If any serving member of the armed forces had done what she did they would be living in the Fort Leavenworth bed and breakfast for years.
A certain General Patreaus might disagree with you. Now, if you were talking about just peons, then you have a point. But the double standard is enchantingly broad.
/. proves with these comments how backwards and luddite the thinking has become. Gone are the days of science and the hope of something more. Here are the times of cowardice and fear. This whole website has become a bastion of cowards who are too frightened of the unknown. I am sure most of the/. crowd would be perfectly fine cowering away with their vacuum tubes and the threat of V2 rockets to be of any use. This whole site is a sick joke. How can news for nerds be something that mocks space travel? The majority seems to have forgotten that nerds want to progress, not regress, and are just too scared and pussy to move beyond the familiar.
No, it shows that people are finally growing up. Making rational attempts at complex problems. Attempting to balance multiple priorities.
If anything, humans are an evolutionary step backward: humans are ill adapted to Mars and our time and effort on the surface of Mars will be spent catering to our own survival rather than doing anything useful.
Right. So what you're saying is you want a whole bunch of autonomous robots, capable of doing pretty much anythings humans can do. Unsupervised on another planet. Full of resources and energy. With a lower gravity well.
I for one, would welcome our new Martian overlords.
MOST National Park land isn't anything that resembles wildnerness where a drone (or a real helicopter for that matter) would not be noticed. Yes, there are parks like Mount Rainier, North Cascades, Glacier, etc where a drone could easily be lost but many parks look like the tourist traps that they are.
Even the wilderness-type parks have the majority of humans clustered in small areas.
And the Park Service has to deal with all manner of idiot on routine basis. From the yo-yo that thinks it's OK to get close enough to some large wild animal to get forensic pictures of nose hair to the moron who tries to tramp up a glacier encrusted mountain in flip flops. And all of their first cousins.
So yeah, the first reaction to drones or anything remotely like them will be to say no. Even trying to get a helicopter to shoot professional video takes months of going back and forth to get permission. And we users of the less traveled roads in National Parks like it that way. I just bought a couple of miniature drones (Hubsun 4 and similar) to play with until I can get good enough to risk and expensive version out in the boonies and the temptation to use them anywhere is certainly there. They're a lot of fun and the capabilities of a $1000 drone are awfully impressive. That combo is going to bring out the people with both disposable income and disposable brains.
The Park Service can't stop families or perfumaholics or the ever present selfie stick. They can't stop stupid. The Park Service is a complex beast run by bureaucrats in Washington who think that a giant Coca-Cola sign on the wall of the Grand Canyon would be an OK idea if they got paid enough for it. It is managed by lots of individual folks in the field, some of which are impressively competent and caring. Others not so much.
But until we have ways of actually controlling this entertaining new concept, I'd agree with NPS and keep the fuckers mostly out.
And Apple stuff basically works. Like the trackpad. Come on world, is Apple the only company that can make a really good trackpad? You'd think so. I'm typing on a 5 year old MacBook Pro 17" with a great trackpad and bulletproof construction. It's been over much of country, part of the planet and the only thing that's gone south is the video, which Apple fixed for free - out of the warranty period.
Yes, in a lot of ways it's a bog standard Intel box, but some of the smooth edges (and not just the rounded corners) and good system integration just really hasn't been duplicated by anybody else. My 2014 Dell XPS 13 is a nice machine, but Windows is still clunkier than OS X and the fucking trackpad is a POS. The keyboard is only a bit better. Why can't Dell fix those two rather important little bits? Beats me, but they haven't.
Once it was a standard Item to Equip in your cool backyard or basement buried shelter medical kit. Iodine Tablets that protect the thyroid form radiation? They knew this in the 50's why aren't the children receiving this now as a precaution? Or is it now considered unsafe?
Dr. Yamashita, former Director of Fukushima Health Mangagement Suryey and a leading figure of thyroid cancer study in the world, has been actively involved in thyroid cancer research in Chernobyl for over 20 years since 1991. Dr. Yamashita was a radiation risk advisor for Fukushima prefecture at the time of the nuclear accident. Despite his experiences in Chernobyl, he assured that distributing iodine tablets to residents in Fukushima, even in the evacuation zones, was unnecessary. However, the distribution of iodine tablets had been discussed within Fukushima Medical University (FMU), especially during the first 1 week after the accident.
But because no permission was given by the national government and the prefecture, the plan was never carried out. .
Surprisingly, there was a group of people who took the iodine tablets under the circumstances. They were doctors, nurses, administrative stuff and their children/relatives, and the students of Fukushima Medical University.
Are the usual pro-nuke ppl. here going to trumpet the same old "no injuries from Fukushima" line, over and over again?
Probably, but nobody except other wackjobs believes them. The more interesting but infinitely harder to address question is whether or not nuclear power, with all it's warts (Chernobyl, Hanford, Fukishima, bog-knows-what-all-is-left-in-Russia) is more or less dangerous than fossil fuels in general.
My best guess is that it's considerably safer since the data on coal looks pretty bad.
The only real problem for nuclear is that it's too damned expensive compared to fossil fuels and now even solar and wind. It's a horribly complex technology that it's adherents fucked up badly by not carefully and consistently holding to the highest of engineering standards (like naval reactors). They cheaped out and they are paying the price.
It's called population based screens. We have studied thyroid cancer for decades for obvious reasons. It's actually one of the easier things to (eventually) diagnose. We know what the baseline should be, the studies are getting higher than baseline levels.
The one criticism from TFA
Scott Davis, professor at the Department of Epidemiology in the Seattle-based School of Public Health, said the key limitation of Tsuda's study is the lack of individual-level data to estimate actual radiation doses.
Which apparently is true but does not invalidate the population based frequency data:
David J. Brenner, professor of radiation biophysics at Columbia University Medical Center, took a different view. While he agreed individual estimates on radiation doses are needed, he said in a telephone interview that the higher thyroid cancer rate in Fukushima is "not due to screening. It's real."
It is something that should eventually be pretty clear, the issue now is to get as many cancers diagnosed when it's "easy" to treat.
Now, does anyone actually believe what TEPCO says about how much radioactive material went airborne? I certainly don't. They haven't said anything truthful since the disaster occurred unless they have had to backtrack after somebody else called them on it.
I suppose you've read up on the history and rationale behind Class B airspace? No? You should.
TL;DR - planes don't always go where they planned to go. Emergencies crop up. During said emergencies, the pilots are busy with the emergency and not terribly interested in looking for random balloons, Cessnas, drones and other rif raf. Radars tend to work best if they have a clear sweep of the sky. Five miles at several hundred miles per hour is a very short time frame.
And other important technical issues.
It's not because some power mad bureaucrat wants to make your libertine life harder.
The FAA may really have to change how it does Class B airspace. Right now it's 'to the ground' because it's easy and there really wasn't any reason not to do that. They may have to carve out low altitude corridors for drones only.
Of course, that effort just might be in a race with the heat death of the Universe, but it's a good idea.
New York is where both engines of USAir flight were hit by soft bodied geese weighing less than 20 pounds each and forced the plane to crash land in the Hudson river. The drones have hard metal parts and hard plastic. They would do far more damage to the plane.
No, a drone would probably not damage a plane in the manner of the 'Miracle on the Hudson'. Even if a drone took out a single engine, all planes and pilots are certified to fly on the remaining powerplant. The problem is that the US Air plane ran into a flock of geese which took out both engines simultaneously. At least so far, drones have not been flocking (that would be scary.
I do think that one answer to this is to develop small, low power transponders that will fit on a drone. Should be possible and then should be absolutely required for any drone over a certain size. If you can see them, you can avoid them. If they are serialized then you can go after the miscreant without a whole lot of fuss and bother.
Although a little heavy handed, you could rig a system where larger drones won't fly unless they have the transponder and the transponder is registered. Yeah, somebody would hack around it but most people wouldn't care and in fact you could use the transponder to find the thing.
You do realize the stupidity of your argument, though, don't you? The flights of wild geese cannot be controlled or regulated easily, but the flights of humanly operated aircraft can. Secondly, I can see no reason why people should be allowed to operate drones unless they at least have a VFR pilot license. Last but not least, you would change your opinion quickly if your wife and children all died in the plane crash caused by a drone. And there is really no reason to wait for it to happen.
I can see lots of reasons a drone operator would not need a pilots license. I have a little Hubsan X4 - it is six inches long and weighs about 100 grams. No real time camera. It's small enough that you lose visual contact with it at about 200 feet. Flight time is 5 minutes.
You don't need a private pilots license for this one. Maybe a brief class like a hunter's safety class to bring the idiots up to some sort of speed, but not something that takes thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours to acquire. Way overkill.
Now, a drone operating in aircraft space - yes, I can imagine a much more rigorous licensing approach. But 'drone' is a very, very broad concept.
Bacteria as a bioweapon probably won't ever work to wipe out populations. You certainly could wreck havoc in clusters of humans with poor infrastructure (refuge camps, slums, Trenton, New Jersey) but even without antibiotics we know enough to slow down the transmission to prevent mass catastrophe. Yes, it would be a good 'terror weapon' since at least the US population seems to be scared of it's own shadow much less any real boogy man (cf, the Ebola scare) but as far as a tactical weapon it has a lot of drawbacks.
But for the NYT, it's not just the New York population. It's the population of the English speaking upper crust. Lot's more than 12 million. That's why the one million number is pretty weak.
And this is why I dropped my subscription. NYT digital is totally clueless. I can have a better experience with the shields up.
I have written to them a number of times suggesting that they lighten up, give their subscribers some actual benefit. Nobody ever listens to me except my dog and he's just waiting for a walk.
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Can you blame him. Bush is just bushed.
If any serving member of the armed forces had done what she did they would be living in the Fort Leavenworth bed and breakfast for years.
A certain General Patreaus might disagree with you. Now, if you were talking about just peons, then you have a point. But the double standard is enchantingly broad.
John Dvorak is that you?
It's the dismal science
I hear they are set to rise from their sunken city R'lyeh and devour the world in 2016
Cthulhu / Dagon 2016 - why vote for the lesser evil?
Maybe they need to add notices for NoScript users "Warning - won't work without JavaScript".
That's pretty much assumed these days.
/. proves with these comments how backwards and luddite the thinking has become. Gone are the days of science and the hope of something more. Here are the times of cowardice and fear. This whole website has become a bastion of cowards who are too frightened of the unknown. I am sure most of the /. crowd would be perfectly fine cowering away with their vacuum tubes and the threat of V2 rockets to be of any use. This whole site is a sick joke. How can news for nerds be something that mocks space travel? The majority seems to have forgotten that nerds want to progress, not regress, and are just too scared and pussy to move beyond the familiar.
No, it shows that people are finally growing up. Making rational attempts at complex problems. Attempting to balance multiple priorities.
Oh, and we're broke. There's always that.
If anything, humans are an evolutionary step backward: humans are ill adapted to Mars and our time and effort on the surface of Mars will be spent catering to our own survival rather than doing anything useful.
Right. So what you're saying is you want a whole bunch of autonomous robots, capable of doing pretty much anythings humans can do. Unsupervised on another planet. Full of resources and energy. With a lower gravity well.
I for one, would welcome our new Martian overlords.
MOST National Park land isn't anything that resembles wildnerness where a drone (or a real helicopter for that matter) would not be noticed. Yes, there are parks like Mount Rainier, North Cascades, Glacier, etc where a drone could easily be lost but many parks look like the tourist traps that they are.
Even the wilderness-type parks have the majority of humans clustered in small areas.
And the Park Service has to deal with all manner of idiot on routine basis. From the yo-yo that thinks it's OK to get close enough to some large wild animal to get forensic pictures of nose hair to the moron who tries to tramp up a glacier encrusted mountain in flip flops. And all of their first cousins.
So yeah, the first reaction to drones or anything remotely like them will be to say no. Even trying to get a helicopter to shoot professional video takes months of going back and forth to get permission. And we users of the less traveled roads in National Parks like it that way. I just bought a couple of miniature drones (Hubsun 4 and similar) to play with until I can get good enough to risk and expensive version out in the boonies and the temptation to use them anywhere is certainly there. They're a lot of fun and the capabilities of a $1000 drone are awfully impressive. That combo is going to bring out the people with both disposable income and disposable brains.
The Park Service can't stop families or perfumaholics or the ever present selfie stick. They can't stop stupid. The Park Service is a complex beast run by bureaucrats in Washington who think that a giant Coca-Cola sign on the wall of the Grand Canyon would be an OK idea if they got paid enough for it. It is managed by lots of individual folks in the field, some of which are impressively competent and caring. Others not so much.
But until we have ways of actually controlling this entertaining new concept, I'd agree with NPS and keep the fuckers mostly out.
So why do Apple's trackpads work and Dell's don't?
And Apple stuff basically works. Like the trackpad. Come on world, is Apple the only company that can make a really good trackpad? You'd think so. I'm typing on a 5 year old MacBook Pro 17" with a great trackpad and bulletproof construction. It's been over much of country, part of the planet and the only thing that's gone south is the video, which Apple fixed for free - out of the warranty period.
Yes, in a lot of ways it's a bog standard Intel box, but some of the smooth edges (and not just the rounded corners) and good system integration just really hasn't been duplicated by anybody else. My 2014 Dell XPS 13 is a nice machine, but Windows is still clunkier than OS X and the fucking trackpad is a POS. The keyboard is only a bit better. Why can't Dell fix those two rather important little bits? Beats me, but they haven't.
Once it was a standard Item to Equip in your cool backyard or basement buried shelter medical kit.
Iodine Tablets that protect the thyroid form radiation?
They knew this in the 50's why aren't the children receiving this now as a precaution? Or is it now considered unsafe?
They thought about it.
Dr. Yamashita, former Director of Fukushima Health Mangagement Suryey and a leading figure of thyroid cancer study in the world, has been actively involved in thyroid cancer research in Chernobyl for over 20 years since 1991. Dr. Yamashita was a radiation risk advisor for Fukushima prefecture at the time of the nuclear accident. Despite his experiences in Chernobyl, he assured that distributing iodine tablets to residents in Fukushima, even in the evacuation zones, was unnecessary. However, the distribution of iodine tablets had been discussed within Fukushima Medical University (FMU), especially during the first 1 week after the accident.
But because no permission was given by the national government and the prefecture, the plan was never carried out. .
Surprisingly, there was a group of people who took the iodine tablets under the circumstances. They were doctors, nurses, administrative stuff and their children/relatives, and the students of Fukushima Medical University.
Are the usual pro-nuke ppl. here going to trumpet the same old "no injuries from Fukushima" line, over and over again?
Probably, but nobody except other wackjobs believes them. The more interesting but infinitely harder to address question is whether or not nuclear power, with all it's warts (Chernobyl, Hanford, Fukishima, bog-knows-what-all-is-left-in-Russia) is more or less dangerous than fossil fuels in general.
My best guess is that it's considerably safer since the data on coal looks pretty bad.
The only real problem for nuclear is that it's too damned expensive compared to fossil fuels and now even solar and wind. It's a horribly complex technology that it's adherents fucked up badly by not carefully and consistently holding to the highest of engineering standards (like naval reactors). They cheaped out and they are paying the price.
It's called population based screens. We have studied thyroid cancer for decades for obvious reasons. It's actually one of the easier things to (eventually) diagnose. We know what the baseline should be, the studies are getting higher than baseline levels.
The one criticism from TFA
Scott Davis, professor at the Department of Epidemiology in the Seattle-based School of Public Health, said the key limitation of Tsuda's study is the lack of individual-level data to estimate actual radiation doses.
Which apparently is true but does not invalidate the population based frequency data:
David J. Brenner, professor of radiation biophysics at Columbia University Medical Center, took a different view. While he agreed individual estimates on radiation doses are needed, he said in a telephone interview that the higher thyroid cancer rate in Fukushima is "not due to screening. It's real."
It is something that should eventually be pretty clear, the issue now is to get as many cancers diagnosed when it's "easy" to treat.
Now, does anyone actually believe what TEPCO says about how much radioactive material went airborne? I certainly don't. They haven't said anything truthful since the disaster occurred unless they have had to backtrack after somebody else called them on it.
I suppose you've read up on the history and rationale behind Class B airspace? No? You should.
TL;DR - planes don't always go where they planned to go. Emergencies crop up. During said emergencies, the pilots are busy with the emergency and not terribly interested in looking for random balloons, Cessnas, drones and other rif raf. Radars tend to work best if they have a clear sweep of the sky. Five miles at several hundred miles per hour is a very short time frame.
And other important technical issues.
It's not because some power mad bureaucrat wants to make your libertine life harder.
That is an impressively paranoid screed.
You really should stay in the basement, but keep up on the Vitamin D pills, you'll need them.
The FAA may really have to change how it does Class B airspace. Right now it's 'to the ground' because it's easy and there really wasn't any reason not to do that. They may have to carve out low altitude corridors for drones only.
Of course, that effort just might be in a race with the heat death of the Universe, but it's a good idea.
New York is where both engines of USAir flight were hit by soft bodied geese weighing less than 20 pounds each and forced the plane to crash land in the Hudson river. The drones have hard metal parts and hard plastic. They would do far more damage to the plane.
No, a drone would probably not damage a plane in the manner of the 'Miracle on the Hudson'. Even if a drone took out a single engine, all planes and pilots are certified to fly on the remaining powerplant. The problem is that the US Air plane ran into a flock of geese which took out both engines simultaneously. At least so far, drones have not been flocking (that would be scary.
I do think that one answer to this is to develop small, low power transponders that will fit on a drone. Should be possible and then should be absolutely required for any drone over a certain size. If you can see them, you can avoid them. If they are serialized then you can go after the miscreant without a whole lot of fuss and bother.
Although a little heavy handed, you could rig a system where larger drones won't fly unless they have the transponder and the transponder is registered. Yeah, somebody would hack around it but most people wouldn't care and in fact you could use the transponder to find the thing.
The FAA regulates pilots, planes, airports, and airspace.
The TSA is security theatre and a government jobs program.
There is nothing in common betwixt the two.
Their is an "A".
You do realize the stupidity of your argument, though, don't you? The flights of wild geese cannot be controlled or regulated easily, but the flights of humanly operated aircraft can. Secondly, I can see no reason why people should be allowed to operate drones unless they at least have a VFR pilot license. Last but not least, you would change your opinion quickly if your wife and children all died in the plane crash caused by a drone. And there is really no reason to wait for it to happen.
I can see lots of reasons a drone operator would not need a pilots license. I have a little Hubsan X4 - it is six inches long and weighs about 100 grams. No real time camera. It's small enough that you lose visual contact with it at about 200 feet. Flight time is 5 minutes.
You don't need a private pilots license for this one. Maybe a brief class like a hunter's safety class to bring the idiots up to some sort of speed, but not something that takes thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours to acquire. Way overkill.
Now, a drone operating in aircraft space - yes, I can imagine a much more rigorous licensing approach. But 'drone' is a very, very broad concept.
Bacteria as a bioweapon probably won't ever work to wipe out populations. You certainly could wreck havoc in clusters of humans with poor infrastructure (refuge camps, slums, Trenton, New Jersey) but even without antibiotics we know enough to slow down the transmission to prevent mass catastrophe. Yes, it would be a good 'terror weapon' since at least the US population seems to be scared of it's own shadow much less any real boogy man (cf, the Ebola scare) but as far as a tactical weapon it has a lot of drawbacks.
You do not know what the word "virulent" means.
Well, he's trying - from the OED:
Syllabification: virulent /vir(y)lnt/
Pronunciation:
Origin
Late Middle English (originally describing a poisoned wound): from Latin virulentus, from virus 'poison' (see virus).
If you want to see what happens with genes when they're isolated, go to the Galapagos Islands.
Warm beaches and tacky tourist trinkets? I don't understand.
But for the NYT, it's not just the New York population. It's the population of the English speaking upper crust. Lot's more than 12 million. That's why the one million number is pretty weak.
And this is why I dropped my subscription. NYT digital is totally clueless. I can have a better experience with the shields up.
I have written to them a number of times suggesting that they lighten up, give their subscribers some actual benefit. Nobody ever listens to me except my dog and he's just waiting for a walk.