the company should be (but isn't always) the "market cap" of that particular issue. The problem is that events happen which change that value, thus the intense competition to be first to act upon even the most tenuous little piece of data. In the case of an announcement from the Federal Reserve (because of its position in the national economy and by design in terms of how the Fed is set up), it can substantially change the value of not just one but nearly every company on the exchange.
That volume and volatility is actually a good thing though. With all of that trading up & down on so many issues of stock, it means ordinary folks who want to buy or sell shares of a company can easily do so because *somebody* is trading those shares. Hopefully when you make a move like that, you are more interested in what that company is going to do (or not do) over the course of a year or more instead of getting caught up in day trading where you are competing against this kind of action of the big boys.
There is always advanced artificial intelligence doing text parsing off of key word combinations and patterns. That is still some pretty beefy AI that would need more than a few thousand CPU cycles to process that information through. The data must also be sent across several busses inside of the computer chassis to be sent into the computer as well.
Most press releases and other documents from the Fed, while in English, have a pretty typical format and "standard" kinds of statements in those documents which can be seen from previous documents already in the public domain. While I wouldn't trust billions of dollars on such software arbitrarily deciding how to set up important trades, it certainly is something that has the potential of being automated and isn't even "new technology".
It would still take making some educated guesses about what kinds of potential things might be said in such a press release ahead of time and setting up each possible alternative. If the Fed would have announced something really off the wall like discontinuing the U.S. Dollar as currency or having the Fed become insolvent (just to suggest some really crazy possibilities as examples), these kind of trades would likely not happen and would require human intervention. Suggesting that they would or would not continue quantitative easing, raising or lowering the discount rate, or other more typical things that certainly were anticipated would be very easy to automatically spot.
The problem is that somebody human would have needed to actually read this kind of information and then click "buy" or "sell" after the roughly 15 seconds to do a quick glance through the data with trades that are pre-programmed off of likely things found in such a press release. I suppose that you might have some very good artificial intelligence that can do a text parsing through a press release and glean that some key piece of information that would certainly be able to shave off a few additional seconds... there certainly is money to hire software developers to develop such AI systems too.
This really is a smoking gun that somebody got this data ahead of the public release, thus really set up the trades ahead of time. I agree with you that trades for other "hard data" which can be generated from common trade data (especially data generated by the stock exchanges themselves) is something that has brokers and traders investing in laser data links literally crossing Wall Street to shave the milliseconds or even picoseconds difference instead of using copper cables going up and down the buildings. Moving computers next to the exchange servers when possible is also done and other tricks too. None the less, some time simply must elapse in order for these trades to happen and be honest.
Do you know what power lets Congress (yes, this is federal) make that illegal? Interstate Commerce. Because I *might* sell it out of state. Tesla *does* sell out of state. It *will* fall under interstate commerce and Federal law. It's that simple.
No, the power that Congress has to regulate the production and sales of alcoholic beverages is contained in the 21st Amendment to the Constitution, not even the interstate commerce clause.
I dare say it is you who is utterly ignorant on this matter and doesn't understand that interstate commerce is that commerce which actually crosses state lines. While I will agree that federal law does apply here so far as what Tesla does in Texas and elsewhere, this can be seen as a completely internal matter. Yes, there is Wickard v. Filburn that seems to indicate that the federal government effectively has universal authority over commerce anywhere over anything in America. That isn't what the authors of the U.S. Constitution intended, but at this point that particular side argument is irrelevant.
What you are also missing in your previous analysis that completely missed the mark is that these dealer associations could also use the state court systems to force an unfavorable (to Tesla) outcome that could completely bypass any precedent used on the federal level. It would be the dealers, not Tesla, that would argue that any federal court jurisdiction on this matter would be inappropriate and outside of that court's jurisdiction. California itself is a sovereign entity unto itself.
What is being done in both Texas and Massachusetts is that there are auto dealers who are in fact trying to force Tesla in to accepting their companies as distributors of Tesla products... a relationship that Tesla simply doesn't want to have. Tesla is willing to work with local governments in terms of having company owned assets that conform to local laws, but what it is fighting is having those governments force an unwanted business relationship onto them that amounts to be a tax lining the pockets of a well connected local businessman in those areas.
The situation that really caused the problem is that Tesla has been going to strip malls and botique outlets to set up a store rather than the traditional 10 acre dealership lot as well. Some of this is also an attempt to force Tesla to buy that fancy real estate and huge buildings.
The thing is that most people are familiar with kilowatt-hours as that is how energy is measured in most homes.... even in Europe and elsewhere. It is also an easy to understand unit of energy, as you comprehend that a kilowatt-hour is literally running ten 100 watt lightbulbs for an hour (or just one of those for ten hours).
It really isn't all that bastardized of a unit as things go, and it is in the realm of human experience, while megajoules simply aren't something people can grasp from typical experience.
It sure isn't an imperial unit, which would be BTUs instead.
The one thing that might impact what happens in California though (as opposed to Texas, Massachusetts, or other states) is that Tesla is a California corporation with a California manufacturing plant and California-based network servers. In other words, it could be considered an intrastate matter and something not even under the jurisdiction of a federal court, but rather just the state court system. Of course they also can appeal to the state constitution of California as well, which in many ways offers even more protection in terms of individual liberties than does the federal version and is certainly a two edged sword in a matter like this.
Unfortunately it is a matter of national policy that companies are outsourcing departments, or for that matter so much manufacturing has gone outside of America. The laws and regulations are such that most companies can't avoid fighting the trend. It wasn't that long ago (in fact in my lifetime and I'm not a senior citizens) when you could go to a department or grocery store and 95%-99% of the items found there would be made or grown in America. There of course were specialty boutiques and things like foreign automobile dealerships, but those were exotic and rather uncommon and only found in small numbers in the largest of cities.
Right now you would be hard pressed to go to ordinary hardware or grocery stores and find anything actually made in America. That companies are not only buying tons of imported goods, but also having most of their employees come from outside of America should be of little surprise. In fact, for many of these utility companies you are talking about, a great many of them aren't even owned by Americans in America, and those which actually have American corporate headquarters will likely have substantial "foreign" ownership. That would make any attempt to force something like keeping IT departments in America something more of a joke.
Preemptive notification works out great..... as long as you have the cardboard boxes already set upon every desk, have disconnected all electronic devices from the offices (including telephones), and have armed guards waiting to escort each employee individually into the office for their personal effects. Possibly if you want to be nice as an employer, you will have contacted the local employment agencies and have employment counselors on hand.
Basically you need to let them know immediately that their jobs are over. Of course give "generous" severance packages when it is happening too, but it should pretty much be a foregone conclusion that they are going.
Oh yeah, the outsourcing contract had better be pretty firm. Possibly offer to employees some sort of "consulting" work if they care (some might be willing to help), but you shouldn't plan on anybody taking up the offer. Yes, somebody doing this is a jerk, but at least the company will be solvent afterward.
Is it a correlation though? If the sun spends the majority of its time in such configurations, it should be that most events happen in this configuration.
The probability that it is just chance is 5% (lambda=0.6, k=n=6). So there is tentative evidence for a correlation at best.
Does the Sun spend the majority of its time in such a configuration?
The problem is that the hypothesis that somehow the Earth itself and specifically mass extinction events on the Earth is the trigger mechanism for the creation of spiral arms in galaxies is suspect. Over the course of the history of the Earth, through the geologic record, mass extinction events are rather rare, but the paper in question suggests there may be some periodic nature to them happening. Suggesting that the mass extinctions are the cause of something still doesn't deal with triggering mechanisms in the event in the first place.... but if this hypothesis is correct it would be a wonderful indicator of life in the universe and substantially alter the Drake equation.
Of course I know it is a stupid hypothesis, but then the question that begs to be asked is why? It certainly would make for an interesting discussion among college freshmen, and those who think they understand science.
I should add that the items in the Cygnus spacecraft is mainly a bunch of food, what amounts to be toilet paper for the sanitary facilities in the ISS, personal items for the astronauts on this and future missions, and a new computer printer to replace one that broke down on board the station as well as some minor spare parts needed for station maintenance.
You would be hard pressed to find this whole load of cargo to be worth more than a hundred thousand dollars, although its value is important for the people on the ISS and the fact that it is so expensive to haul anything up to that altitude. Hopefully a competitive cargo delivery service can improve that cost as an issue.
As others have said, this is rocket science, and rocket science has the reputation it does for a reason.
Building something that gets into orbit successfully, much less performing a rendezvous with another object already in orbit, is something that has such a thin margin of error that almost anything can prevent success and a whole lot of things can cause a failure.
I see this more as a glass is half-full kind of thing where it is just freaking amazing that Orbital has been able to get this far and even get near the ISS, much less be in a position to actually dock. Not only that, but this is the very first time that this launch vehicle + spacecraft has done something like this. And you expect it to be perfect on the very first try?
The cargo itself isn't all that valuable BTW, so "hundreds of millions of taxpayer funds" are not on the line. Orbital is only going to be paid for cargo delivered, although NASA did send them some money earlier for meeting previous manufacturing objectives. It should also be pointed out that Orbital wasn't even the original contractor who was supposed to be taking cargo into space, but rather Kistler Aerospace. NASA justifiably dumped that service contract and awarded it instead to Orbital after some pretty stiff competition from some other very worthy alternatives.
If anything, it sure is a heck of a lot cheaper in terms of the few hundred million dumped into the COTS program than the tens of billions that have been wasted on Constellation and SLS, where there has yet to be anything even close to flying. Those were both programs that were supposed to be operational before the Space Shuttle flights ended, but instead won't even be considered for an initial flight before 2017, and likely will be delayed well past 2020. Without this program, the $100+ billion dumped on the ISS would be wasted because the ISS would have to be splashed by now. That 1000x difference in orders of magnitude for these programs really makes the amount spent by NASA on Orbital to be real chump change and insignificant, especially with the results that have already been earned by Orbital.
So a company who is launching satellites for the military is also delivering cargo to the International Space Station. Did I miss something?
Or do you really think that the ISS is a part of some global conspiracy to conquer the Earth?
We use the most up to date Milky Way model and solar orbit data
in order to test the hypothesis that the Sun's galactic spiral arm crossings cause
mass extinction events on Earth.
That is how the authors of this paper reported their findings in the actual article's abstract. As for how some random Slashdot poster reported this idea, does it really matter? If you are complaining about Slashdot itself and lame editorship on the part of those who review these stories on the Slashdot staff, that is something else entirely and not something to complain about to the paper's authors.
Besides, they claim it is a causation, or that events which somehow happen during those crossings in turn trigger these extinction events. Unfortunately we have a data sample of one solar system to compare against right now to see if there might be any substance to the mechanism.
It could be worse.... we could simply be falling into the galactic core and passing within a few light years of the central galactic black hole every few million years. Instead, the orbit of the Sun is roughly circular and stays in the main galactic disk.
The other possibility is that the Earth could fly into intergalactic space and the Sun could go in a different direction. That would make things very comfortable.
It means every time a mass extinction occurs on Earth, a galactic spiral arm is contructed.
This sounds very reasonable to me, especially if it is just a "correlation".
I would agree with you. A thousand years from now people would be looking at the ISS like we look at a Norse longboat and wonder how anybody put up with such a vessel to cross the North Atlantic Ocean. Such vessels have been found from archaeological digs, or even something much more recent like the H L Hunley and have been restored at huge expense, certainly more than it cost to originally build those vessels.
While a replica may be built too, I think it has some deeper meaning to have the actual equipment there for future generations to see. The cost of pushing the ISS up to a higher orbit certainly is something that is in the realm of an affordable mission in the here and now.
It isn't as if using ion engines on the ISS is a new concept. The idea has been kicking around for some time and mainly needs some funding. The idea to put one of those engines on the ISS has been discussed simply to maintain the current orbit as it needs to be boosted periodically anyway.
I would even go so far as to suggest that the required delta-v to put the ISS at L5 has likely been already applied simply to keep the station where it is at instead of crashing down back onto the Earth over its current lifetime. A similar kind of energy will need to be applied over the next 15 or so years anyway, so why not build a system that can also work as an end-of-life termination system too?
Another issue with the ISS is that it is so huge that any effort to deorbit the station will most certainly result in a debris field regardless of how much effort you put into breaking it up prior to re-entry. Even splashing it down has a great many complications where it might even be cheaper and certainly offer much less risk to people here on the Earth if it was pushed up to a higher orbit as well. There is definitely going to be a cost to deorbit above and beyond just the delta-v issues.
You might want to check this video out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=806JGh4LPSM
It is a professor at UC Berkley who has been pioneering general printing of semi-conductors and circuits, and he includes a demo of 3D printing with his talk that also includes some interesting discussion about some of the substrates and physics involved with those processes. If you are interested in this kind of thing, I definitely think this video would be worthy of your time.
It is interesting in the lecture how he addresses specifically what at least he thinks of printed IC circuits and especially microprocessors.