Of course the meteor would not have had any noteworthy radioactivity and was not in a populated area. I don't remember exactly how often it's estimated to happen and I can't find any sources, but meteors of this size hit the earth a lot more often than most people realize...something like between once a year and once a decade. The comparison to Hiroshima really is about the energy of the impact, not the destructiveness. Little boy had a yield equivalent to approximately 15,000 tons of TNT.
The cuts are being made to originally projected future budgets. The science budget will actually continue to increase year-over-year, but not nearly as much as planned before the Columbia accident. If the CEV lives up to its long-term potential for lower-cost human access to space (hard to lose given the size and complexity of the shuttle), the science budget actually stands to benefit in the long term.
No need to post AC, you're pretty much right about the science achieved by robotic missions, but there are a few things to recognize. First, astronauts did place the Hubble and other observatories in orbit, and serviced it twice. It's possibly the best science investment NASA's made, but it had help. Second, robots don't expand human horizons. Some people think it's a corny goal, but a heck of a lot don't. Third, if we can get human's out there cost-effectively, I have no doubt that we will far outpace what we can accomplish with robots.
Woohoo! I knew I liked British people for a reason. Trans-Atlantic props for a great post, bro.
(*) FYI, Opportunity already beat you blokes by coming to rest inside Eagle Crater, which was only about 10 meters across and 1 or 2 deep. From 80 million miles away, baby!
No. The rigidity of the frame would depend on the specific alloy and the frame design. Be careful making statements like that until you know the range of tensile and ultimate yield strengths achievable with each metal.
There are two big reasons that come to mind why we won't actually have titanium cars, and both are cost related.
1.) $3/pound still does not compete with the cost of a few $hundred/ton for raw steel.
2.) Titanium is more difficult to work with especially for welding or casting, which increases the process costs.
Lest others smuggly convince themselves that NASA must then be a complete loser house, the above goes for probably almost every major project in every industry to the beginning of time. People have this (somewhat understandable) idea that a bunch of Japanese engineers wearing ties got together and drew a bunch of conceptual drawings, took them to the factory, started selling Toyota Corollas 6 months later, and by the end of the year had a reputation for making one of the most reliable cars on the rode. The actual case is that years of development go into every major redesign. While NASA gets one shot at building much of their stuff right, Toyota constantly improves their products year after year...and I believe they still average over 1 defect per vehicle coming off the assembly line. I'm positively amazed that younger companies like Kia are even able to break into the market at all, given the years of experience, prior design, and mistakes the older companies have to build on.
And it's my opinion that if people were really more interested in taking joyrides into space than criticizing businesses they have no experience in, they'd pay more attention to what's going on. SS1 was a technology demonstrator. That was the goal of the X-prize. From there it is still necessary for someone with the money and entreprenurial will (and a favorable market, which I'm not fully convinced exists) to take it from a demonstrator to a real product and accompanying service. Virgin Galactic has licensed the technology and is working with Scaled Composites to develop the larger commerical version. Had Ansari not offered up the X-prize and given Rutan and others a reason to invest the money and effort they did showing entreprenuers like Branson that it's possible, none of that might have taken place. Furthermore, the X-prize was awarded by the choice of the foundation, not claimed like a spoil of war, and it was done so with private money.
To go several layers up the discussion, yes the private industry is slow...slow compared to the original exaggerated promises made by people with plenty of money and rhetoric but little if any actual engineering experience.
To be fair, those are relatively technical questions for a news article, all the more so for the poor journalism major who wrote it and would probably have no clue of the significance of 5 tau. And the article did mention several hundred-thousand potential charge/discharge cycles. However, since I like to nitpick too, how about this common type of statement:
...so even today's most powerful capacitors hold 25 times less energy than similarly sized standard chemical batteries.
One would assume they mean 4%, but the wording really suggests a difference of the form 25(x-y) rather than 1/25. I can parse such statements ok in non-technical articles, but when I start trying to do math in my head, statements like "twice as small" throw me off-balance for a bit.
1.) Nothing never wears out. Ideally a part doesn't wear out in the system's lifetime, but even solid state components die eventually, even if it's from corroding away 10000 years from now.
2.) If a company picks up on the technology (or the MIT guy picks up some venture capital and develops it himself), they have a serious market advantage over traditional battery companies because they have a better product (hopefully). The other companies have to follow suit to remain competitive (patents allowing). The first guy has an interest in getting to market as fast as possible to gain market share before the competitors catch up.
3.) We will never have all of the capacitors we need. Selling them as replacements like batteries might be unlikely, but in the near term they could compete against rechargeables, and in the long term, new products will continue to need onboard power.
4.) The intially high demand would allow manufacturer's to quickly recoup their development and tooling costs by charging more early in production while avoiding the need to invest in extremely high manufacturing capacity. As price drops, they become financially feasible to a larger market.
5.) Waning sales from market saturation are just one more thing companies deal with on a regular basis. Compare these to another item that doesn't typically wear out: silverware. Everybody's got forks and spoons, but consumers still buy new sets.
Even him if he's like my sociology professor/debate coach who after our debate tournements kept us well-supplied with, um... iPods... or something like that. I won't comment on some of our ages at the time, but we were still young enough that we didn't realize yet how bad PBR tastes.
I just got back from an African Safari. The close proximity with nature is amazing. Why, on my first day I got out of bed and shot an elephant in my pajamas. How the elephant got in my pajamas I will never know!
(No, the elephant was not listening to my iPod. Apparently they don't like the earbuds either.)
It was still up thirty seconds ago (come on, laugh, it's a joke).
I have a few random thoughts, but don't take these too seriously, because really, I don't care.
From Evan's bio on the site: "I have no shame in my game." Granted, he did stop short of posting pictures of the lady's baby, but I'm not a big fan of vigilante justice. Couple the first statement with the utterly lame flash intro, the javascript disabling of the right-click menu, and the fact his website is written in ancient HTML 3.2, and I think it's obvious this is not a clear cut case of good versus evil.
On an actual serious vein, perhaps someone can explain how finders keepers fits into this legally. Sure she didn't intend to leave it in the taxi, and clearly from an ethical standpoint the finder should make a reasonble effort (as in paying attention to the "reward for returning this" messages she sent) to return it, but could it be considered abandoned? Do taxi or other service companies have any special obligations regarding their customer's empty-headedness?
1.) Localized content. I've heard localized content is available on some satellite stations, but I don't know the details, and I suspect they don't offer dozens of local choices like current broadcasts do and HD potentially can. While music is typically my main criteria for selecting a station, sometimes I'll pick one's that I know do traffic, weather, or news updates frequently. There's also local talk shows and busy parents or alumni who love listening to local high school and college sporting events broadcast on the radio.
2.) Lower cost. Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't XM and Sirius both subscription services?
3.) Embedding. XM or Sirius haven't made their way into car or home stereos as a standard feature. AM/FM antennae have long since. I didn't understand all the technical details from the article, but it sounds to me that there's not much needed beyond a decoder for the HD broadcast to be playable.
4.) Standardization. The article mentioned this format has been accepted by the FCC as a standard. Again, I don't know the details of satellite radio, but it sounds like the equipment is not inter-compatible.
5.) Independent operation. Stations handle the production and distribution of their programming themselves, instead of passing off the latter to the satellite owners. I tend to think of this as a good thing.
That's how I see it anyway. I'm no expert on this, so I welcome more information or rebuttals of my points. I'm also no fortune-teller, so I'm not saying HD is going to kick butt, but I disagree that it's too late to grab market share.
If I understand the article, it sounds like the presence of a dust disk suggests that these bodies formed on their own. The dust is similar to the accretion disk observed around young stars that fuels their growth and possibly the formation of orbiting planets. In theory, if a local knot of gas and dust was too small to form even a brown drawf, you get these planemos. A very small jump of reason suggests there may even by binary planemos or planemos with "moons."
Astute questions, but ones which the engineers have already thought of.
The Spacehab modules aren't quite as simple as they sound (otherwise they would have been included on the ISS). I believe they are to be built with mounting features included on the walls for things such as dividers and lockers. The trick is making sure these don't interfere with a smooth inflation. Additionally, the core of the module, which provides longitudinal rigidity and holds the inflating and related equipment will offer more rigid mounts for items where that may be important, like exercise gear. Also, EVA's would not be handled directly from these modules. You would still need airlocks for that, which could possibly be added onto the end, or else included in a traditional module. And yes, windows can be included in the spacehab modules.
First of all, they are hardly simplistic little devices. NASA spent a fair bit of money and several years researching and development of the concept. No doubt Heinlein, Clark, or Asimov also discussed the idea of inflatable modules long before Bigelow heard about them.
NASA's Transhab project was originally intended to utilize inflatable modules for the ISS. Like most aerospace projects, it ran over budget and the program was cancelled before all of the technical challenges like reliable inflation (these are much more complex than a balloon) were solved. Bigelow bought rights on the NASA patents when he started his aerospace company, and has been working on ironing out the remaining design details and figuring how to reliably manufacture them for several years now.
Second, these are not quite as revolutionary as they sound. They do offer significantly more internal volume for the weight, but not a huge amount. I think it's about double for Bigelow's layouts. There is a lot of core framework, life support, etc equipment associated with each module. They also only address the issue of creating interior volume, not fueling, power, temperature control, docking, and all the other major parts of a space station. They also don't offer much benefit for certain ISS modules like Columbus, which has built in experimental stations that can't realistically be inflated and would be difficult at best to install in a SpaceHab module after inflation. However, the technology may later be applied in areas other than habitation. One proposal is replacing the aluminum trusses that support solar panels with inflatable tubes that become sufficiently rigid when pressurized.
Third, they may actually be safer than current aluminum modules. The synthetic materials they are made from are even stronger than Kevlar, and layered just like the aluminum/mylar/whatever else currently used. The difference is that these are elastic, so they can be folded up conveniently for launch, and they maintain their outer shape via pressure rather than framing. The same radiation protection would be offered. When a micrometeorites do hit they will probably not be massive enough to penetrate the skin. If one does, you would have a slow leak that could be located and repaired. They aren't inflated to near their ultimate yield strength like balloons are, so a small breach would not immediately grow into a tear that would cause them to "pop."
Check out some of NASA's conceptual drawings for a better idea what these modules are really like.
Dang, who doesn't use this as their motto. It's my alma mater's, too (not Hopkins), and I'm pretty sure I've seen it on at least one other school's literature.
Oh come on. That's like saying, "Wouldn't it have been simpler to just eat your sandwich than squishing the bread into a doughy ball to throw at your friends or scuplt dinosaurs out of?" or "Couldn't you have just walked around the block instead of racing your neighbor across the junkyard with the mean pitbulls?" or "You know your wouldn't have broken your leg if you hadn't been climbing that tree in the first place."
You also probably use your keys every day, making habit pretty easy to achieve and giving you a reason to have a place (counter, key rack, whatever) where you normally keep them. Your keys don't get delivered to your house along with a 1000 pounds of other supplies that have to be quickly stowed out of the way where it will fit. It's not like the ISS has a nice pegboards all over the walls like your garage with pretty outlines drawn around the hooks for the hammers and the screwdrivers.
Look at what was lost, too. These were single use items. They don't have any special place to be kept. It was a bag to hold a small sample plate (easily replaced) and a foot restraint for EVA (they had a spare). Two small, probably very mundane looking objects that are no doubt very easy to lose track of when you have two guys unloading a Progress cargo ship full of stuff that might not be used for 3 months by themselves while also continuing their regular duties of monitoring the station and the experiments running onboard.
I suppose it is a little disappointing to lose stuff in a big aluminum tube. You know it's in there, and it's undoubtably safely stowed, you just can't find it. The fact that losing two such simple objects in a structure the size of the average house but much more crowded is even a story sort of shows how well they do of keeping track of things. I seriously doubt anyone here can tell someone exactly where everything in their house is, especially if they just moved into the house 2 months ago and someone else handled most of the moving.
I do have to say, these are rather boring as far as innovative solutions. Not quite like using duct tape and urine bags to adapt the big round C02 srcubbers from the CM to interface with the little square hole on the LEM on Apollo 13 or basically stretching a tarp over Skylab to help reduce solar heating. Also, apparently the Russian cosmonaut (I forget his name), accidentally dropped a tool during the last EVA. It had enough momentum there was nothing he could do but watch it float out past the solar panels.
Watch the commercials again, re-read the ads, then figure out the answer. The ISP's don't say they're "selling an 85 mph car." It's always a car "capable of speeds up to 85 mph" or "up to 10 times as fast as jogging." That's under ideal conditions, which of course never happens.
There's plenty of people here who can explain the reasons you don't get top speeds better than I, but I'm sure overselling the bandwidth is one of them. Try DL'ing stuff at 3 AM sometime and see if you get different results than at 5 PM when everyone gets home from work. To see some of the myriad of other factors involved in action, try transferring a big file between two computers on an empty LAN and see if you actually get 10/100/1000 Mbps like the hardware can supposedly achieve. I think personally the best speed I've ever seen is 32 Mbps (ie, 4 MBps) on a 100 Mbps LAN.
Of course the ISP's could try to figure out what the actual average speed users get is, but that's still just a mean for a wide range that depends on a lot of factors. Even getting around the overselling bandwidth is tough, because if you provide space for all of your users to simultaneously max out at once (which doesn't really happen anyways), you're going to have to raise their rates to pay for the added infrastructure. They'll be much less happy about a huge rate increase than an occasional slowing of their connection.
As far as your analogy, internet access is much more like a road or a pipeline than a car. You generally aren't going to get some place faster on a side street than on the freeway, and just because the speed limit is 55 doesn't mean you'll be able to go that fast.
Well then, as long as the cool thing lately is to talk about how evil it is, why not mention gasoline? I know people who buy thousands of pounds per year (20 gal/week * 52 week/year * 7 lb/gal) of a substance that is explosive when mixed in proper proportions! Homeland security completely ignores them!
How about my parent's farm? It's small, a hobby farm really, but the ~200 gallons of diesel and 1000 pounds of ammonium-based fertilizer purchases they occasionally make could potentially be used in an ANFO charge fully 1/2 the size of the one detonated in front of the Murray Federal Building in Oklahoma City by McVeigh. Oh wait, that gets burned in the tractors or spread on the ground to make food. Well that's hardly evil.
Of course, when a researcher wants a few milligrams of a palladium isotope or whatever to use as a neutron source for an experiment, despite the fact that such an amount is about as dangerous as a smoke detector, they should have to jump through hoops while dancing the macerena and reciting tongue twisters. After all, it's radioactive.
Since the summary doesn't mention it and nobody reads the articles, I want to point out that the charge against the owners of the company is that they were selling materials commonly used in fireworks. It doesn't sound to me like there is even any evidence that the material had been used for that purpose.
Re:The Register's new market: tabloids
on
Online Revenge
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· Score: 1
"Shoot", "self", "foot" might be an ok response to the story if he really is guilty (honestly, I wouldn't be surprised, but the response is disproportionate), but the conversation here just assumes he's guilty.
My point wasn't about the legality of the vigilantism, it was about the asshole-itude of the buyer and lack of responsibility on the part of The Register in spreading hearsay. Also, libel can be a crime in some countries and is a serious civil matter in quite a few, including the US and UK.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course the meteor would not have had any noteworthy radioactivity and was not in a populated area. I don't remember exactly how often it's estimated to happen and I can't find any sources, but meteors of this size hit the earth a lot more often than most people realize...something like between once a year and once a decade. The comparison to Hiroshima really is about the energy of the impact, not the destructiveness. Little boy had a yield equivalent to approximately 15,000 tons of TNT.
The cuts are being made to originally projected future budgets. The science budget will actually continue to increase year-over-year, but not nearly as much as planned before the Columbia accident. If the CEV lives up to its long-term potential for lower-cost human access to space (hard to lose given the size and complexity of the shuttle), the science budget actually stands to benefit in the long term.
No need to post AC, you're pretty much right about the science achieved by robotic missions, but there are a few things to recognize. First, astronauts did place the Hubble and other observatories in orbit, and serviced it twice. It's possibly the best science investment NASA's made, but it had help. Second, robots don't expand human horizons. Some people think it's a corny goal, but a heck of a lot don't. Third, if we can get human's out there cost-effectively, I have no doubt that we will far outpace what we can accomplish with robots.
Woohoo! I knew I liked British people for a reason. Trans-Atlantic props for a great post, bro.
(*) FYI, Opportunity already beat you blokes by coming to rest inside Eagle Crater, which was only about 10 meters across and 1 or 2 deep. From 80 million miles away, baby!
No. The rigidity of the frame would depend on the specific alloy and the frame design. Be careful making statements like that until you know the range of tensile and ultimate yield strengths achievable with each metal.
There are two big reasons that come to mind why we won't actually have titanium cars, and both are cost related.
1.) $3/pound still does not compete with the cost of a few $hundred/ton for raw steel.
2.) Titanium is more difficult to work with especially for welding or casting, which increases the process costs.
Lest others smuggly convince themselves that NASA must then be a complete loser house, the above goes for probably almost every major project in every industry to the beginning of time. People have this (somewhat understandable) idea that a bunch of Japanese engineers wearing ties got together and drew a bunch of conceptual drawings, took them to the factory, started selling Toyota Corollas 6 months later, and by the end of the year had a reputation for making one of the most reliable cars on the rode. The actual case is that years of development go into every major redesign. While NASA gets one shot at building much of their stuff right, Toyota constantly improves their products year after year...and I believe they still average over 1 defect per vehicle coming off the assembly line. I'm positively amazed that younger companies like Kia are even able to break into the market at all, given the years of experience, prior design, and mistakes the older companies have to build on.
And it's my opinion that if people were really more interested in taking joyrides into space than criticizing businesses they have no experience in, they'd pay more attention to what's going on. SS1 was a technology demonstrator. That was the goal of the X-prize. From there it is still necessary for someone with the money and entreprenurial will (and a favorable market, which I'm not fully convinced exists) to take it from a demonstrator to a real product and accompanying service. Virgin Galactic has licensed the technology and is working with Scaled Composites to develop the larger commerical version. Had Ansari not offered up the X-prize and given Rutan and others a reason to invest the money and effort they did showing entreprenuers like Branson that it's possible, none of that might have taken place. Furthermore, the X-prize was awarded by the choice of the foundation, not claimed like a spoil of war, and it was done so with private money.
To go several layers up the discussion, yes the private industry is slow...slow compared to the original exaggerated promises made by people with plenty of money and rhetoric but little if any actual engineering experience.
To be fair, those are relatively technical questions for a news article, all the more so for the poor journalism major who wrote it and would probably have no clue of the significance of 5 tau. And the article did mention several hundred-thousand potential charge/discharge cycles. However, since I like to nitpick too, how about this common type of statement:
One would assume they mean 4%, but the wording really suggests a difference of the form 25(x-y) rather than 1/25. I can parse such statements ok in non-technical articles, but when I start trying to do math in my head, statements like "twice as small" throw me off-balance for a bit.
1.) Nothing never wears out. Ideally a part doesn't wear out in the system's lifetime, but even solid state components die eventually, even if it's from corroding away 10000 years from now.
2.) If a company picks up on the technology (or the MIT guy picks up some venture capital and develops it himself), they have a serious market advantage over traditional battery companies because they have a better product (hopefully). The other companies have to follow suit to remain competitive (patents allowing). The first guy has an interest in getting to market as fast as possible to gain market share before the competitors catch up.
3.) We will never have all of the capacitors we need. Selling them as replacements like batteries might be unlikely, but in the near term they could compete against rechargeables, and in the long term, new products will continue to need onboard power.
4.) The intially high demand would allow manufacturer's to quickly recoup their development and tooling costs by charging more early in production while avoiding the need to invest in extremely high manufacturing capacity. As price drops, they become financially feasible to a larger market.
5.) Waning sales from market saturation are just one more thing companies deal with on a regular basis. Compare these to another item that doesn't typically wear out: silverware. Everybody's got forks and spoons, but consumers still buy new sets.
How ironic...
;)
By the way, the jerk store called. They're out of you.
On a similar vein...
I just got back from an African Safari. The close proximity with nature is amazing. Why, on my first day I got out of bed and shot an elephant in my pajamas. How the elephant got in my pajamas I will never know!
(No, the elephant was not listening to my iPod. Apparently they don't like the earbuds either.)
Hint: leave the lid shut.
It was still up thirty seconds ago (come on, laugh, it's a joke).
I have a few random thoughts, but don't take these too seriously, because really, I don't care. From Evan's bio on the site: "I have no shame in my game." Granted, he did stop short of posting pictures of the lady's baby, but I'm not a big fan of vigilante justice. Couple the first statement with the utterly lame flash intro, the javascript disabling of the right-click menu, and the fact his website is written in ancient HTML 3.2, and I think it's obvious this is not a clear cut case of good versus evil. On an actual serious vein, perhaps someone can explain how finders keepers fits into this legally. Sure she didn't intend to leave it in the taxi, and clearly from an ethical standpoint the finder should make a reasonble effort (as in paying attention to the "reward for returning this" messages she sent) to return it, but could it be considered abandoned? Do taxi or other service companies have any special obligations regarding their customer's empty-headedness?
Hush! You're ruining his rhetorical argument with your facts!
1.) Localized content. I've heard localized content is available on some satellite stations, but I don't know the details, and I suspect they don't offer dozens of local choices like current broadcasts do and HD potentially can. While music is typically my main criteria for selecting a station, sometimes I'll pick one's that I know do traffic, weather, or news updates frequently. There's also local talk shows and busy parents or alumni who love listening to local high school and college sporting events broadcast on the radio.
2.) Lower cost. Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't XM and Sirius both subscription services?
3.) Embedding. XM or Sirius haven't made their way into car or home stereos as a standard feature. AM/FM antennae have long since. I didn't understand all the technical details from the article, but it sounds to me that there's not much needed beyond a decoder for the HD broadcast to be playable.
4.) Standardization. The article mentioned this format has been accepted by the FCC as a standard. Again, I don't know the details of satellite radio, but it sounds like the equipment is not inter-compatible.
5.) Independent operation. Stations handle the production and distribution of their programming themselves, instead of passing off the latter to the satellite owners. I tend to think of this as a good thing.
That's how I see it anyway. I'm no expert on this, so I welcome more information or rebuttals of my points. I'm also no fortune-teller, so I'm not saying HD is going to kick butt, but I disagree that it's too late to grab market share.
If I understand the article, it sounds like the presence of a dust disk suggests that these bodies formed on their own. The dust is similar to the accretion disk observed around young stars that fuels their growth and possibly the formation of orbiting planets. In theory, if a local knot of gas and dust was too small to form even a brown drawf, you get these planemos. A very small jump of reason suggests there may even by binary planemos or planemos with "moons."
I have a catapult. Give me money or I will throw a big rock at you? :D
Astute questions, but ones which the engineers have already thought of.
The Spacehab modules aren't quite as simple as they sound (otherwise they would have been included on the ISS). I believe they are to be built with mounting features included on the walls for things such as dividers and lockers. The trick is making sure these don't interfere with a smooth inflation. Additionally, the core of the module, which provides longitudinal rigidity and holds the inflating and related equipment will offer more rigid mounts for items where that may be important, like exercise gear. Also, EVA's would not be handled directly from these modules. You would still need airlocks for that, which could possibly be added onto the end, or else included in a traditional module. And yes, windows can be included in the spacehab modules.
First of all, they are hardly simplistic little devices. NASA spent a fair bit of money and several years researching and development of the concept. No doubt Heinlein, Clark, or Asimov also discussed the idea of inflatable modules long before Bigelow heard about them.
NASA's Transhab project was originally intended to utilize inflatable modules for the ISS. Like most aerospace projects, it ran over budget and the program was cancelled before all of the technical challenges like reliable inflation (these are much more complex than a balloon) were solved. Bigelow bought rights on the NASA patents when he started his aerospace company, and has been working on ironing out the remaining design details and figuring how to reliably manufacture them for several years now.
Second, these are not quite as revolutionary as they sound. They do offer significantly more internal volume for the weight, but not a huge amount. I think it's about double for Bigelow's layouts. There is a lot of core framework, life support, etc equipment associated with each module. They also only address the issue of creating interior volume, not fueling, power, temperature control, docking, and all the other major parts of a space station. They also don't offer much benefit for certain ISS modules like Columbus, which has built in experimental stations that can't realistically be inflated and would be difficult at best to install in a SpaceHab module after inflation. However, the technology may later be applied in areas other than habitation. One proposal is replacing the aluminum trusses that support solar panels with inflatable tubes that become sufficiently rigid when pressurized. Third, they may actually be safer than current aluminum modules. The synthetic materials they are made from are even stronger than Kevlar, and layered just like the aluminum/mylar/whatever else currently used. The difference is that these are elastic, so they can be folded up conveniently for launch, and they maintain their outer shape via pressure rather than framing. The same radiation protection would be offered. When a micrometeorites do hit they will probably not be massive enough to penetrate the skin. If one does, you would have a slow leak that could be located and repaired. They aren't inflated to near their ultimate yield strength like balloons are, so a small breach would not immediately grow into a tear that would cause them to "pop."
Check out some of NASA's conceptual drawings for a better idea what these modules are really like.
Dang, who doesn't use this as their motto. It's my alma mater's, too (not Hopkins), and I'm pretty sure I've seen it on at least one other school's literature.
Oh come on. That's like saying, "Wouldn't it have been simpler to just eat your sandwich than squishing the bread into a doughy ball to throw at your friends or scuplt dinosaurs out of?" or "Couldn't you have just walked around the block instead of racing your neighbor across the junkyard with the mean pitbulls?" or "You know your wouldn't have broken your leg if you hadn't been climbing that tree in the first place."
Totally irrelevant to being a kid.
You also probably use your keys every day, making habit pretty easy to achieve and giving you a reason to have a place (counter, key rack, whatever) where you normally keep them. Your keys don't get delivered to your house along with a 1000 pounds of other supplies that have to be quickly stowed out of the way where it will fit. It's not like the ISS has a nice pegboards all over the walls like your garage with pretty outlines drawn around the hooks for the hammers and the screwdrivers.
Look at what was lost, too. These were single use items. They don't have any special place to be kept. It was a bag to hold a small sample plate (easily replaced) and a foot restraint for EVA (they had a spare). Two small, probably very mundane looking objects that are no doubt very easy to lose track of when you have two guys unloading a Progress cargo ship full of stuff that might not be used for 3 months by themselves while also continuing their regular duties of monitoring the station and the experiments running onboard.
I suppose it is a little disappointing to lose stuff in a big aluminum tube. You know it's in there, and it's undoubtably safely stowed, you just can't find it. The fact that losing two such simple objects in a structure the size of the average house but much more crowded is even a story sort of shows how well they do of keeping track of things. I seriously doubt anyone here can tell someone exactly where everything in their house is, especially if they just moved into the house 2 months ago and someone else handled most of the moving.
I do have to say, these are rather boring as far as innovative solutions. Not quite like using duct tape and urine bags to adapt the big round C02 srcubbers from the CM to interface with the little square hole on the LEM on Apollo 13 or basically stretching a tarp over Skylab to help reduce solar heating. Also, apparently the Russian cosmonaut (I forget his name), accidentally dropped a tool during the last EVA. It had enough momentum there was nothing he could do but watch it float out past the solar panels.
Watch the commercials again, re-read the ads, then figure out the answer. The ISP's don't say they're "selling an 85 mph car." It's always a car "capable of speeds up to 85 mph" or "up to 10 times as fast as jogging." That's under ideal conditions, which of course never happens.
There's plenty of people here who can explain the reasons you don't get top speeds better than I, but I'm sure overselling the bandwidth is one of them. Try DL'ing stuff at 3 AM sometime and see if you get different results than at 5 PM when everyone gets home from work. To see some of the myriad of other factors involved in action, try transferring a big file between two computers on an empty LAN and see if you actually get 10/100/1000 Mbps like the hardware can supposedly achieve. I think personally the best speed I've ever seen is 32 Mbps (ie, 4 MBps) on a 100 Mbps LAN.
Of course the ISP's could try to figure out what the actual average speed users get is, but that's still just a mean for a wide range that depends on a lot of factors. Even getting around the overselling bandwidth is tough, because if you provide space for all of your users to simultaneously max out at once (which doesn't really happen anyways), you're going to have to raise their rates to pay for the added infrastructure. They'll be much less happy about a huge rate increase than an occasional slowing of their connection.
As far as your analogy, internet access is much more like a road or a pipeline than a car. You generally aren't going to get some place faster on a side street than on the freeway, and just because the speed limit is 55 doesn't mean you'll be able to go that fast.
Well then, as long as the cool thing lately is to talk about how evil it is, why not mention gasoline? I know people who buy thousands of pounds per year (20 gal/week * 52 week/year * 7 lb/gal) of a substance that is explosive when mixed in proper proportions! Homeland security completely ignores them!
How about my parent's farm? It's small, a hobby farm really, but the ~200 gallons of diesel and 1000 pounds of ammonium-based fertilizer purchases they occasionally make could potentially be used in an ANFO charge fully 1/2 the size of the one detonated in front of the Murray Federal Building in Oklahoma City by McVeigh. Oh wait, that gets burned in the tractors or spread on the ground to make food. Well that's hardly evil.
Of course, when a researcher wants a few milligrams of a palladium isotope or whatever to use as a neutron source for an experiment, despite the fact that such an amount is about as dangerous as a smoke detector, they should have to jump through hoops while dancing the macerena and reciting tongue twisters. After all, it's radioactive.
Since the summary doesn't mention it and nobody reads the articles, I want to point out that the charge against the owners of the company is that they were selling materials commonly used in fireworks. It doesn't sound to me like there is even any evidence that the material had been used for that purpose.
"Shoot", "self", "foot" might be an ok response to the story if he really is guilty (honestly, I wouldn't be surprised, but the response is disproportionate), but the conversation here just assumes he's guilty.
My point wasn't about the legality of the vigilantism, it was about the asshole-itude of the buyer and lack of responsibility on the part of The Register in spreading hearsay. Also, libel can be a crime in some countries and is a serious civil matter in quite a few, including the US and UK.