It's not like you can compare it to a commuter busway, the subsidy provided by the government in that case is minor, and even in that case you'd be hard pressed to claim that the passengers were paying their own way - they're not, the government is subsidizing them.
In this case though, Russia is acting more like a business -- there's no legislation obligating them to sell trips, but they're doing it because it's making them a profit.
Similarly, you can't claim that Ansari is paying the "market price" for a trip to the ISS, as there is no market - right now there's only one place to go if you want such a trip and you can't have a market with only one seller in it.
Ok then, it's a monopoly market in that case. If anything, it means that she's paying even more than she would otherwise.
It's a bit much to suggest that Anousheh Ansari is paying her own way.
Why's that? If one purchases a trip on a vesselat the current market price, regardless of whether or not that vessel is government-operated, isn't that paying one's own way?
Helen Sharman kinda predates her by 15 years. Not to mention the fact that neither actually like the term "space tourist" and have claimed they are the first such.
Indeed. It seems that people want to use the term "space tourist" for anybody that pays their own way, rather than having the government pay for them (or in the case of Helen Sharman, having a consortium of British companies pay for her). I don't think anybody would've called the partipants in the ill-fated Teacher in Space Project tourists, even though their primary purpose would've been an outreach role similar to that Anoushseh Ansari is fulfilling.
Anousheh Ansari official blog, other details
on
Chemical Leak on ISS
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
For those of you curious about such things, the X Prize (which Anousheh Ansari funded) is hosting an official Anousheh Ansari Space Blog. Before her launch, Anousheh posted some descriptions of her pre-launch training and her thoughts on going to space. There's also some commentary from Peter Diamandis, the founder of the X Prize.
* According to an interview with MSNBC's Alan Boyle, she had initially planned on bringing some science projects up with her, but this was scratched when the launch date was suddently bumped from being 1-2 years to being a few months away. However, she's purchased some datalink time in order to do live communications with groups at MIT and Google.
* Her company Prodea is working with the Russian space agency and Space Adventures to build a suborbital spacecraft which will launch out of spaceports in the UAE and Singapore.
* She rathes dislikes the term "space tourist." From an interview with space.com:
SPACE.com: You don't like the term "space tourist" and call it an "over simplistic label to a complicated process." Can you further explain that?
AA: Absolutely. In a way I take offense when they call me a tourist because it brings that image of someone with a camera around their neck and a ticket in their hand walking to the airport to go on a trip somewhere and coming back to show their pictures. But I think spaceflight is much more than that.
I've been training for it for six months. I think if it is to be compared to an experiment or an experience on Earth it probably is closer to expeditions like people who go to Antarctica or people who climb Mount Everest. I mean that requires a lot more preparation, thinking, and studying or appreciation of the environment. So I would probably compare it more to an expedition than I would to a touristy trip to another city.
Probably because the people who the cameras are supposed to catch would simply blow them up.
In that case, you simply install the cameras in pairs which watch each other, perhaps with decent concealment so there's uncertainty over where they are. If one of them blows up, you have video of a suspect at fairly little cost.
I make fairly frequent trips to London to visit our office there. It's interesting, I talked about these cameras with the guys there (the office is smack in the middle of London) and they all love them. Criminals have circumvented the system by being where the cameras aren't. This has made the highly populated parts London MUCH safer...
This makes me wonder... why hasn't, say, Baghdad or Ramadi been covered with a network of CCTV cameras? There's of course electricity issues, but one would imagine that could be taken care of with something like solar panels.
I'm not familiar with UK law: Are private citizens also allowed to do this? Can they set up a camera in a public place and leave it there? So long as it doesn't violate civil disturbance laws, can they have the camera say things to passerby?
This reminds me of Charles Stross's Lovecraftian/Dilbertian spy thriller Concrete Jungle, which is licensed under a Creative Commons license and can be read as a free download. (Slight spoiler follows) In the novella, part of the plotline involves taking the turn-to-stone ability that medusas have, attributing it to some quantum-mechanical observance trickery, and encoding the relevant neural circuitry into an FPGA chip built into the cameras. The basic idea is that the whole reason the whole reason the UK is constructing their surveillance camera network isn't for the surveillance itself, but to provide an instant-kill defense network against the hordes of some impending Lovecratian horror.
The question you should be asking is "Why is the Military being used for civillian law enforcment?"
They aren't. Despite the dumb-ass slashdot blurb, there's absolutely nothing in the article about the military doing anything whatsoever to American civilians.
The military and the citizenry are never meant to tangle with each other as it is deemed unfair especially if a death occurs.
Where in the article has it been suggested that the military would tangle with the citizenry?
Actually though, in reading through this thread, I think the problem is with the stupid/inaccurate slashdot blurb. The/. blurb makes it seem like the Air Force is about to test their new weapons on hapless Americans. If this is what they were actually going to do, then I would agree that would be a horrendous violation of our rights. However, if you actually read the article (ignoring CNN's own sensationalist headline), you'll see that this is far from the case.
Here's the quote the blurb is based on, from the Air Force Secretary: "If we're not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation."
Despite slashdot-hallucinations to the contrary, he isn't claiming that the Air Force is going to paratroop into the middle of a cub scout meeting and start firing less-than-lethal lasers at everybody in order to see if it works or not. What he's saying is that he's refusing to use it on Iraqi civilians until they're considered safe enough that they've been used in similar situations in the US.
Since the constitution doesn't grant me rights as a citizen, it grants the government rights and this is clearly not something I'd say is supported in any ammendment and certainly not the constitution in general.
What gives the government the right to use the lethal weapons they've been using for the past few hundred years?
Using our military on our own people flies in the spirit of the constitution as well.
Where in the article has anybody suggested using the military on our own people?
It is just that given a little bit of knowledge of US history, it is all too easy to suspect that the government may try to use these weapons against civilians in an unjustified manner.
Sure... and the government might also try to use lethal weapons in an unjustified manner. How is it that nonlethal weapons are a greater threat to our constitutional rights?
If the majority of the Chinese are content with their government or its actions (which is the case otherwise their country would be in a civil war until it changed) we as a world community have to respect their right to govern their country.
In the American Civil War, the majority of people in the Confederacy were content with their government and its actions. Should the world community have respected their right to govern their country?
I think you've just hit upon a new theory as to why the dinosaurs went extinct. Is there any evidence, for or against? How well are the dinosaur extinction event and the magnetic pole flips narrowed down, and could the dinosaur extinction be a delayed reaction?
Well, the thing is, magnetic pole reversals actually happen pretty often, according to Wikipedia at a rate of 1-5 events every million years. Since the dinosaurs lived 65-230 million years ago, by looking at this graph we can deduce that during their existence they experienced a few dozen pole reversals.
Now that I look at it though, it is somewhat interesting that the Cretaceous Long Normal, an abnormally long (~40 million year) period during which there were no pole reversals at all, ended around 15 million years before the dinosaurs disappeared. I personally think it's just a coincidence, though.
What's interesting though is that there doesn't seem to be any fossil evidence of higher-than-normal extinction rates during previous pole reversals...
You save a huge amount of money if you launch from a geographic location that is near the equator, heading east (so you get the benefit of the Earth's rotation, which saves fuel and allows for an increased payload), and is far enough away from people that you don't get bits of rocket landing in residential areas if it all goes wrong. Being near the equator also puts you in a good position for a geostationary orbit.
Cape Canaveral is at a latitude of 29N. Vandenberg, the site of the West Coast Space Shuttle launch site, is at 35N latitude. An entire space shuttle launch complex was constructed at Vandenberg at the cost of $4 billion, and the launch complex was never used. Is the difference in latitude (29N vs 35N) worth all the problems and costly delays from Florida weather?
Young planets, Class B worlds are less than 10 billion years old. Their diameters range in size from 1,000 to 10,000 km. They are located in the hotzone region of a star's solar system. Their surfaces are partially molten and may feature active volcanoes with an overall high surface temperature. Their atmospheres, if any, are extremely tenuous, with few active gases. They almost never have life forms.
NOTHING on your feed was something that someone couldn't have seen otherwise.
No kidding. Facebook basically just replicated the functionality of the Facebook Stalker firefox extension. I haven't tried it yet, but I'm guesing FB Stalker's functionality still works.
I'm running this thing right now, after downloading from here. It's kind of neat, but it'd be really nice if it gave some sort of feedback to the user to show it was actually operating. I'd like to be able to, say, kick my computer and watch a little seismometer guage move around, just to let me know the thing is working.
Also, to the commenter who was worrying that things like kicks or shifts to a computer would result in false alarms, that's part of why they're using a P2P network. By aggregating the results from many machines, you can toss out false alarms. Of course, if a bunch of people got together on IRC to coordinate times at which they'd all kick their computers, that could probably trigger it...;)
Slashdot Mirror
It's not like you can compare it to a commuter busway, the subsidy provided by the government in that case is minor, and even in that case you'd be hard pressed to claim that the passengers were paying their own way - they're not, the government is subsidizing them.
In this case though, Russia is acting more like a business -- there's no legislation obligating them to sell trips, but they're doing it because it's making them a profit.
Similarly, you can't claim that Ansari is paying the "market price" for a trip to the ISS, as there is no market - right now there's only one place to go if you want such a trip and you can't have a market with only one seller in it.
Ok then, it's a monopoly market in that case. If anything, it means that she's paying even more than she would otherwise.
It's a bit much to suggest that Anousheh Ansari is paying her own way.
Why's that? If one purchases a trip on a vesselat the current market price, regardless of whether or not that vessel is government-operated, isn't that paying one's own way?
Helen Sharman kinda predates her by 15 years. Not to mention the fact that neither actually like the term "space tourist" and have claimed they are the first such.
Indeed. It seems that people want to use the term "space tourist" for anybody that pays their own way, rather than having the government pay for them (or in the case of Helen Sharman, having a consortium of British companies pay for her). I don't think anybody would've called the partipants in the ill-fated Teacher in Space Project tourists, even though their primary purpose would've been an outreach role similar to that Anoushseh Ansari is fulfilling.
For those of you curious about such things, the X Prize (which Anousheh Ansari funded) is hosting an official Anousheh Ansari Space Blog. Before her launch, Anousheh posted some descriptions of her pre-launch training and her thoughts on going to space. There's also some commentary from Peter Diamandis, the founder of the X Prize.
Some other interesting bits of info:
* She's carrying a small carbon-fiber piece of Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne up with her into orbit.
* According to an interview with MSNBC's Alan Boyle, she had initially planned on bringing some science projects up with her, but this was scratched when the launch date was suddently bumped from being 1-2 years to being a few months away. However, she's purchased some datalink time in order to do live communications with groups at MIT and Google.
* Her company Prodea is working with the Russian space agency and Space Adventures to build a suborbital spacecraft which will launch out of spaceports in the UAE and Singapore.
* She rathes dislikes the term "space tourist." From an interview with space.com:
SPACE.com: You don't like the term "space tourist" and call it an "over simplistic label to a complicated process." Can you further explain that?
AA: Absolutely. In a way I take offense when they call me a tourist because it brings that image of someone with a camera around their neck and a ticket in their hand walking to the airport to go on a trip somewhere and coming back to show their pictures. But I think spaceflight is much more than that.
I've been training for it for six months. I think if it is to be compared to an experiment or an experience on Earth it probably is closer to expeditions like people who go to Antarctica or people who climb Mount Everest. I mean that requires a lot more preparation, thinking, and studying or appreciation of the environment. So I would probably compare it more to an expedition than I would to a touristy trip to another city.
Actually, the issue I was addressing was more that of somebody sneaking up on a camera from outside of its field of view.
Probably because the people who the cameras are supposed to catch would simply blow them up.
In that case, you simply install the cameras in pairs which watch each other, perhaps with decent concealment so there's uncertainty over where they are. If one of them blows up, you have video of a suspect at fairly little cost.
I make fairly frequent trips to London to visit our office there. It's interesting, I talked about these cameras with the guys there (the office is smack in the middle of London) and they all love them. Criminals have circumvented the system by being where the cameras aren't. This has made the highly populated parts London MUCH safer...
This makes me wonder... why hasn't, say, Baghdad or Ramadi been covered with a network of CCTV cameras? There's of course electricity issues, but one would imagine that could be taken care of with something like solar panels.
I'm not familiar with UK law: Are private citizens also allowed to do this? Can they set up a camera in a public place and leave it there? So long as it doesn't violate civil disturbance laws, can they have the camera say things to passerby?
This reminds me of Charles Stross's Lovecraftian/Dilbertian spy thriller Concrete Jungle, which is licensed under a Creative Commons license and can be read as a free download. (Slight spoiler follows) In the novella, part of the plotline involves taking the turn-to-stone ability that medusas have, attributing it to some quantum-mechanical observance trickery, and encoding the relevant neural circuitry into an FPGA chip built into the cameras. The basic idea is that the whole reason the whole reason the UK is constructing their surveillance camera network isn't for the surveillance itself, but to provide an instant-kill defense network against the hordes of some impending Lovecratian horror.
:)
The novella is a little strange, but fun.
There are a lot of weapons that we're willing to use in a wartime situation that are not used against US citizens.
Sure. All the Air Force Secretary is saying is that the new technologies wouldn't be in that category.
The question you should be asking is "Why is the Military being used for civillian law enforcment?"
They aren't. Despite the dumb-ass slashdot blurb, there's absolutely nothing in the article about the military doing anything whatsoever to American civilians.
The military and the citizenry are never meant to tangle with each other as it is deemed unfair especially if a death occurs.
/. blurb makes it seem like the Air Force is about to test their new weapons on hapless Americans. If this is what they were actually going to do, then I would agree that would be a horrendous violation of our rights. However, if you actually read the article (ignoring CNN's own sensationalist headline), you'll see that this is far from the case.
Where in the article has it been suggested that the military would tangle with the citizenry?
Actually though, in reading through this thread, I think the problem is with the stupid/inaccurate slashdot blurb. The
Here's the quote the blurb is based on, from the Air Force Secretary: "If we're not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation."
Despite slashdot-hallucinations to the contrary, he isn't claiming that the Air Force is going to paratroop into the middle of a cub scout meeting and start firing less-than-lethal lasers at everybody in order to see if it works or not. What he's saying is that he's refusing to use it on Iraqi civilians until they're considered safe enough that they've been used in similar situations in the US.
Since the constitution doesn't grant me rights as a citizen, it grants the government rights and this is clearly not something I'd say is supported in any ammendment and certainly not the constitution in general.
What gives the government the right to use the lethal weapons they've been using for the past few hundred years?
Using our military on our own people flies in the spirit of the constitution as well.
Where in the article has anybody suggested using the military on our own people?
It is just that given a little bit of knowledge of US history, it is all too easy to suspect that the government may try to use these weapons against civilians in an unjustified manner.
Sure... and the government might also try to use lethal weapons in an unjustified manner. How is it that nonlethal weapons are a greater threat to our constitutional rights?
What this would constitute is a violation of basic human rights: a right to life, liberty, property and/or the pursuit of happiness.
If an officer uses a lethal gun which hasn't been tested before, is that in itself a violation of constitutional principles?
> It's scary as all hell and smacks the face of the constitution.
Which constititional principle is being violated?
so just excrutiating pain then... nice.
Yup, like pepper spray, which is also "tested on Americans."
Was it a majority, even, if you count slaves as well?
Slaves only constituted about 1/4 of the Confederacy's population.
If the majority of the Chinese are content with their government or its actions (which is the case otherwise their country would be in a civil war until it changed) we as a world community have to respect their right to govern their country.
In the American Civil War, the majority of people in the Confederacy were content with their government and its actions. Should the world community have respected their right to govern their country?
I think you've just hit upon a new theory as to why the dinosaurs went extinct. Is there any evidence, for or against? How well are the dinosaur extinction event and the magnetic pole flips narrowed down, and could the dinosaur extinction be a delayed reaction?
Well, the thing is, magnetic pole reversals actually happen pretty often, according to Wikipedia at a rate of 1-5 events every million years. Since the dinosaurs lived 65-230 million years ago, by looking at this graph we can deduce that during their existence they experienced a few dozen pole reversals.
Now that I look at it though, it is somewhat interesting that the Cretaceous Long Normal, an abnormally long (~40 million year) period during which there were no pole reversals at all, ended around 15 million years before the dinosaurs disappeared. I personally think it's just a coincidence, though.
What's interesting though is that there doesn't seem to be any fossil evidence of higher-than-normal extinction rates during previous pole reversals...
You save a huge amount of money if you launch from a geographic location that is near the equator, heading east (so you get the benefit of the Earth's rotation, which saves fuel and allows for an increased payload), and is far enough away from people that you don't get bits of rocket landing in residential areas if it all goes wrong. Being near the equator also puts you in a good position for a geostationary orbit.
Cape Canaveral is at a latitude of 29N. Vandenberg, the site of the West Coast Space Shuttle launch site, is at 35N latitude. An entire space shuttle launch complex was constructed at Vandenberg at the cost of $4 billion, and the launch complex was never used. Is the difference in latitude (29N vs 35N) worth all the problems and costly delays from Florida weather?
> These scientists, however, are talking about "Hot Earths" -- which would be "Class L" planets.
s sifications#Class_B_Geomorteus
Not to nitpick, but are you sure they wouldn't be class B planets instead?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_planet_cla
Young planets, Class B worlds are less than 10 billion years old. Their diameters range in size from 1,000 to 10,000 km. They are located in the hotzone region of a star's solar system. Their surfaces are partially molten and may feature active volcanoes with an overall high surface temperature. Their atmospheres, if any, are extremely tenuous, with few active gases. They almost never have life forms.
Example: Mercury (Sol I)
NOTHING on your feed was something that someone couldn't have seen otherwise.
No kidding. Facebook basically just replicated the functionality of the Facebook Stalker firefox extension. I haven't tried it yet, but I'm guesing FB Stalker's functionality still works.
I'm running this thing right now, after downloading from here. It's kind of neat, but it'd be really nice if it gave some sort of feedback to the user to show it was actually operating. I'd like to be able to, say, kick my computer and watch a little seismometer guage move around, just to let me know the thing is working.
;)
Also, to the commenter who was worrying that things like kicks or shifts to a computer would result in false alarms, that's part of why they're using a P2P network. By aggregating the results from many machines, you can toss out false alarms. Of course, if a bunch of people got together on IRC to coordinate times at which they'd all kick their computers, that could probably trigger it...