Well, if we know which kind of Amex you apply to get, we can predict with nearly 100% certainty what the first five digits will be. This means only 10 digits need to be predicted.
Every card issuer has a set prefix that belongs to them. The first four digits of any card number indicate who issued it. This applies to every kind of card from credit cards you can use anywhere but also things like branded gas station credit cards only good at that one chain, and so on.
This leaves only so many additional digits for card numbers, and from that pool of course some are active. Others have been issued to other cardholders but replaced, so those card numbers are also off the available list. Stolen card numbers are also off the avail list. The end result is that there are only so many possible unused card numbers.
It is also important to remember that not all cards are issued the same: Amex issues most of its cards itself. They have only a few prefix numbers. But card issuers like Visa and Mastercard use thousands of member banks and credit unions to issue cards and each of those issuers will usually have their own prefix numbers.
In other words, most Amex cards start with 37***. This leaves 10 digits for individual cards for the entirety of Amex customers, past, present, black listed, all of them. Amex segregates different types of cards based on the first five digits so not all combinations are possible and available to issue.
But your Chase Visa card will have 5678 and your Bank of America Visa will have 6789 (not their real numbers) which are unique to each bank. This means EACH of these banks has 11 digits they can use even if the other banks also use the same 11 digits for a card. It won't matter because the prefix is different.
Amex and the other banks can have more than one prefix. There are public lists of which bank is which.
It's 2015 and the US is still trying (and apparently failing) to implement chip-and-pin. So no, clearly they are not trying.
NO they are not. Most US card issuers are implementing Chip-and-Signature, which is NOT the same thing as Chip-and-Pin. The cards LOOK the same and have the same chip but this method happens to be far less secure. What a surprise. Does the US ever do anything with high security?
The only thing Chip-and-Sig does is crack down on fake mag stripe cards because copying the chip is harder to do. But for the signature part, almost nobody ever actually looks at or checks signatures much less asks for ID.
Only a handful of US card issuers are actually doing Chip-and-Pin, mainly small banks and a couple credit unions.
Can we please try to name drop some more schools into the teaser?
I am SURE somewhere we missed somebody's school affiliation that, while having jack shit to do with anything, merits a mention. Surely a janitor who attended night classes at Yale Lock Academy or somebody's third cousin Louis who once had cheese from a shop near Rutgers deserves the same accolades.
Seriously, why the hell does it matter where all these people went to school and why does this need to be in the teaser? You know what was MISSING from the teaser? A reason why anyone should care.
You are correct. But this sort of ignorant "X times to a lesser value" bullshit math is rampant. I use it to easily spot stupid people for me.
Sometimes I will ask them, please draw for me on a blackboard how you would work "20 times less than X" and laugh at them when they can't do it.
But the scary thing is how many people don't understand what's wrong. It is simply that you cannot multiply and reach a lower value. 10 times less can't work. Ever.
One tenth can. But fractions are apparently impossible.
Probably not healthy to hate Speed Racer that much. How can anyone hate a show where the car had more gadgets than James Bond, and in particular, the car had a fucking camera drone 40 years before anyone else ever thought of that idea.
Lots of characters died, not so much in the edited version but they still did.
And you missed the 1996 remake version (no not the movie) where the car got some serious upgrades and ultimately a sort of FTL warp drive which spawned huge plot of about a demonic empire from the future trying to kill everyone. The remake show also had one of the most powerful, meaningful ending themes ever used on an anime series. Absolutely epic.
Back in the 60's, Star Trek had to compete with Lost in Space as some viewers and a lot of TV execs considered them basically the same. Which is silly. Star Trek rarely had costumed monsters of the week. Lost in Space never missed them.
Both shows shared some writers, directors, guest stars, and even monster props by the same people. So the two shows DID have some things in common. But not premise or most content.
And now, Netflix is remaking Lost and CBS is launching a new Star Trek series. They shall compete again.
As a new Comcast subscriber, I can confirm all of this is true. 100%.
Comcast's own hotspot finder app shows you a map of the hotspots complete with street address and even names in some cases. For this reason, I don't have one of their wifi hotspots running in MY house. Hell no. Do enjoy USING their hotspots when I am out and about. Works really well, far better than any other hotspot service I've ever had. Comcast wifi is all over.
And for validating, once your device (phone, laptop, whatever) authenticates once with Xfinity Wifi or Cablewifi, their system adds your MAC to the approved list and you don't need to login again. It's very handy.
The CIA and NSA specialize in intercepting items in transit, modifying them, carefully repacking them to hide any sign of tampering and sending them on to the end recipient.
None of that is impacted in the slightest bit if customers are coming to a warehouse in NC to test it. So it tests clean and they sign off on it. And what happens next? It gets shipped. And if they want to intercept it, they will. And what has been accomplished? Nothing.
And of course this is separate from the OTHER big Cisco issue of counterfeit fake Cisco products dropping into the channel from unclear origins in China. Nobody knows for sure what the hell is in that gear. Is it firmware with malware in it, or malware made to act like firmware? Keyloggers or full blown remote access? Nobody knows. But a lot of businesses have bought that stuff as genuine and installed it and trusted it. The truth is, all bets are off.
When you have people openly (or at least semi-openly) plotting against you, what you want them to do is keep talking where you can see and hear it.
You do not want them to shut up and go covert because that makes your job much harder.
The Brits outlined how to do all of this with "Ultra" -they didn't go out and TELL the Nazis the Enigma machine had been compromised. No. They let them keep talking and planning and in the end even sacrificed some lives to ensure the Nazis had no idea they were being monitored.
Had the Brits (and it has to be said, the Poles who started decoding Enigma) gone and waved it in the faces of the Nazis, all it would have done is forced them to use some other covert method that nobody could monitor.
The bottom line from this or any other kind of speech is that it may be unpleasant to hear and see ideas and things you disagree with, be they hate speech or racism, bias, religious proselytizing, political pandering, or whatever. If you make the speech go away, if you make it fall out of the public eye, then all it does is fall into dark corners where the harsh light of judgment cannot easily see it. You won't stop it, In human history, nobody has ever stopped talking about something because someone else (parent, government, teacher, priest, etc) said not to. It isn't human nature to simply surrender ideas like that and stop thinking and talking about them, By trying to lower the boom on open chatter, you simply make such discussions hide and in so doing you make it much harder to monitor and squash.
Mining for gold like this is a fool's errand, as much as stocking up in warehouses in case the world ends.
Countries who do not have US (read US and other "free" nations) interests at heart control vast amounts of gold and other minerals which they CHOOSE to keep off the market for their own reasons. There is nothing stopping them from dumping their stock and making the bottom fall out of the markets at which point gold won't be worth mining or hoarding.
Everyone has to judge their own finances, but I find it absurd to considering investing in something like Gold where the value is set in large part by countries and peoples who would be happy if my country and people got vaporized. Now, everyone ELSE can invest in it if they want. I don't trust them and I won't invest in things I can't trust.
It would go back in time only from the perspective of an outside observer. From the perspective of the particle itself, it is still in what it would perceive to be normal time, if a particle could perceive such a thing.
But none of this matters. No matter what humans call Pluto or how we classify it. whether we fight wars about it on/. or on a battlefield with guns, none of this matters whatsoever to the astronomical object we call Pluto. Every single atom it's made of will carry on the same regardless of what we call it, or whether indeed humans had ever managed to find out it was there at all.
So go on and argue about it. Someone will eventually win. And it will still make no difference at all. Pluto will carry on for billions of years after humanity has vanished from this universe. If life exists or develops on another body in the Sol system, perhaps Pluto will even get a new name which will also matter not at all.
Totally agree. Life is all around us here on the earth and most of it is related to us, yet none of it uses radio. This alone should tell us radio is a rare thing, not a common thing.
But SETI and most of the other programs are in fact searching space not for aliens at all, but looking for another instance of beings exactly like us. Not found more just like us this week? Oh well, keep trying! Got to be another Hoboken New Jersey out there somewhere.
We have never had ANY reason to assume aliens of any kind use radio as we know it. Even among the life forms on Earth, many of which are very closely related to us, absolutely NONE of them have developed or discovered radio except humans. So therefore, we already know radio happens 1 in some billions of species even when they are our close relatives.
Among aliens unlikely to be anything like us, we have to assume that they may never have found radio, or use it differently. SETI essentially looks out into space looking to find ourselves. This is just ludicrous. What little we know about space and other planets tells us the universe is incredibly diverse. We aren't going to find another US out there. So no wonder they have always failed.
But what's the point in doing all the hard work to terraform Mars when there is nothing that can be done to stop this? The planet is dead unless we can increase the mass and magnetic fields, two things we don't have the science to do, nor will have in any remotely near timespan.
Well the low output could be because we have only accidentally stumbled across whatever it happening. Once it is researched and fine-tuned and a better drive is built, it will likely be far more effective and efficient.
Science is full of examples where the first way of doing a process was terribly inefficient or plain wrong-headed but better and faster and smarter ways came along later. So I am not knocking their puny output power just yet. That it works at all is great. It means there is more to do.
It doesn't necessarily violate conservation of motion if the action and reaction are taking place in a way we didn't know about and therefore don't measure.
For example, if the EM drive is pushing against a force we don't perceive, then it IS having an action that conserves motion. We just aren't measuring it correctly so it merely appears to be happening by magic.
A real world example of this would be a linear motor. One of the fancy roller coasters will do for an example. The linear motors on the track push the coaster. We can see the motor and the ride carriage and measure the force and so on and it's clear electric power is making the magnetic field that does the pushing.
With an EM drive, we see movement (or at least thrust) happening but we don't yet see the other half of it, i.e. what it is reacting against. It is like the roller coaster is operating in fog and you can't see the trackway. The fog is our lack of understanding of the physics behind it. Not because we are dumb but because this is going to be some weird aspect of physics we never suspected before and apparently can't easily perceive with our normal senses, so literally nobody has ever even tried to come up with how it works.
In this way, it does not break rules. It's making new ones.
My suspicion is that the EM drive is reacting against some sort of background EM field that we don't yet know about.
You hit closer than you might have realized: in the 80s, foreign state broadcasters had a practice of leasing time on shortwave relay stations located in the US and Canada with the express purpose of reaching North American listeners.
Some shortwave churches bought and operated stations under religious licenses but used leased time to actually make some money off it. There were also businesses expressly operated as relay stations just like the one in Virginia. Okeechobee Florida was a popular site for this, and at least one of the relays is apparently still operating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Note before people ask: Yes it has US call letters but it broadcasts on shortwave, not AM, FM or TV bands.
As for the Chinese population issue, the situation is not what it seems. Due to the one-child policies, China has a severe problem with lack of children, rapidly aging adults, and a big problem with lack of women for men to marry. It is estimated as many as 34 million Chinese men will not be able to find wives, and the women are like women in many other countries (US, Japan, Israel, UK, Germany, etc) where "staying home and having kids" is not necessarily appealing or financially feasible. So for the couples who do marry, they are not having enough children to maintain the population. You need 2.1 kids per family to maintain populations. China is having 1.something. Taken all together along with the "graying" of the existing generation as they age, and the population of China may halve in the next 50-100 years.
There is a long history on the shortwave radio bands where stations setup for religious or cultural purposes ended up leasing air time to foreign broadcasters. Back in the late 1980s. there were several relay stations (i.e. paid stations just like this one in D.C.) in Canada and a large one in Okeechobee Florida. Among others, Radio Taiwan aka The Voice of "Free" China", Radio Japan, DW from Germany, the BBC World Service and others used them to target North American listeners.
The problem with NASA and indeed all human efforts at anything is that we can't see beyond 4-year cycles in the West and somewhat longer cycles in China, negated by the lack of most of the space program needed to make the plans happen, if they had the plans.
Getting to other planets takes a lot of money over a long time scale. Apparently Mars will take a couple decades or so. And we may not make it.
Getting to anything farther away, or long development projects like the warp drive and so on, threaten to take tens of decades. It may take a century or two to get to a warp drive. Humanity has no history of supporting goals like that. We don't even have words to describe making that kind of commitment that transcends the time lines of nations. But even for a Mars missing taking decades, we cannot do it. We lack the ability to support anything like that.
Inheriting the stars will take huge amounts of time and effort. We won't be able to do it. I welcome humanity proving me wrong.
So what Bolden is really saying is that they have nothing to fall back on if the Mars thing doesn't work out. If the rocket fails. If there's some biological problem that comes up. or even if some other mission of importance comes up. It's Mars and only Mars and if it's not Mars it's nothing. Goddamn NASA how fucking stupid are you rocket scientists anyway? WTF?
This is like my four-year-old cousin who throws a fit if he can't have the exact candy bar he wants. He proclaims he'd rather starve than eat something else. Fine. Do it, I say, much to the horror of his mom and dad.
If my toddler cousin starves to death because he could not have candy, and NASA ceases to exist without Mars, then I say neither of them deserve to exist. Let them both die. But I really think my cousin will eventually eat something else and I feel NASA will find something else to do.
Sony is a massively complex company, such that they have sued themselves over DMCA issues before. Literally one division has no idea what another is doing.
Samsung's rise in the 80s and 90s was fueled in part by a mission to destroy Sony. That was their driving goal, and they have in fact succeeded with that mission and then some. Part because Samsung is that good, but also because Sony literally invents ways to shoot themselves in the head.
Not much. It cannot go critical. If it leaks and dumps all the stuff on the ground, oh well, Scrap it up and haul it away. It won't poison water tables or irradiate anyone.
Worst it could is burn someone unlucky enough to get too close to it when hot.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if we know which kind of Amex you apply to get, we can predict with nearly 100% certainty what the first five digits will be. This means only 10 digits need to be predicted.
Every card issuer has a set prefix that belongs to them. The first four digits of any card number indicate who issued it. This applies to every kind of card from credit cards you can use anywhere but also things like branded gas station credit cards only good at that one chain, and so on.
This leaves only so many additional digits for card numbers, and from that pool of course some are active. Others have been issued to other cardholders but replaced, so those card numbers are also off the available list. Stolen card numbers are also off the avail list. The end result is that there are only so many possible unused card numbers.
It is also important to remember that not all cards are issued the same: Amex issues most of its cards itself. They have only a few prefix numbers. But card issuers like Visa and Mastercard use thousands of member banks and credit unions to issue cards and each of those issuers will usually have their own prefix numbers.
In other words, most Amex cards start with 37***. This leaves 10 digits for individual cards for the entirety of Amex customers, past, present, black listed, all of them. Amex segregates different types of cards based on the first five digits so not all combinations are possible and available to issue.
But your Chase Visa card will have 5678 and your Bank of America Visa will have 6789 (not their real numbers) which are unique to each bank. This means EACH of these banks has 11 digits they can use even if the other banks also use the same 11 digits for a card. It won't matter because the prefix is different.
Amex and the other banks can have more than one prefix. There are public lists of which bank is which.
http://www.stevemorse.org/ssn/...
It's 2015 and the US is still trying (and apparently failing) to implement chip-and-pin. So no, clearly they are not trying.
NO they are not. Most US card issuers are implementing Chip-and-Signature, which is NOT the same thing as Chip-and-Pin. The cards LOOK the same and have the same chip but this method happens to be far less secure. What a surprise. Does the US ever do anything with high security?
The only thing Chip-and-Sig does is crack down on fake mag stripe cards because copying the chip is harder to do. But for the signature part, almost nobody ever actually looks at or checks signatures much less asks for ID.
Only a handful of US card issuers are actually doing Chip-and-Pin, mainly small banks and a couple credit unions.
Can we please try to name drop some more schools into the teaser?
I am SURE somewhere we missed somebody's school affiliation that, while having jack shit to do with anything, merits a mention. Surely a janitor who attended night classes at Yale Lock Academy or somebody's third cousin Louis who once had cheese from a shop near Rutgers deserves the same accolades.
Seriously, why the hell does it matter where all these people went to school and why does this need to be in the teaser? You know what was MISSING from the teaser? A reason why anyone should care.
You are correct. But this sort of ignorant "X times to a lesser value" bullshit math is rampant. I use it to easily spot stupid people for me.
Sometimes I will ask them, please draw for me on a blackboard how you would work "20 times less than X" and laugh at them when they can't do it.
But the scary thing is how many people don't understand what's wrong. It is simply that you cannot multiply and reach a lower value. 10 times less can't work. Ever.
One tenth can. But fractions are apparently impossible.
+1 Dick Tufeld. One of the coolest voice people ever. He adds megatons of drama to everything he reads. It's amazing. His intro for Thundarr is epic.
Probably not healthy to hate Speed Racer that much. How can anyone hate a show where the car had more gadgets than James Bond, and in particular, the car had a fucking camera drone 40 years before anyone else ever thought of that idea.
Lots of characters died, not so much in the edited version but they still did.
And you missed the 1996 remake version (no not the movie) where the car got some serious upgrades and ultimately a sort of FTL warp drive which spawned huge plot of about a demonic empire from the future trying to kill everyone. The remake show also had one of the most powerful, meaningful ending themes ever used on an anime series. Absolutely epic.
Back in the 60's, Star Trek had to compete with Lost in Space as some viewers and a lot of TV execs considered them basically the same. Which is silly. Star Trek rarely had costumed monsters of the week. Lost in Space never missed them.
Both shows shared some writers, directors, guest stars, and even monster props by the same people. So the two shows DID have some things in common. But not premise or most content.
And now, Netflix is remaking Lost and CBS is launching a new Star Trek series. They shall compete again.
Nothing changes.
As a new Comcast subscriber, I can confirm all of this is true. 100%.
Comcast's own hotspot finder app shows you a map of the hotspots complete with street address and even names in some cases. For this reason, I don't have one of their wifi hotspots running in MY house. Hell no. Do enjoy USING their hotspots when I am out and about. Works really well, far better than any other hotspot service I've ever had. Comcast wifi is all over.
And for validating, once your device (phone, laptop, whatever) authenticates once with Xfinity Wifi or Cablewifi, their system adds your MAC to the approved list and you don't need to login again. It's very handy.
The CIA and NSA specialize in intercepting items in transit, modifying them, carefully repacking them to hide any sign of tampering and sending them on to the end recipient.
None of that is impacted in the slightest bit if customers are coming to a warehouse in NC to test it. So it tests clean and they sign off on it. And what happens next? It gets shipped. And if they want to intercept it, they will. And what has been accomplished? Nothing.
And of course this is separate from the OTHER big Cisco issue of counterfeit fake Cisco products dropping into the channel from unclear origins in China. Nobody knows for sure what the hell is in that gear. Is it firmware with malware in it, or malware made to act like firmware? Keyloggers or full blown remote access? Nobody knows. But a lot of businesses have bought that stuff as genuine and installed it and trusted it. The truth is, all bets are off.
When you have people openly (or at least semi-openly) plotting against you, what you want them to do is keep talking where you can see and hear it.
You do not want them to shut up and go covert because that makes your job much harder.
The Brits outlined how to do all of this with "Ultra" -they didn't go out and TELL the Nazis the Enigma machine had been compromised. No. They let them keep talking and planning and in the end even sacrificed some lives to ensure the Nazis had no idea they were being monitored.
Had the Brits (and it has to be said, the Poles who started decoding Enigma) gone and waved it in the faces of the Nazis, all it would have done is forced them to use some other covert method that nobody could monitor.
The bottom line from this or any other kind of speech is that it may be unpleasant to hear and see ideas and things you disagree with, be they hate speech or racism, bias, religious proselytizing, political pandering, or whatever. If you make the speech go away, if you make it fall out of the public eye, then all it does is fall into dark corners where the harsh light of judgment cannot easily see it. You won't stop it, In human history, nobody has ever stopped talking about something because someone else (parent, government, teacher, priest, etc) said not to. It isn't human nature to simply surrender ideas like that and stop thinking and talking about them, By trying to lower the boom on open chatter, you simply make such discussions hide and in so doing you make it much harder to monitor and squash.
Mining for gold like this is a fool's errand, as much as stocking up in warehouses in case the world ends.
Countries who do not have US (read US and other "free" nations) interests at heart control vast amounts of gold and other minerals which they CHOOSE to keep off the market for their own reasons. There is nothing stopping them from dumping their stock and making the bottom fall out of the markets at which point gold won't be worth mining or hoarding.
Everyone has to judge their own finances, but I find it absurd to considering investing in something like Gold where the value is set in large part by countries and peoples who would be happy if my country and people got vaporized. Now, everyone ELSE can invest in it if they want. I don't trust them and I won't invest in things I can't trust.
It would go back in time only from the perspective of an outside observer. From the perspective of the particle itself, it is still in what it would perceive to be normal time, if a particle could perceive such a thing.
But none of this matters. No matter what humans call Pluto or how we classify it. whether we fight wars about it on /. or on a battlefield with guns, none of this matters whatsoever to the astronomical object we call Pluto. Every single atom it's made of will carry on the same regardless of what we call it, or whether indeed humans had ever managed to find out it was there at all.
So go on and argue about it. Someone will eventually win. And it will still make no difference at all. Pluto will carry on for billions of years after humanity has vanished from this universe. If life exists or develops on another body in the Sol system, perhaps Pluto will even get a new name which will also matter not at all.
Totally agree. Life is all around us here on the earth and most of it is related to us, yet none of it uses radio. This alone should tell us radio is a rare thing, not a common thing.
But SETI and most of the other programs are in fact searching space not for aliens at all, but looking for another instance of beings exactly like us. Not found more just like us this week? Oh well, keep trying! Got to be another Hoboken New Jersey out there somewhere.
It's just stupid.
We have never had ANY reason to assume aliens of any kind use radio as we know it. Even among the life forms on Earth, many of which are very closely related to us, absolutely NONE of them have developed or discovered radio except humans. So therefore, we already know radio happens 1 in some billions of species even when they are our close relatives.
Among aliens unlikely to be anything like us, we have to assume that they may never have found radio, or use it differently. SETI essentially looks out into space looking to find ourselves. This is just ludicrous. What little we know about space and other planets tells us the universe is incredibly diverse. We aren't going to find another US out there. So no wonder they have always failed.
But what's the point in doing all the hard work to terraform Mars when there is nothing that can be done to stop this? The planet is dead unless we can increase the mass and magnetic fields, two things we don't have the science to do, nor will have in any remotely near timespan.
Any work we'd do to terraform would be throwaway.
Well the low output could be because we have only accidentally stumbled across whatever it happening. Once it is researched and fine-tuned and a better drive is built, it will likely be far more effective and efficient.
Science is full of examples where the first way of doing a process was terribly inefficient or plain wrong-headed but better and faster and smarter ways came along later. So I am not knocking their puny output power just yet. That it works at all is great. It means there is more to do.
It doesn't necessarily violate conservation of motion if the action and reaction are taking place in a way we didn't know about and therefore don't measure.
For example, if the EM drive is pushing against a force we don't perceive, then it IS having an action that conserves motion. We just aren't measuring it correctly so it merely appears to be happening by magic.
A real world example of this would be a linear motor. One of the fancy roller coasters will do for an example. The linear motors on the track push the coaster. We can see the motor and the ride carriage and measure the force and so on and it's clear electric power is making the magnetic field that does the pushing.
With an EM drive, we see movement (or at least thrust) happening but we don't yet see the other half of it, i.e. what it is reacting against. It is like the roller coaster is operating in fog and you can't see the trackway. The fog is our lack of understanding of the physics behind it. Not because we are dumb but because this is going to be some weird aspect of physics we never suspected before and apparently can't easily perceive with our normal senses, so literally nobody has ever even tried to come up with how it works.
In this way, it does not break rules. It's making new ones.
My suspicion is that the EM drive is reacting against some sort of background EM field that we don't yet know about.
You hit closer than you might have realized: in the 80s, foreign state broadcasters had a practice of leasing time on shortwave relay stations located in the US and Canada with the express purpose of reaching North American listeners.
Some shortwave churches bought and operated stations under religious licenses but used leased time to actually make some money off it. There were also businesses expressly operated as relay stations just like the one in Virginia. Okeechobee Florida was a popular site for this, and at least one of the relays is apparently still operating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Prior to being operated as WRMI, it was named WYFR and broadcast relays from Taiwan and others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Note before people ask: Yes it has US call letters but it broadcasts on shortwave, not AM, FM or TV bands.
As for the Chinese population issue, the situation is not what it seems. Due to the one-child policies, China has a severe problem with lack of children, rapidly aging adults, and a big problem with lack of women for men to marry. It is estimated as many as 34 million Chinese men will not be able to find wives, and the women are like women in many other countries (US, Japan, Israel, UK, Germany, etc) where "staying home and having kids" is not necessarily appealing or financially feasible. So for the couples who do marry, they are not having enough children to maintain the population. You need 2.1 kids per family to maintain populations. China is having 1.something. Taken all together along with the "graying" of the existing generation as they age, and the population of China may halve in the next 50-100 years.
This is a serious problem.
There is a long history on the shortwave radio bands where stations setup for religious or cultural purposes ended up leasing air time to foreign broadcasters. Back in the late 1980s. there were several relay stations (i.e. paid stations just like this one in D.C.) in Canada and a large one in Okeechobee Florida. Among others, Radio Taiwan aka The Voice of "Free" China", Radio Japan, DW from Germany, the BBC World Service and others used them to target North American listeners.
Nobody raised an eyebrow.
The problem with NASA and indeed all human efforts at anything is that we can't see beyond 4-year cycles in the West and somewhat longer cycles in China, negated by the lack of most of the space program needed to make the plans happen, if they had the plans.
Getting to other planets takes a lot of money over a long time scale. Apparently Mars will take a couple decades or so. And we may not make it.
Getting to anything farther away, or long development projects like the warp drive and so on, threaten to take tens of decades. It may take a century or two to get to a warp drive. Humanity has no history of supporting goals like that. We don't even have words to describe making that kind of commitment that transcends the time lines of nations. But even for a Mars missing taking decades, we cannot do it. We lack the ability to support anything like that.
Inheriting the stars will take huge amounts of time and effort. We won't be able to do it. I welcome humanity proving me wrong.
So what Bolden is really saying is that they have nothing to fall back on if the Mars thing doesn't work out. If the rocket fails. If there's some biological problem that comes up. or even if some other mission of importance comes up. It's Mars and only Mars and if it's not Mars it's nothing. Goddamn NASA how fucking stupid are you rocket scientists anyway? WTF?
This is like my four-year-old cousin who throws a fit if he can't have the exact candy bar he wants. He proclaims he'd rather starve than eat something else. Fine. Do it, I say, much to the horror of his mom and dad.
If my toddler cousin starves to death because he could not have candy, and NASA ceases to exist without Mars, then I say neither of them deserve to exist. Let them both die. But I really think my cousin will eventually eat something else and I feel NASA will find something else to do.
Sony is a massively complex company, such that they have sued themselves over DMCA issues before. Literally one division has no idea what another is doing.
Samsung's rise in the 80s and 90s was fueled in part by a mission to destroy Sony. That was their driving goal, and they have in fact succeeded with that mission and then some. Part because Samsung is that good, but also because Sony literally invents ways to shoot themselves in the head.
Not much. It cannot go critical. If it leaks and dumps all the stuff on the ground, oh well, Scrap it up and haul it away. It won't poison water tables or irradiate anyone.
Worst it could is burn someone unlucky enough to get too close to it when hot.