Idiot. Alright - WTF is in that suit that people haven't been preserving for hundreds of years already?
As posted upthread, they don't know. The records are incomplete. They'll have to start by hiring a historian to try and find out what it is made out of, what changes have been made to the suit, and what condition it was in when it was on the moon. If they can't they'll have to find somebody who can find out in a non-destructive way. Then they'll need somebody to figure out how to preserve it as well as somebody to do the work. Then comes taking the 3D scan of the thing. Then they'll probably also need somebody to make stands for it, set it up, and transport everything. Add in a project manager as well as somebody else that will have to manage the KS as all those people who donated money will be wanting updates as well as the stuff they were promised. There's salary for about ten professionals before even talking about what actual equipment is needed.
Re:During Pluto's day - how light is it?
on
Pluto's Haze
·
· Score: 1
I suppose I could do the math, but since I'm lazy... if it were possible for you to be standing on the daylight side of Pluto, does anyone know how bright/dark would it be? Is there enough light that you'd be able to see the terrain, at least dimly?
I did the math once based on the supposed camera settings they were shooting at, and from my experience since I do concert photography, it was about as much light as a band on stage lit by four red stage lights which seems to be the minimum standard.
Yeah, we've got a programmer in our group that we played with one night. After his second questionable 2 letter word we added a rule (democratically voted on and adopted) that you must be able to define your word and use it properly in a sentence if anyone asks.
I've seen this all play out before with my group of friends and their programers. Now, the key to winning at Scrabble in the early stages of casual play will be learning all the 2 letter words and their definitions followed by learning all the 3 letter words and their definitions. Somebody will begin learning the 4 letter words. Typically, this is enough to gain the edge and win even against people with really good vocabularies as they can consistantly earn points. If he had the forethought to learn all the 2 letter words, he can no doubt learn their definitions too, and then move on. Now, you will either be faced with having him tell you what all these words mean also, or spending the time to learn them yourself. Eventually, my friends stopped playing because it was no longer a fun "beer and pretzels" game, but one involving lots of work to just have any chance of having fun.
Except Earth has natural forest fires and prarie fires and methane fires.
Yes, but assuming the equipment was sensitive enough, cities would detect as constant low burning fires that remained in the same place constantly over years. It would at least be unusual to have some many natural steady state, if not slowly increasing fires, and quite possible that the light spectrum does not match such known sources as natural gas or methane. However, if will probably be a larger clue, if they could detect ancient cities light, that said lights dim soon after sundown every day.
Killing Jews was strictly within the law of Nazi Germany.
I would not bet on that. While Germany and Germans may have been pedantically detail oriented and had a desire to fulfill the letter of the law, the NAZI party never really had those habits. Even after it was technically legal for Hitler to write up any law he wanted, he often didn't bother. They would write up laws that sounded good to the German people and announce them, and then promptly ignore and break them. Anybody asking too much about the legality of their actions usually found themselves threatened with extra-judicial punishment.
In D&D terms, they were a Chaotic Evil group in charge of a Lawful country. They developed propaganda to the art it became just so they could lie to the country to get away with all the illegal stuff they did. When they took over the labor unions, they did not even make up ex post facto laws to put the former union leaders in jail (even the ones that worked with the NAZIs), they just made up a list and sent them to camps, confiscated their money, and told everybody they now belonged to the new nationalized labor union they created.
That, and holy hell, phones really aren't a security risk. People are a security risk; if someone's allowed to see the same document a thousand times, they can simply memorize it instead of taking a picture. You need to have people you trust; the government simply runs on the policy that no one can be trusted, and (often!) gets far less competent people because of that...
Well, phones are considered the security risk. They do trust the people, but not the phones. A cousin of mine works on a secure military base. They used to be able to keep their phones, so long as the batteries could be taken out and be sure they were non-operative. With the iPhone and similar, they couldn't take out the battery, couldn't be sure it was off, and couldn't really tell if it was recording data whether or not or if the owner even knew about it. Thus, they banned all phones at the door. They weren't worried about somebody there as much as about somebody installing software or otherwise hacking the phone itself without the knowledge the owner. They are, after all, not really phones, but small pocket computers with wireless connections whose power is probably greater than what we worked with ten years ago as a desktop.
How it that different from any other taxi company?
Uber doesn't own the cars, and the taxi company owns the cars. Since, you know, they could dispatch people with mules instead of people with cars; are they now a drayage company, as well?
Well, this is about Europe and maybe they have standardized laws across all the EU, but here in the US, many taxi companies often down't own the cars. The medallion or license owners own the cars, which they lease to the taxi company, which leases them to the drivers.
I did some digging as to what it would cost to do a full 3d high res photo shoot for the entire space suit... whole thing... inside, outside, helmet, gloves, etc. And I'm having a hard time getting numbers even in 5 figures. This is looking like maybe 8 grand.
That's probably because you've never had to hire a trained professional with professional equipment before. Eight grand wouldn't be unheard of for a single day of a wedding photographer. Of course that single day includes prep time, equipment costs, an assistant, and a week of post production work at a contractor's rate, but you're just one of those people who wonders why they can' just have their cousin take photos with their point and shoot for free instead. five figures is easy to reach if you have to hire a contracted professional for their time or hire an FTE to use your own equipment (which would easily be another five figures to do what they want to do). That doesn't even begin to cover transportation costs, stands to set up the suit for the 3D photos, or any number of other costs that will start to appear once the project gets underway and done with the due diligance needed with preservation in mind. Extend that to all the other features of the work you have no idea about, and I don't doubt that you might question it, however I do doubt any of your figures have anything to do with reality.
The Smithsonian has a $805,000,000 budget.... surely they could scrounge up 0.06% of their annual budget to pay for it themselves since preserving significant artifacts of USA history is pretty much exactly what taxpayers are paying them for.
Well, the Smithsonian has a gift shop, probably does fundraisers, has publicity programs, and does collection of data of supporters. Like it or not, Kickstarter is a tool that does all those things. Go look at the Kickstarter. This is not so much as a plea for money but a publicity event to sell merchandise that will raise that money while also offering a chance to collect a list of people interested in their endeavors. Very early on, Kickstarter ceased to really be a way to kick in money to a desired goal and became a method of selling stuff to make money to fund that goal. Sometimes that stuff is the finished product that was the goal and KS is being used to raise funding, but just as often if not more so, the stuff is related merch separate from the end goal and people are kicking in just for that merch. I've seen bands raising tour money by offering the same stuff they sell at their concerts for the same price. It's a way to sell stuff you'll try and sell anyway through a publicised site for a limited amount of time.
If we can make the colony sustainable, it's way past time for us to make a backup.
We either get ourselves to other planets and stay there, or we all die here on our single-planet graveyard.
If we can't make this planet sustainable, then we'd have no hope of making some other colony sustainable. While it's a reasonable goal, realistically, there are countless things that need to happen here on Earth first to make that goal possible.
Why has Slashdot been so focused on counting genitalia lately? Every day there's some story about how there are too many penises, or not enough vaginas, involved with some industry or activity. I mean, earlier today we had a shitty submission about the penis and vagina accountants not liking the numbers they're working with, which I thought would mean no more penis and vagina counting submissions for the rest of the day. But nope! I was wrong! Now we have this submission, which although it mentions mathematics briefly, is far more focused on counting penises and vaginas.
Because there is a horde of insightful/trolls that jump on every time one shows up and up post counts. Just like all the Apple articles people bitch about, bitching also ups post counts, advertising clicks, and all the things that drive the site. If all the ACs with sticks would jump on *nix articles and stir up stuff there, there would be more *nix articles on/. but as it is, we get social issues and Apple.
as to think that:
1) anonymous space aliens are radiating coherent energy in all directions (we sure aren't) and,
2) that we'll pick them up, when receiving photons from stars is so difficult.
but...
1) We are. The specific examples given are aeronatical and interplanetary radar which we are radiating in all directions.
2) Also from the given specific examples, they have figured out what they can detect from such systems based on what we are currently using.
Unlike other radio waves, active radar is something that a more advanced race will need more powerful versions of to track things in their solar system and must use a limited range of frequencies for due to the physics of the job.
My understanding has been that we should expect a civilization to use radio broadcasts that radiate out and which we can distinguish from noise for only maybe 100 or so years. Prior to that, they've not invented radio. After some point, all transmissions are compressed and/or encrypted so that they're harder to distingush from noise. And at some point, transmissions may be done via other media, such as point-to-point lasers and even things we haven't discovered yet. The likelihood is that all over civilizations have started at different points and progressed differently, so we've likely missed that window on all other civilizations.
From what I've read of the linked articles, the specific examples they are giving are for radar, both aeronautical and interplanetary. Active radar will have use long after the use other radio waves have been reduced. The natural and unnatural sources for such are probably fairly well understood and recognizable, the band they exist in is due to practical uses that all races would need, and a more advanced civilization with need to scan their solar system for objects in space would probably have an increased need for more powerful versions as they grow. It seems a fairly decent assumption that such things would be found with physics as we currently know it. If nothing else, they will have the radar observations from thousands of systems and galaxies that will probably keep astrophysics grad students and hopeful PhDs busy for decades.
The whole "X was faked" theory misses one key point. If the moon landings were bogus, the Russians, Chinese, and a few others, all of whom had/have the technical ability would have blown the whistle on us.
OMG! You're right!
They're in on it! There must be a conspiracy involving all the major nations of the Earth. If that's true, then they aren't really at odds. The Cold War was also faked, and this is all part of their grand plan. What is their real goal?
I really cannot imagine why they would want to get back into the business.
Just pondering, but I have seen plenty of instances in the application world where somebody will form a company, make a program, and sell it to a larger company. They then take that money to make themselves rich and form a new company which will make a new version of the program, which they will probably sell to a larger company because the larger company never did anything with the original program they purchased. Wash, rinse, and repeat. IN this case, Nokia probably is a larger company and without insider information as to why the Microsoft deal actually happened, or at least their opinion of why, it would be hard to tell what they might plan.
The politically correct crowd will willingly ignore horrible behavior as long as the person is otherwise supportive of their cause. I point to William Jefferson Clinton (Bill) as my defacto example of someone, who had they been had an (R) after their name, would have been judged completely differently by the PC (read, liberal) crowd.
So I take the cries of the PC crowd to be largely hypocritical.
Well, that goes both ways. If he had R next to his name, all the people (like my family members) who were talking about how "he is obviosly sick in his sexual predatoriness", would be going "it a private matter we shouldn't be worrying about" just like they have done for the other Rs caught in such things. When you mix political parties you are invoking knee jerk factionalism that will color everything else.
For some of the same reasons that settlements on Earth are far apart. Settlements will probably be based on natural resources, and it's doubtful you'll find them all close together. On Mars, it will probably be based on different mineral and ore mines, and they'll have to be mined where they can be found.
Er, today there are far more people still living with their parents than ever. If you want to measure "standard of living" in terms of gadgets go ahead. In the 1950's one man could support his wife and several kids with a house fully paid for, health costs were not a problem, etc. Today? You are a slave to the bank. Don't you or your wife dream of getting sick. Can you afford that baby, and more importantly will mom and dad mind you adding yet another family member into the already crowded house?
When the last recession started in 2008 or what not and people were taking about the great depression, I started looking into the Great Depression, the 1950's and standards of living. In the course, I found some studies that dealt with increasing standard of living in the 1950's. You can still living like they did in the 1950's. Just cut your salary in half and get rid of all but three of your electric appliances. Then, every year give yourself a 5% raise and buy a new electric appliance and you'll pretty much approximate what it was like in the 50's including standard of living. The 50's were considered good times not because they were a great standard of living but because it was a time of increasing standard of living. Even then, the middle class standards of the 1950's were of such that if we were reduced to it today, it would be near apocalyptic. The study I was looking was done in the 50's on what they considered "middle class" and studied things like amount of clothes owned, time spent on chores, and amount of money spent on food. The average middle class family had less than two weeks worth of clean clothes. The wife had to stay at home because it took a full time person to do washing, cleaning, and cooking without electric appliances. The 50's stereotype of the father getting eggs and bacon while the family getting porridge is because that is all the family could afford as food was such a high percentage of the families income at the time. It would not be hard at all to live at the 1950's standard of living for the average middle class family in todays salaries if you are willing to do without.
Given Apollo level funding and political will (from the US and other involved nations), what do you think the major steps to getting to Mars will be and how long do you think it would take to actually put a man on Mars?
I haven't had much experience with Doctors fortunately, but the last few visits made me feel like they were the equivalent of 1st level helpdesk. Issues were either googled, or simply told to take some antibiotics and come back if it gets worse (ie the reboot). When you look at how much a modern economy spends on healthcare, I think there is room for a different health model which is a lot cheaper and more efficient.
Essentially, you are at a 1st level helpdesk. Human body or computer, there's no quick track that skips proper troubleshooting, and proper troubleshooting sometimes takes time. Trouble is that there is no tier 2 helpdesk that isn't dedicated to a specific field, which they will send you to once they determine what it is. From there, if they can figure out the specific issue, you can go to a tier 3 helpdesk of a specialist. Patients, like users might try and skip the tier 1 helpdesk, but chances are, the tier 2 guy issuing to have to do the same troubleshooting, just at an increased cost and perhaps send you back to tier 1 because you are seeing somebody in the wrong friend, because patients, like users, using have no idea what they are doing and if they think they do, are usually wrong. That being said, there does exist a wide range of experience and competence at all tier levels.
Libya: Obama's exercise in failed "regime change" has left Libya more fucked up than what W did to Iraq. Why'd Obama depose Qaddafi again?
From my reading, that was actually Europe, mostly France and Italy. They were willing to push their agenda and get rid of Qaddafi, got Europe involved, and then realized that they couldn't carry out such a mission without NATO resources, which meant dragging in the US. I can't find real reference to it, but I suspect that Europe basically said "we supported you in Iraq, now you can support us in this" and we had to get involved in North Africa to scratch Europe's back. Notice that that was the NATO operation that we were not in charge of.
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Idiot. Alright - WTF is in that suit that people haven't been preserving for hundreds of years already?
As posted upthread, they don't know. The records are incomplete. They'll have to start by hiring a historian to try and find out what it is made out of, what changes have been made to the suit, and what condition it was in when it was on the moon. If they can't they'll have to find somebody who can find out in a non-destructive way. Then they'll need somebody to figure out how to preserve it as well as somebody to do the work. Then comes taking the 3D scan of the thing. Then they'll probably also need somebody to make stands for it, set it up, and transport everything. Add in a project manager as well as somebody else that will have to manage the KS as all those people who donated money will be wanting updates as well as the stuff they were promised. There's salary for about ten professionals before even talking about what actual equipment is needed.
I suppose I could do the math, but since I'm lazy... if it were possible for you to be standing on the daylight side of Pluto, does anyone know how bright/dark would it be? Is there enough light that you'd be able to see the terrain, at least dimly?
I did the math once based on the supposed camera settings they were shooting at, and from my experience since I do concert photography, it was about as much light as a band on stage lit by four red stage lights which seems to be the minimum standard.
Yeah, we've got a programmer in our group that we played with one night. After his second questionable 2 letter word we added a rule (democratically voted on and adopted) that you must be able to define your word and use it properly in a sentence if anyone asks.
I've seen this all play out before with my group of friends and their programers. Now, the key to winning at Scrabble in the early stages of casual play will be learning all the 2 letter words and their definitions followed by learning all the 3 letter words and their definitions. Somebody will begin learning the 4 letter words. Typically, this is enough to gain the edge and win even against people with really good vocabularies as they can consistantly earn points. If he had the forethought to learn all the 2 letter words, he can no doubt learn their definitions too, and then move on. Now, you will either be faced with having him tell you what all these words mean also, or spending the time to learn them yourself. Eventually, my friends stopped playing because it was no longer a fun "beer and pretzels" game, but one involving lots of work to just have any chance of having fun.
I've wondered about that... what about just wearing chaps & a stetson? :-)
Aesthetically acceptable and there are probably camps that cater to your particular hobbies.
Except Earth has natural forest fires and prarie fires and methane fires.
Yes, but assuming the equipment was sensitive enough, cities would detect as constant low burning fires that remained in the same place constantly over years. It would at least be unusual to have some many natural steady state, if not slowly increasing fires, and quite possible that the light spectrum does not match such known sources as natural gas or methane. However, if will probably be a larger clue, if they could detect ancient cities light, that said lights dim soon after sundown every day.
Killing Jews was strictly within the law of Nazi Germany.
I would not bet on that. While Germany and Germans may have been pedantically detail oriented and had a desire to fulfill the letter of the law, the NAZI party never really had those habits. Even after it was technically legal for Hitler to write up any law he wanted, he often didn't bother. They would write up laws that sounded good to the German people and announce them, and then promptly ignore and break them. Anybody asking too much about the legality of their actions usually found themselves threatened with extra-judicial punishment.
In D&D terms, they were a Chaotic Evil group in charge of a Lawful country. They developed propaganda to the art it became just so they could lie to the country to get away with all the illegal stuff they did. When they took over the labor unions, they did not even make up ex post facto laws to put the former union leaders in jail (even the ones that worked with the NAZIs), they just made up a list and sent them to camps, confiscated their money, and told everybody they now belonged to the new nationalized labor union they created.
Doctor Who never loses a patient!
What about Adric?
That, and holy hell, phones really aren't a security risk. People are a security risk; if someone's allowed to see the same document a thousand times, they can simply memorize it instead of taking a picture. You need to have people you trust; the government simply runs on the policy that no one can be trusted, and (often!) gets far less competent people because of that...
Well, phones are considered the security risk. They do trust the people, but not the phones. A cousin of mine works on a secure military base. They used to be able to keep their phones, so long as the batteries could be taken out and be sure they were non-operative. With the iPhone and similar, they couldn't take out the battery, couldn't be sure it was off, and couldn't really tell if it was recording data whether or not or if the owner even knew about it. Thus, they banned all phones at the door. They weren't worried about somebody there as much as about somebody installing software or otherwise hacking the phone itself without the knowledge the owner. They are, after all, not really phones, but small pocket computers with wireless connections whose power is probably greater than what we worked with ten years ago as a desktop.
How it that different from any other taxi company?
Uber doesn't own the cars, and the taxi company owns the cars. Since, you know, they could dispatch people with mules instead of people with cars; are they now a drayage company, as well?
Well, this is about Europe and maybe they have standardized laws across all the EU, but here in the US, many taxi companies often down't own the cars. The medallion or license owners own the cars, which they lease to the taxi company, which leases them to the drivers.
I did some digging as to what it would cost to do a full 3d high res photo shoot for the entire space suit... whole thing... inside, outside, helmet, gloves, etc. And I'm having a hard time getting numbers even in 5 figures. This is looking like maybe 8 grand.
That's probably because you've never had to hire a trained professional with professional equipment before. Eight grand wouldn't be unheard of for a single day of a wedding photographer. Of course that single day includes prep time, equipment costs, an assistant, and a week of post production work at a contractor's rate, but you're just one of those people who wonders why they can' just have their cousin take photos with their point and shoot for free instead. five figures is easy to reach if you have to hire a contracted professional for their time or hire an FTE to use your own equipment (which would easily be another five figures to do what they want to do). That doesn't even begin to cover transportation costs, stands to set up the suit for the 3D photos, or any number of other costs that will start to appear once the project gets underway and done with the due diligance needed with preservation in mind. Extend that to all the other features of the work you have no idea about, and I don't doubt that you might question it, however I do doubt any of your figures have anything to do with reality.
The Smithsonian has a $805,000,000 budget.... surely they could scrounge up 0.06% of their annual budget to pay for it themselves since preserving significant artifacts of USA history is pretty much exactly what taxpayers are paying them for.
Well, the Smithsonian has a gift shop, probably does fundraisers, has publicity programs, and does collection of data of supporters. Like it or not, Kickstarter is a tool that does all those things. Go look at the Kickstarter. This is not so much as a plea for money but a publicity event to sell merchandise that will raise that money while also offering a chance to collect a list of people interested in their endeavors. Very early on, Kickstarter ceased to really be a way to kick in money to a desired goal and became a method of selling stuff to make money to fund that goal. Sometimes that stuff is the finished product that was the goal and KS is being used to raise funding, but just as often if not more so, the stuff is related merch separate from the end goal and people are kicking in just for that merch. I've seen bands raising tour money by offering the same stuff they sell at their concerts for the same price. It's a way to sell stuff you'll try and sell anyway through a publicised site for a limited amount of time.
If we can make the colony sustainable, it's way past time for us to make a backup.
We either get ourselves to other planets and stay there, or we all die here on our single-planet graveyard.
If we can't make this planet sustainable, then we'd have no hope of making some other colony sustainable. While it's a reasonable goal, realistically, there are countless things that need to happen here on Earth first to make that goal possible.
Why has Slashdot been so focused on counting genitalia lately? Every day there's some story about how there are too many penises, or not enough vaginas, involved with some industry or activity. I mean, earlier today we had a shitty submission about the penis and vagina accountants not liking the numbers they're working with, which I thought would mean no more penis and vagina counting submissions for the rest of the day. But nope! I was wrong! Now we have this submission, which although it mentions mathematics briefly, is far more focused on counting penises and vaginas.
Because there is a horde of insightful/trolls that jump on every time one shows up and up post counts. Just like all the Apple articles people bitch about, bitching also ups post counts, advertising clicks, and all the things that drive the site. If all the ACs with sticks would jump on *nix articles and stir up stuff there, there would be more *nix articles on /. but as it is, we get social issues and Apple.
as to think that: 1) anonymous space aliens are radiating coherent energy in all directions (we sure aren't) and, 2) that we'll pick them up, when receiving photons from stars is so difficult.
but...
1) We are. The specific examples given are aeronatical and interplanetary radar which we are radiating in all directions.
2) Also from the given specific examples, they have figured out what they can detect from such systems based on what we are currently using.
Unlike other radio waves, active radar is something that a more advanced race will need more powerful versions of to track things in their solar system and must use a limited range of frequencies for due to the physics of the job.
My understanding has been that we should expect a civilization to use radio broadcasts that radiate out and which we can distinguish from noise for only maybe 100 or so years. Prior to that, they've not invented radio. After some point, all transmissions are compressed and/or encrypted so that they're harder to distingush from noise. And at some point, transmissions may be done via other media, such as point-to-point lasers and even things we haven't discovered yet. The likelihood is that all over civilizations have started at different points and progressed differently, so we've likely missed that window on all other civilizations.
From what I've read of the linked articles, the specific examples they are giving are for radar, both aeronautical and interplanetary. Active radar will have use long after the use other radio waves have been reduced. The natural and unnatural sources for such are probably fairly well understood and recognizable, the band they exist in is due to practical uses that all races would need, and a more advanced civilization with need to scan their solar system for objects in space would probably have an increased need for more powerful versions as they grow. It seems a fairly decent assumption that such things would be found with physics as we currently know it. If nothing else, they will have the radar observations from thousands of systems and galaxies that will probably keep astrophysics grad students and hopeful PhDs busy for decades.
The whole "X was faked" theory misses one key point. If the moon landings were bogus, the Russians, Chinese, and a few others, all of whom had/have the technical ability would have blown the whistle on us.
OMG! You're right!
They're in on it! There must be a conspiracy involving all the major nations of the Earth. If that's true, then they aren't really at odds. The Cold War was also faked, and this is all part of their grand plan. What is their real goal?
I really cannot imagine why they would want to get back into the business.
Just pondering, but I have seen plenty of instances in the application world where somebody will form a company, make a program, and sell it to a larger company. They then take that money to make themselves rich and form a new company which will make a new version of the program, which they will probably sell to a larger company because the larger company never did anything with the original program they purchased. Wash, rinse, and repeat. IN this case, Nokia probably is a larger company and without insider information as to why the Microsoft deal actually happened, or at least their opinion of why, it would be hard to tell what they might plan.
The politically correct crowd will willingly ignore horrible behavior as long as the person is otherwise supportive of their cause. I point to William Jefferson Clinton (Bill) as my defacto example of someone, who had they been had an (R) after their name, would have been judged completely differently by the PC (read, liberal) crowd.
So I take the cries of the PC crowd to be largely hypocritical.
Well, that goes both ways. If he had R next to his name, all the people (like my family members) who were talking about how "he is obviosly sick in his sexual predatoriness", would be going "it a private matter we shouldn't be worrying about" just like they have done for the other Rs caught in such things. When you mix political parties you are invoking knee jerk factionalism that will color everything else.
Why would we place settlements on Mars far apart?
For some of the same reasons that settlements on Earth are far apart. Settlements will probably be based on natural resources, and it's doubtful you'll find them all close together. On Mars, it will probably be based on different mineral and ore mines, and they'll have to be mined where they can be found.
Er, today there are far more people still living with their parents than ever. If you want to measure "standard of living" in terms of gadgets go ahead. In the 1950's one man could support his wife and several kids with a house fully paid for, health costs were not a problem, etc. Today? You are a slave to the bank. Don't you or your wife dream of getting sick. Can you afford that baby, and more importantly will mom and dad mind you adding yet another family member into the already crowded house?
When the last recession started in 2008 or what not and people were taking about the great depression, I started looking into the Great Depression, the 1950's and standards of living. In the course, I found some studies that dealt with increasing standard of living in the 1950's. You can still living like they did in the 1950's. Just cut your salary in half and get rid of all but three of your electric appliances. Then, every year give yourself a 5% raise and buy a new electric appliance and you'll pretty much approximate what it was like in the 50's including standard of living. The 50's were considered good times not because they were a great standard of living but because it was a time of increasing standard of living. Even then, the middle class standards of the 1950's were of such that if we were reduced to it today, it would be near apocalyptic. The study I was looking was done in the 50's on what they considered "middle class" and studied things like amount of clothes owned, time spent on chores, and amount of money spent on food. The average middle class family had less than two weeks worth of clean clothes. The wife had to stay at home because it took a full time person to do washing, cleaning, and cooking without electric appliances. The 50's stereotype of the father getting eggs and bacon while the family getting porridge is because that is all the family could afford as food was such a high percentage of the families income at the time. It would not be hard at all to live at the 1950's standard of living for the average middle class family in todays salaries if you are willing to do without.
> Unfortunately, that really limited the ability of the producers to pick inoffensive accents
Didn't stop them with Yoda.
Originally, Yoda had a very heavy and identifiable muppet accent.
What do you think the needed new technologies are left to develop, test, and refine to production models before we can perform a manned Mars mission?
Given Apollo level funding and political will (from the US and other involved nations), what do you think the major steps to getting to Mars will be and how long do you think it would take to actually put a man on Mars?
I haven't had much experience with Doctors fortunately, but the last few visits made me feel like they were the equivalent of 1st level helpdesk. Issues were either googled, or simply told to take some antibiotics and come back if it gets worse (ie the reboot). When you look at how much a modern economy spends on healthcare, I think there is room for a different health model which is a lot cheaper and more efficient.
Essentially, you are at a 1st level helpdesk. Human body or computer, there's no quick track that skips proper troubleshooting, and proper troubleshooting sometimes takes time. Trouble is that there is no tier 2 helpdesk that isn't dedicated to a specific field, which they will send you to once they determine what it is. From there, if they can figure out the specific issue, you can go to a tier 3 helpdesk of a specialist. Patients, like users might try and skip the tier 1 helpdesk, but chances are, the tier 2 guy issuing to have to do the same troubleshooting, just at an increased cost and perhaps send you back to tier 1 because you are seeing somebody in the wrong friend, because patients, like users, using have no idea what they are doing and if they think they do, are usually wrong. That being said, there does exist a wide range of experience and competence at all tier levels.
Libya: Obama's exercise in failed "regime change" has left Libya more fucked up than what W did to Iraq. Why'd Obama depose Qaddafi again?
From my reading, that was actually Europe, mostly France and Italy. They were willing to push their agenda and get rid of Qaddafi, got Europe involved, and then realized that they couldn't carry out such a mission without NATO resources, which meant dragging in the US. I can't find real reference to it, but I suspect that Europe basically said "we supported you in Iraq, now you can support us in this" and we had to get involved in North Africa to scratch Europe's back. Notice that that was the NATO operation that we were not in charge of.