I am surprised that some agents don't have an email address since it's basically the standard for communications. Even the old fogey's should have access to an account, regardless of whether or not they check it.
Does anybody really care, however, that only 100 out of 2000 agents have internet capable phones? Are other agents somehow restricted in their ability to accomplish tasks by making phone calls from a phone and accessing the internet from a computer? Is using google on a 128x128 pixel screen really going to make a difference in upholding the law? I get tired of saying it, but CSI is not the real world. Having flashy gadgets like micro-pippeters, super-duper litmus tests, and PDA's doesn't guarantee you'll get the bad guy.
I'm a little more concerned about the fact that there are 2,000 FBI agents in New York. Knowing that makes me want to cinch down my aluminum foil hat a little tighter.
Additionally, the "plain" styling took about one tenth as long to load as forbes page the submission also linked to.
In all honestly, what got me started using google back in the day was not the quality of search results over yahoo (it helped, for a little while though), it was the fact that even on dial-up it loaded almost instantly.
90 days was actually the minimum criteria for the mission to be considered successful. The rover team generally felt pretty confident if the rovers landed successfully and survived infant mortality (which generally occurs because of problems in manufacture or design), then they probably would last pretty well beyond the 90 days. In fact, the original budget provided for operations cost for 90 days for the primary mission, plus a possible 90 day extension, as well as a further 180 day extension in case the rovers were still running at the end of the first 6 months. By that time, even if nothing mechanically had failed, they expected dust on the solar panels to have left them inoperational, as it had to the earlier Sojourner rover after roughly 3 months. Well, they got to one year and the rovers were still showing no major problems, so NASA approved a special additional 1 year extension to their budget rather than simply abandon their $820 million investment when it could still offer scientific return. Now they're over two years, and I'm not sure where the money is coming from, but NASA seems intent on milking them for all they're worth.
Yikes, if calculating trajectories and trip times was as difficult as predicting service life, we'd be in serious trouble.
I think the author meant contracts that are billed monthly...but yes they are usually locked in for 1-2 years.
I've been told that some of the providers will offer the good deals ( $0.10/min) afforded by these plans without a contract if you aren't trying for the free or discount phones, but the one vendor I asked claimed that I was misinformed.
If you are pro-choice and your employer is a die-hard pro-lifer, you don't want to work at that company.
Well, if the disagreement is the source of conflict between you and your employer, then no you don't want to work for him. You should both be able to cooperate despite having differing views.
Ok, I'll bite, how do they know they came from Earth rather than, say were asteroids?
Because they said they came from earth when they created the computer model the article is talking about. One of the nice things about computer models is it's relatively easy to control external effects, like asteroids.
Solar Billiards - v1.3.11 Please input the following earth-impactor parameters for your simulation
Pearl Harbor could have benefited from just a little bit of historical accuracy (you know, like not having half a dozen hung-over guys on their own shooting down more Japanese planes than the Japanese actually lost that day), actually being about the title event, not relying on a cliches like the third wheel in the featured love-triangle looking at a picture of his love before he died, and not having ridiculously over-the-top acting for the parts of Doolittle and Roosevelt. Compared to that, I was almost able to completely ignore the fact that the Japanese were bombing Aegis cruisers and Perry class frigates.
No point...just ranting. I still haven't forgiven Jerry Bruckheimer for his deceptive theft of 2-1/2 hours of my life.
With the uncertainty whether Blue Ray or HD-DVD will grab the market, it seems like there should be plenty of people sitting on the fence to wait and see which wins. Nobody wants to end up with a bunch of HD-DVD discs if Blue Ray ends up being the dominant format or vice versus. Same story as VHS versus Beta, I should think.
So what if the companies backing one format guaranteed they will replace your movies with the competing format if theirs flops? That way there's no reason not to buy that format (aside from the expected outrageous intructory costs), and it subsequently has a much greater chance of success.
Of course, if the competing format followed suit with the same guarantee, then the advantage for the originating company is basically lost and it could cause sustained high prices in the long run. Hmmm...maybe it's not such a good idea.
And these are just the things we're expecting to eventually achieve! Of the big things of the past, how many of them have really been anticipated? I'd say human flight was probably the most anticipated, but a lot of people were skeptical it was possible until it actually happened. Radio, television, computers, and all these other toys that electromagnetics gave us...nobody saw them coming. Heck, I remember my dad being amused back in the 80's when comparing fax machines to the way some old scifi shows portrayed futuristic space crews using teletype machines.
Of course, my list is filled with really big stuff. The point of the article was not that there is nothing left to invent, but rather that pretty much all the easy stuff has been invented already. The wheel? Check. Lightbulbs? Check. The Ferrari Enzo? Check. Hoverboards like in Back to the Future? Still working on it...
I was shocked when I read Stephen Hawking's Universe, which was a biography written by the same author as A Brief History of Time. Hawking was quoted in it as saying he thought there was a good chance all the big mysteries remaining in theoretical physics (unified field theory, etc) would be solved in about 20 years, leaving just experimental physics to play catch up. Flash forward 20 years and we find ourselves practically no closer to the end, with string theory raising just as many questions as it answers.
Having a physical copy as proof of purchase is nice, but the main reason I buy CD's is no DRM so I can legally use my music however I want.
It also helps that I can get them for $6 each if I don't mind waiting and having a limited selection from BMG, although I recently noticed they now call themself Sony-BMG, so I'm not sure how I feel about buying from them anymore. I'm not fond of people who install programs on people's computers without their permissions, especially when it's malicious.
The drive to do great things in space ended when going to the moon became routine.
Make that "routine" in quotation marks. It never truly became routine, but by the time of Apollo 13, the general public was already treating it as such. Marylin Lovell was shocked to see the low press turn out at press briefings held before her husband's launch. Nobody cared.
The sad part is that only nerds get truly excited about earning second place in space. When Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon, it was, to paraphrase basically every journalist who ever wrote a reflective piece about it, "the defining moment of American perseverance and ingenuity." After that point it was just guys in short-sleeved dress shirts playing with science toys who only matter when their tax-funded creations go boom.
In contrast, people will gossip about and feed on for months the latest news about Martha Stewart, Brad Pitt, and Paris Hilton, who have collectively given the world decorative hors d'hourves, a couple decent action movies, and a headache.
Q: "Did you hear that Angelina Jolie is going to name her child Siegfried?" (I made that up)
A: "No, but did you hear that the recent Stardust and Genesis missions returned the first extra-terrestrial samples to earth since the Apollo Program? They could revolutionize our understanding of how the solar system formed."
Q: "Stardust...isn't that the show with the old lawyer-guy from Boston Legal?"
...and Edwards Airforce Base has a paved runway about 15,000 feet long, but there is an additional 10 miles or so of marked dry lake bed suitable for landing a wide range of aircraft on and considered part of the runway. Bottom line: this is a long runway, possibly even a really long runway, but not a REALLY long runway.
"We made a cut, put the material in, and then we looked at the brain over different time points," explained Dr Rutledge Ellis-Behnke, a neuroscientist at MIT and lead author on the paper.
"The first thing we saw was that the brain had started to heal itself in the first 24 hours. We had never seen that before - so that was very surprising."
The article almost makes this sound like redneck science. "Hey Jethro, let's cut these hamster's optical nerves and see what happens when we dump a bunch of amino acids in their heads!"
One would expect they had some theories of what might happen when they did this, but I didn't get that impression from the article. Is anyone familiar with related science that might have been a motivator for this study? I'm sure this must have had better hypothetical motivation than whoever the first person to stick a CD in the microwave did.
Re:I think that boycott comes on other terms
on
Spore Is EA's New Ace
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Guess EA can't win that one 'gainst the religious right, huh?
If you want to speak for the religious right, you should first consider joining it. I personally think it sounds like a cool idea for a game.
Edison supposedly screwed Tesla over on some patent, but I believe it was actually Westinghouse that Edison was trash-talking on AC vs DC. Brilliant intuition, but he could've used a little more education. I wouldn't dignify this Murdock guy by comparing him to Edison, though. Murdock doesn't have 1100 patents, for one.
I like reading newspapers. In fact, I'm actually willing to pay to do it. There's a lot of news, particularly local news, that is not very time sensitive and it doesn't hurt to wait until the paper arrives to get it. It's also rather pleasant to sit back and read off of the paper instead of squinting in the computer screen. If I'm willing to give newspapers money to read their stuff, and half the people I know are willing to do the same, remind me again why newspapers are going to die out? I didn't pay much attention in economics class.
Agricultural use of satellite imagery is nothing new. Space Imaging is a company that already markets infrared and other imagery to farmers. It can help ensure balanced irrigation and application of pesticides or fertilizers or predict crop yield. I believe several land grant universities are currently doing research on how to effectively utilize satellite imagery for agriculture purposes.
I think someone already mentioned that this has lower resolution than SPOT, and many satellites have thrusters.
I finally had a chance to read the tower link. I saw the skyramp one earlier and haven't revisited it.
It seems to me the closest thing to compare to the tower idea currently existing are radio towers. Any feasibility study would be wise to include some input from people with experience designing and building guy-supported and non-guyed towers.
Perhaps I missed it while skimming through the discussion, but I saw nothing nothing about bending in the tower. They talked about wind loading and presumably considered stiffness, but did not mention how the loading may change when it deforms. An ideal truss does not deform, but in real conditions, it flexes a little bit under load and that may affect the loading in individual members. A few microstrain in each member multiplied over 11,000 meters can end up being a couple meters displacement at the top, which means the load is no longer centered, and the originally buckling analysis may have to be rerun. With the number of members I suspect are being discussed here, that would almost absolutely have to be done by computer and it will take a lot of work to set up.
Additional issues: Manufacturing methods - how do you assemble structures 11 kilometers up with 100 mph cross winds? Joints - joints add weight and the type used affects the strength. Pin joints are ideal but heavier. Welded or bonded joints are lighter but subject to bending stress and more difficult to manufacture and repair, especially in composites. Coil - The weight of the inductor will not be trivial. Also, I believe there are issues with scaling these things up that maglev train proponents have run up against.
I haven't read your links yet, but I'm skeptical about this being "readily achievable with today's technology." To put an 11 km pylon in perspective, Tapei 101 is 508 meters (0.508 km, if you need the math done) tall. Burj Dubai will be 705 meters tall. The Mars oil platform is 990 meters tall, but 900 meters of that is underwater and mostly consists of cables running under tension to the sea floor, and it's definitely not evacuated. A similar design would have to be parked in the Marianas Trench (11 kilometers ~ 36000 feet) or have stick above the water a significant distance, and also have to maintain straightness in any currents or else deal with lateral accelerations on the launch vehicle due to curvature of the launch tube.
Evacuation is also a challenge. If you want to park it in an ocean trench, you'll need to deal with the pressure at the bottom (approximately 15000 psi at the bottom...there's a reason Trieste is the only manned vessel ever to go there). Even if you find a way to build an 11 km tall tower standing above the water, you've got to pump air out faster than it flows in the open top, or add the mass of a cover to the top... which means stuff moving at the end of an 11 km long moment arm.
I also went ahead and did some quick math. 1 m/s/s acceleration over 11 km is not enough:
s = s(0) + v(0)*t + 0.5*a*t^2, where s(0)=0 and v(0) = 0 so:
t = ((2*s)/a)^0.5 = 148 seconds to traverse the 11 km
v = v(0) + a*t = 0 + 1 m/s/s * 148 s = 148 m/s = 331 mph
Woefully short of escape velocity.
So then I tried 1 G and got 1040 mph, which still doesn't cut it. Next I went for 5 G's, which is on the order of what astronauts experience during a launch, and that gave me 2,326 mph. It's still not escape velocity, but surprisingly enough, it is sufficient kinetic energy to loft an object to a height of 22,000 miles, or the altitude of a geosynchronous orbit. Unfortunately, when it gets there it doesn't have sufficient tangetial velocity to stay there, so it follows a funny elliptical path 22,000 miles to the hard ground. I ran out of scratch paper before I could quantify that, however. I did have one line left to note that a 1000 kg payload accellerating at 5 G's requires 2.4 MW of power, not accounting for losses, which is one capability we do easily have.
It's a pity, because all of these ideas show some measure of original thought and are theoretically feasible in some fashion, but the technical challenges are rather mind-numbing. So far the only problems I see with the space elevator are a sufficiently strong ribbon, a reliable method for weaving the ribbon in place, absolute reliability of a car during the 22,000 mile trip, and power to the car. Naturally, none of these are very trivial.
I'd wager they decided it wasn't worth the fuel for either the MRO or any of the other 3 probes currently in orbit to point their attennae at each other, then at earth to relay the info just to find out a few minutes earlier. It's probably possible to accomplish, but it's possible that the orbits just didn't work out or that any of the orbiters were busy with other tasks, such as MRO running self checks.
Knowing that changes can be made after launch has made me wonder if the Genesis capsule that crashed after it's parachute failed to deploy last year could've been saved, had the problem been discovered before re-entry. The parachutes were programmed to deploy a certain amount of time after an accelerometer detected re-entry, but the accelerometer had been installed upside down according to an incorrect engineering drawing. It might have been possible to simply look for the negative reading. If that wasn't a possibility, perhaps there might have been another event that could trigger the timer, or they could've just attempted to guess the time the parachute should deploy.
All you have to do to screw up a computer-controlled burn is put the wrong number in the computer.
FYI, the explosion on Apollo 13 was not caused during a burn. They were conducting a routine stir of one of the oxygen tanks when a wire inside that had melted off its insulation while draining after a launch rehersal shorted. I don't remember if the return burn the Apollo 13 LEM later performed (not normal) was computer-controlled or not, but I seem to remember that it was.
Slashdot Mirror
I am surprised that some agents don't have an email address since it's basically the standard for communications. Even the old fogey's should have access to an account, regardless of whether or not they check it.
Does anybody really care, however, that only 100 out of 2000 agents have internet capable phones? Are other agents somehow restricted in their ability to accomplish tasks by making phone calls from a phone and accessing the internet from a computer? Is using google on a 128x128 pixel screen really going to make a difference in upholding the law? I get tired of saying it, but CSI is not the real world. Having flashy gadgets like micro-pippeters, super-duper litmus tests, and PDA's doesn't guarantee you'll get the bad guy.
I'm a little more concerned about the fact that there are 2,000 FBI agents in New York. Knowing that makes me want to cinch down my aluminum foil hat a little tighter.
Additionally, the "plain" styling took about one tenth as long to load as forbes page the submission also linked to.
In all honestly, what got me started using google back in the day was not the quality of search results over yahoo (it helped, for a little while though), it was the fact that even on dial-up it loaded almost instantly.
Well, it's better than the message I got:
Which won? I have to know. I won't be able to get anything done until I find out.
90 days was actually the minimum criteria for the mission to be considered successful. The rover team generally felt pretty confident if the rovers landed successfully and survived infant mortality (which generally occurs because of problems in manufacture or design), then they probably would last pretty well beyond the 90 days. In fact, the original budget provided for operations cost for 90 days for the primary mission, plus a possible 90 day extension, as well as a further 180 day extension in case the rovers were still running at the end of the first 6 months. By that time, even if nothing mechanically had failed, they expected dust on the solar panels to have left them inoperational, as it had to the earlier Sojourner rover after roughly 3 months. Well, they got to one year and the rovers were still showing no major problems, so NASA approved a special additional 1 year extension to their budget rather than simply abandon their $820 million investment when it could still offer scientific return. Now they're over two years, and I'm not sure where the money is coming from, but NASA seems intent on milking them for all they're worth.
Yikes, if calculating trajectories and trip times was as difficult as predicting service life, we'd be in serious trouble.
I think the author meant contracts that are billed monthly...but yes they are usually locked in for 1-2 years.
I've been told that some of the providers will offer the good deals ( $0.10/min) afforded by these plans without a contract if you aren't trying for the free or discount phones, but the one vendor I asked claimed that I was misinformed.
Well, if the disagreement is the source of conflict between you and your employer, then no you don't want to work for him. You should both be able to cooperate despite having differing views.
Well, flop definitely isn't a marketing term, but point well taken.
Solar Billiards - v1.3.11
Please input the following earth-impactor parameters for your simulation
Impactor diameter (m): 5000
Impactor velocity (m/s): 12000
Ecliptic Declination (deg): 7.3
Please input the following solar system parameters for your simulation
Target diameter (km): 4000
Target solar altitude (AU): 15
System asteroid density (objects/AU^3): 0
Click start to begin
Calculating Trajectories...Done
Results:
Total impacts of earth origin: 107
Impacts of non-earth origin: 0
Congratulations! Impact count greater than 100! Click here to redeem your free iPod!
Pearl Harbor could have benefited from just a little bit of historical accuracy (you know, like not having half a dozen hung-over guys on their own shooting down more Japanese planes than the Japanese actually lost that day), actually being about the title event, not relying on a cliches like the third wheel in the featured love-triangle looking at a picture of his love before he died, and not having ridiculously over-the-top acting for the parts of Doolittle and Roosevelt. Compared to that, I was almost able to completely ignore the fact that the Japanese were bombing Aegis cruisers and Perry class frigates.
No point...just ranting. I still haven't forgiven Jerry Bruckheimer for his deceptive theft of 2-1/2 hours of my life.
With the uncertainty whether Blue Ray or HD-DVD will grab the market, it seems like there should be plenty of people sitting on the fence to wait and see which wins. Nobody wants to end up with a bunch of HD-DVD discs if Blue Ray ends up being the dominant format or vice versus. Same story as VHS versus Beta, I should think. So what if the companies backing one format guaranteed they will replace your movies with the competing format if theirs flops? That way there's no reason not to buy that format (aside from the expected outrageous intructory costs), and it subsequently has a much greater chance of success. Of course, if the competing format followed suit with the same guarantee, then the advantage for the originating company is basically lost and it could cause sustained high prices in the long run. Hmmm...maybe it's not such a good idea.
Can anybody think of more things to add?
And these are just the things we're expecting to eventually achieve! Of the big things of the past, how many of them have really been anticipated? I'd say human flight was probably the most anticipated, but a lot of people were skeptical it was possible until it actually happened. Radio, television, computers, and all these other toys that electromagnetics gave us...nobody saw them coming. Heck, I remember my dad being amused back in the 80's when comparing fax machines to the way some old scifi shows portrayed futuristic space crews using teletype machines.
Of course, my list is filled with really big stuff. The point of the article was not that there is nothing left to invent, but rather that pretty much all the easy stuff has been invented already. The wheel? Check. Lightbulbs? Check. The Ferrari Enzo? Check. Hoverboards like in Back to the Future? Still working on it...
I was shocked when I read Stephen Hawking's Universe, which was a biography written by the same author as A Brief History of Time. Hawking was quoted in it as saying he thought there was a good chance all the big mysteries remaining in theoretical physics (unified field theory, etc) would be solved in about 20 years, leaving just experimental physics to play catch up. Flash forward 20 years and we find ourselves practically no closer to the end, with string theory raising just as many questions as it answers.
Having a physical copy as proof of purchase is nice, but the main reason I buy CD's is no DRM so I can legally use my music however I want.
It also helps that I can get them for $6 each if I don't mind waiting and having a limited selection from BMG, although I recently noticed they now call themself Sony-BMG, so I'm not sure how I feel about buying from them anymore. I'm not fond of people who install programs on people's computers without their permissions, especially when it's malicious.
The sad part is that only nerds get truly excited about earning second place in space. When Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon, it was, to paraphrase basically every journalist who ever wrote a reflective piece about it, "the defining moment of American perseverance and ingenuity." After that point it was just guys in short-sleeved dress shirts playing with science toys who only matter when their tax-funded creations go boom.
In contrast, people will gossip about and feed on for months the latest news about Martha Stewart, Brad Pitt, and Paris Hilton, who have collectively given the world decorative hors d'hourves, a couple decent action movies, and a headache.
Q: "Did you hear that Angelina Jolie is going to name her child Siegfried?" (I made that up)
A: "No, but did you hear that the recent Stardust and Genesis missions returned the first extra-terrestrial samples to earth since the Apollo Program? They could revolutionize our understanding of how the solar system formed."
Q: "Stardust...isn't that the show with the old lawyer-guy from Boston Legal?"
...and Edwards Airforce Base has a paved runway about 15,000 feet long, but there is an additional 10 miles or so of marked dry lake bed suitable for landing a wide range of aircraft on and considered part of the runway. Bottom line: this is a long runway, possibly even a really long runway, but not a REALLY long runway.
One would expect they had some theories of what might happen when they did this, but I didn't get that impression from the article. Is anyone familiar with related science that might have been a motivator for this study? I'm sure this must have had better hypothetical motivation than whoever the first person to stick a CD in the microwave did.
Edison supposedly screwed Tesla over on some patent, but I believe it was actually Westinghouse that Edison was trash-talking on AC vs DC. Brilliant intuition, but he could've used a little more education. I wouldn't dignify this Murdock guy by comparing him to Edison, though. Murdock doesn't have 1100 patents, for one.
I'm with the AC on this one.
I like reading newspapers. In fact, I'm actually willing to pay to do it. There's a lot of news, particularly local news, that is not very time sensitive and it doesn't hurt to wait until the paper arrives to get it. It's also rather pleasant to sit back and read off of the paper instead of squinting in the computer screen. If I'm willing to give newspapers money to read their stuff, and half the people I know are willing to do the same, remind me again why newspapers are going to die out? I didn't pay much attention in economics class.
Agricultural use of satellite imagery is nothing new. Space Imaging is a company that already markets infrared and other imagery to farmers. It can help ensure balanced irrigation and application of pesticides or fertilizers or predict crop yield. I believe several land grant universities are currently doing research on how to effectively utilize satellite imagery for agriculture purposes.
I think someone already mentioned that this has lower resolution than SPOT, and many satellites have thrusters.
I finally had a chance to read the tower link. I saw the skyramp one earlier and haven't revisited it.
It seems to me the closest thing to compare to the tower idea currently existing are radio towers. Any feasibility study would be wise to include some input from people with experience designing and building guy-supported and non-guyed towers.
Perhaps I missed it while skimming through the discussion, but I saw nothing nothing about bending in the tower. They talked about wind loading and presumably considered stiffness, but did not mention how the loading may change when it deforms. An ideal truss does not deform, but in real conditions, it flexes a little bit under load and that may affect the loading in individual members. A few microstrain in each member multiplied over 11,000 meters can end up being a couple meters displacement at the top, which means the load is no longer centered, and the originally buckling analysis may have to be rerun. With the number of members I suspect are being discussed here, that would almost absolutely have to be done by computer and it will take a lot of work to set up.
Additional issues: Manufacturing methods - how do you assemble structures 11 kilometers up with 100 mph cross winds? Joints - joints add weight and the type used affects the strength. Pin joints are ideal but heavier. Welded or bonded joints are lighter but subject to bending stress and more difficult to manufacture and repair, especially in composites. Coil - The weight of the inductor will not be trivial. Also, I believe there are issues with scaling these things up that maglev train proponents have run up against.
I haven't read your links yet, but I'm skeptical about this being "readily achievable with today's technology." To put an 11 km pylon in perspective, Tapei 101 is 508 meters (0.508 km, if you need the math done) tall. Burj Dubai will be 705 meters tall. The Mars oil platform is 990 meters tall, but 900 meters of that is underwater and mostly consists of cables running under tension to the sea floor, and it's definitely not evacuated. A similar design would have to be parked in the Marianas Trench (11 kilometers ~ 36000 feet) or have stick above the water a significant distance, and also have to maintain straightness in any currents or else deal with lateral accelerations on the launch vehicle due to curvature of the launch tube.
Evacuation is also a challenge. If you want to park it in an ocean trench, you'll need to deal with the pressure at the bottom (approximately 15000 psi at the bottom...there's a reason Trieste is the only manned vessel ever to go there). Even if you find a way to build an 11 km tall tower standing above the water, you've got to pump air out faster than it flows in the open top, or add the mass of a cover to the top... which means stuff moving at the end of an 11 km long moment arm.
I also went ahead and did some quick math. 1 m/s/s acceleration over 11 km is not enough:
s = s(0) + v(0)*t + 0.5*a*t^2, where s(0)=0 and v(0) = 0 so:
t = ((2*s)/a)^0.5 = 148 seconds to traverse the 11 km
v = v(0) + a*t = 0 + 1 m/s/s * 148 s = 148 m/s = 331 mph
Woefully short of escape velocity.
So then I tried 1 G and got 1040 mph, which still doesn't cut it. Next I went for 5 G's, which is on the order of what astronauts experience during a launch, and that gave me 2,326 mph. It's still not escape velocity, but surprisingly enough, it is sufficient kinetic energy to loft an object to a height of 22,000 miles, or the altitude of a geosynchronous orbit. Unfortunately, when it gets there it doesn't have sufficient tangetial velocity to stay there, so it follows a funny elliptical path 22,000 miles to the hard ground. I ran out of scratch paper before I could quantify that, however. I did have one line left to note that a 1000 kg payload accellerating at 5 G's requires 2.4 MW of power, not accounting for losses, which is one capability we do easily have.
It's a pity, because all of these ideas show some measure of original thought and are theoretically feasible in some fashion, but the technical challenges are rather mind-numbing. So far the only problems I see with the space elevator are a sufficiently strong ribbon, a reliable method for weaving the ribbon in place, absolute reliability of a car during the 22,000 mile trip, and power to the car. Naturally, none of these are very trivial.
I'd wager they decided it wasn't worth the fuel for either the MRO or any of the other 3 probes currently in orbit to point their attennae at each other, then at earth to relay the info just to find out a few minutes earlier. It's probably possible to accomplish, but it's possible that the orbits just didn't work out or that any of the orbiters were busy with other tasks, such as MRO running self checks.
Knowing that changes can be made after launch has made me wonder if the Genesis capsule that crashed after it's parachute failed to deploy last year could've been saved, had the problem been discovered before re-entry. The parachutes were programmed to deploy a certain amount of time after an accelerometer detected re-entry, but the accelerometer had been installed upside down according to an incorrect engineering drawing. It might have been possible to simply look for the negative reading. If that wasn't a possibility, perhaps there might have been another event that could trigger the timer, or they could've just attempted to guess the time the parachute should deploy.
All you have to do to screw up a computer-controlled burn is put the wrong number in the computer.
FYI, the explosion on Apollo 13 was not caused during a burn. They were conducting a routine stir of one of the oxygen tanks when a wire inside that had melted off its insulation while draining after a launch rehersal shorted. I don't remember if the return burn the Apollo 13 LEM later performed (not normal) was computer-controlled or not, but I seem to remember that it was.
For further evidence that Mars got pwned, note that K'breel didn't first post this time around.