Seeing that it was so critical they should have had redundancy built in at the hardware level. Something like N projectors going through a switch with a dead man timer to change inputs.
When the timer doesn't reset the switch changes to a different input.
There was this article on the Big Foot myth on TV the other day and a good point was made about how primates with big brains generally live in warm climates because of the energy cost of their brain. The idea is that Big Foot can't live in North America the way that Gorillas live in Africa. There just isn't enough food.
So when humans moved into the colder parts of Europe they would have needed ways to gather enough food to avoid starvation. Perhaps cooking made that easier by broadening their diet.
Sounds like a stupid browser problem to me. Which one uses smartquotes?
How do you propose that slashdot support both iso-8859-1 AND unicode simultaneously according to the what stupid commenter wants? What if they want to use UTF-16 next?
If I moved to Israel I would hate to be told that "Michael Smith" sounds like a rude word in the local language and I couldn't use my normal email address.
Jewish people here occasionally have a chuckle at the name of our Friends Of The Zoos society.
In Korea I saw a street sign saying (something like) "exit roap this way". In Malaysia a place where you can pick your own strawberries advertises "Self Plucking".
the amount of material that would leave a life-inhabited planet with enough velocity to ever get to another star system would be miniscule.
There was this thing recently about bacterial life living below the sea floor. It lives very slowly and uses very little oxygen. And there is a hell of a lot of it. I could imagine something like that making it to mars after a big impact.
Actually, if you did the same test in the Sahara, it would come back positive; a gram of Sahara soil contains maybe a billion bacteria. Bacteria *are* our ecosystem, in a lot of ways. In the water, in Antarctic ice, miles beneath the surface of the earth, they are in their millions.
In read somewhere that Viking would not have found life in typical Antarctic soil, though it is there in small quantities.
In fact, I think Phoenix's instruments could determine the chirality of an oil sample (although I'm not sure that right-handed molecules would disprove a biological origin).
If there is or was life (as we know it) on Mars I am willing to bet that it came from the same source as life on Earth. Either one of those planets or a third source. So the chirality should be the same as ours.
I also RTFA (and worse, I'm not ashamed of that), and they're pretty adamant it's not about the presence of life (past or present), so I wonder what it could be. If it's to do with the habitability of Mars, then the two candidates I can think of are: They've found a lot more water than expected.
The orbiters have already shown that mars has many metres of permafrost over most of its surface. Its hard to see how a lander could expand on that.
The key part is in the last paragraph, where it says the "provocative" results came from the experiment where they added water from Earth to a sample of soil. I bet they had a burst of oxygen like the old Viking lander experiments, which no one ever satisfactorily explained. The one that I remembered that made sense was some kind of dry peroxide in the soil formed by UV, which reacted with water to generate O2, but didn't repeat because the peroxide was used up.
This is mainly a guess because I don't understand the chemistry. Previously NASA announced that the regolith they sampled was pretty normal soil and that you could grow some plants in it without modification. Is that still consistent with presence of the "dry peroxide"?
If the transport vehicle ran on petroleum, you could just use the Martian oil to power it. A huge waste of oil, but if you don't, you'll never get to use any of it anyway. This is not to say that I think this is a good idea, or even a likely possibility, just saying that the cost of getting the oil back would be much, much lower than normally, since the fuel would be "free". (If you don't use it, the market price would be 0)
No. Fuels like oil only have energy in the presence of an oxidizer. On Earth our oxidizers are in finite supply. On mars and in deep space they hardly exist at all. You can't use oil for fuel anywhere away from Earth.
Seriously, why the run around. Did they go to the president when the viking Labeled Release results ended up positive?
Maybe the life forms are some sort of stem cells and they're checking on the legality of bringing back samples?
They might have to send this experiment again, this time to the north pole in two years time. I wonder if they can cook up another phoenix fast enough?
a nozzle of one shape may give optimum thrust at rest, at sea-level pressure, but be relatively inefficient at high velocity in the upper atmosphere.
Perhaps they should ask Scaled Composites to help them with the first 15km of the launch. And yeah I know they would need something beefier than WhiteKnightTwo.
Slashdot Mirror
It didn't even finish! My ASUS eeePC boots in about 30 seconds. I don't see why Linux should go to so much trouble on a phone.
We have an active electric vehicle group here in Vancouver.
Vancouver must be pretty cold. How would you go in an electric vehicle in the Canadian winter? Would it be too cold to drive?
I assume you pay a registration fee.
For a moment there I thought somebody had fixed Ubuntu bug one.
Maybe they forgot to disable the screen saver...
Seeing that it was so critical they should have had redundancy built in at the hardware level. Something like N projectors going through a switch with a dead man timer to change inputs.
When the timer doesn't reset the switch changes to a different input.
Well yeah. This is China. I reckon there were about 100000 chinese guys who really could fix the problem who were watching the olympics at that point.
There was this article on the Big Foot myth on TV the other day and a good point was made about how primates with big brains generally live in warm climates because of the energy cost of their brain. The idea is that Big Foot can't live in North America the way that Gorillas live in Africa. There just isn't enough food.
So when humans moved into the colder parts of Europe they would have needed ways to gather enough food to avoid starvation. Perhaps cooking made that easier by broadening their diet.
Sounds like a stupid browser problem to me. Which one uses smartquotes?
How do you propose that slashdot support both iso-8859-1 AND unicode simultaneously according to the what stupid commenter wants? What if they want to use UTF-16 next?
EBCDIC!
DONT FORGET BAUDOT
He is more likely in the future to be required by law to have an email address in his own name.
If I moved to Israel I would hate to be told that "Michael Smith" sounds like a rude word in the local language and I couldn't use my normal email address.
Jewish people here occasionally have a chuckle at the name of our Friends Of The Zoos society.
Its funny how Spanish keeps expanding and French keeps shrinking, despite official support from Governments. Maybe it is just a better language.
Oh, and if you live in San Diego and you come to a car dealership where they give you a "Leash Agreement" instead of a Lease one, tell them I said hi!
Maybe they do more than sell cars?
This would be a great name for an internet cafe.
In Korea I saw a street sign saying (something like) "exit roap this way". In Malaysia a place where you can pick your own strawberries advertises "Self Plucking".
the amount of material that would leave a life-inhabited planet with enough velocity to ever get to another star system would be miniscule.
There was this thing recently about bacterial life living below the sea floor. It lives very slowly and uses very little oxygen. And there is a hell of a lot of it. I could imagine something like that making it to mars after a big impact.
...or a deliberate contamination. Of course I would NEVER expect (really no sarcasm) any scientist to do such a thing...
Yes, well it was never proven but a scientist apparently mailed anthrax spores to innocent people in 2001 so we can't assume they are all angels.
Actually, if you did the same test in the Sahara, it would come back positive; a gram of Sahara soil contains maybe a billion bacteria. Bacteria *are* our ecosystem, in a lot of ways. In the water, in Antarctic ice, miles beneath the surface of the earth, they are in their millions.
In read somewhere that Viking would not have found life in typical Antarctic soil, though it is there in small quantities.
there's an Atomic Force Microsoft as well as ...
Oh my god.
In fact, I think Phoenix's instruments could determine the chirality of an oil sample (although I'm not sure that right-handed molecules would disprove a biological origin).
If there is or was life (as we know it) on Mars I am willing to bet that it came from the same source as life on Earth. Either one of those planets or a third source. So the chirality should be the same as ours.
I also RTFA (and worse, I'm not ashamed of that), and they're pretty adamant it's not about the presence of life (past or present), so I wonder what it could be. If it's to do with the habitability of Mars, then the two candidates I can think of are: They've found a lot more water than expected.
The orbiters have already shown that mars has many metres of permafrost over most of its surface. Its hard to see how a lander could expand on that.
The key part is in the last paragraph, where it says the "provocative" results came from the experiment where they added water from Earth to a sample of soil. I bet they had a burst of oxygen like the old Viking lander experiments, which no one ever satisfactorily explained. The one that I remembered that made sense was some kind of dry peroxide in the soil formed by UV, which reacted with water to generate O2, but didn't repeat because the peroxide was used up.
This is mainly a guess because I don't understand the chemistry. Previously NASA announced that the regolith they sampled was pretty normal soil and that you could grow some plants in it without modification. Is that still consistent with presence of the "dry peroxide"?
If the transport vehicle ran on petroleum, you could just use the Martian oil to power it. A huge waste of oil, but if you don't, you'll never get to use any of it anyway. This is not to say that I think this is a good idea, or even a likely possibility, just saying that the cost of getting the oil back would be much, much lower than normally, since the fuel would be "free". (If you don't use it, the market price would be 0)
No. Fuels like oil only have energy in the presence of an oxidizer. On Earth our oxidizers are in finite supply. On mars and in deep space they hardly exist at all. You can't use oil for fuel anywhere away from Earth.
Seriously, why the run around. Did they go to the president when the viking Labeled Release results ended up positive? Maybe the life forms are some sort of stem cells and they're checking on the legality of bringing back samples?
They might have to send this experiment again, this time to the north pole in two years time. I wonder if they can cook up another phoenix fast enough?
I just realized, Spaceship Two is not orbital anyway, so it doesn't count.
Thats right. I was thinking in terms of the powered ascent from 15km to (say) 50, then they coast.
a nozzle of one shape may give optimum thrust at rest, at sea-level pressure, but be relatively inefficient at high velocity in the upper atmosphere.
Perhaps they should ask Scaled Composites to help them with the first 15km of the launch. And yeah I know they would need something beefier than WhiteKnightTwo.