This is impossible to disprove because any environment where a tree lives and subsequently falls is populated by various forms of live with a nervous system. Probably no tree has ever fallen in an environment devoid of insects, invertebrates, birds, tree rodents, etc.
However, a tree falling would create a sound shockwave which would affect any nearby object regardless of whether it had ears or a nervous system or was alive or not. It is a simple matter of physics. Therefore a tree falling would make the same sound regardless of whether any particular thing heard it.
While I do feel there is growing evidence to support the simulation theory, I do take issue with this idea that the sim needs to save CPU cycles.
The universe, simulated or not, is a huge and very complex place. The CPU power and programming code needed to create and run this is probably beyond our comprehension and may always remain that way. But clearly whatever would be capable of doing this would be extremely powerful. A CPU with effectively infinite processing power.
Therefore, I find it silly to suggest that this CPU would need to conserve processing cycles. Something powerful enough to sim the entire universe would, but nature of the task, have enough capacity to do the universe and then some, having plenty of capacity left over. In other words, it should be capable of fully simulating every atom at all times. If it can do so, it will. Trying to decide which atoms to pause would probably consume more CPU than if the atoms were left alone to run the sim normally.
Kari was hired to work as a sculptor and model maker and artist in the M5 business and was already working there. She happened to be around when the TV series pilot episodes needed help, but she was an M5 employee and wasn't officially added to the show cast until later.
People who work for M5 do not automatically work for the show. They have always been separate.
It's currently on Saturdays on the Science channel. It IS a bad sign when a show begins changing the day it airs week to week, and worse when it hops from the main Discovery channel where it got good ratings and now airs on Science which is usually one of the least-watched channels.
Discovery has buried the show to kill it. Everyone involved knew it.
Beyond Productions has kicked this show around for years. Too expensive to make, too many people, too many everything. And Discovery whined and complained and cheapened it to death all the while getting eternal reruns out of older episodes.
Then they kept moving the show from one day to another and then from network to network to network so nobody knows where the new episodes are even running. It's Saturday nights, you know, the science night of the week. Well ok, Friday nights are worse. And it's on Science channel which is watched by approximately one dog with a TV set in Ohio, and only because he ate the remote and can't change the channel.
The second team got axed last year and went back to making money the normal way. And no shocker, the main cast will do the same now. Actually, they have all been doing "other jobs" all the while anyway because the show never exactly paid a lot and it only filmed a few weeks a year anyway. They HAD to have real jobs.
Just got laid off from a place like that. For the last several years, the mantra had been "We want to be just like Zynga!" nevermind how THAT company was rotting from the inside out. And then management decided to adopt Google's OKR process. A key problem is that management talked big about doing these things but rarely ever actually does them, so you end up with some teams and groups doing OKRs and others who have none, for years. So when the annual reviews come around, you cannot say you have met any OKRs because you and your manager and their manager and in fact the entire department never had any OKRs.
But of course the REAL secret of the OKRs we did was to set ridiculous goals you could never meet. For example, the team I was in was kind of a helpdesk/front line firefighter team, doing things like on-call support at 3:00AM. Client support stuff. We eventually got an OKR of "increase sales turnovers by 20%" but of course we weren't IN sales and had no training or tools to do that, and if we'd actually tried, the real sales side would have had a fit. So nobody ever met that OKR. It was impossible and stupid. By attaching OKRs like that to most of the teams and pinning bonuses on results, what they did was rig it so very few people qualified for bonuses any more. Now they SAID "we're setting sky-high impossible OKRs so you will reach for the sky and achieve the amazing" but they meant "we've set a goal not even God can meet, good luck to you hahahaha!"
At the same time, they began hiring H1Bs, kids fresh from college, and co-ops and interns, all working for half the wages and sometimes actually buying the "We're just like Google!" bullshit.
Anyway, they'd been gunning for me for a while. Had a decent review and scored well. They went back and changed it and decided no, I needed to be on a PIP. Because somebody had to be. Gave me stupid goals and priorities and then while I was on approved vacation, my manager told HR I'd quit.
Raised a stink about that but they laid me off two weeks later anyway. More than a decade at that place. Absolutely thrilled to be gone.
In the hacking/spy drama movie Sneakers, there is a scene where Robert Redford's character is confronted with an office door protected by a keypad lock, which cannot be picked. But he needs to get into that office. The lock looks impenetrable. Surely the mission is about to fail.
So he asks his support team for help with the lock. What they tell him is never shown on screen, only Redford mumbling and agreeing to try it.
He takes a couple steps back and KICKS IN THE DOOR. The lock was completely irrelevant, in the end.
The lesson from that scene is extremely powerful when you understand the same lesson applies to ANY problem. When you are faced with a heavily secured door, or an encryption standard, the attack vector is often going to be something other than going through the face of the door or the front end of the encryption. What you'd do is KICK IN THE DOOR. And the TLAs know this and do exactly that. Their people have always kicked in doors while normal people look at the locks and shrug and walk away.
As a former investor in Playboy Enterprises, I got to see first-hand that the basic problem with the company is Hef. No matter what is on the masthead of the magazine, NO decision of any import happens without Hef signing off on it.
As the creator of the brand, certainly he is due some consideration.
But I have to be extremely blunt and say that Hef is simply out of touch with what readers wanted, and it's been this way for years. Hef has yes or no approval on every centerfold, so if it seems like a lot of them look similar, that's because Hef is choosing them. Even as editors stand there and offer up candidates, Hef has final say. Note that he has almost nothing else to do with the magazine, has no interest in financial stats and figures or reader feedback. If Hef wants a skinny blonde (and that is usually his type), Hef gets it. Month after month.
Taking this even farther, most years the magazine and website had reader voting to choose the Playmate of the Year. They make somewhat of a big deal about the voting process, at least online. None of it means anything. Hef has final say. He alone picks the PMOY. The editors can suggest their own ideas and they can present the public's vote. But Hef makes the call. End of story. It tends to be whatever playmate he is interested in that day. There is a lot more I can say about what keeps him interested, that but it's third party stuff. Some of the ladies have written their own books about it.
Hef meddles in other ways as well and it had been driving the editorial staff up a wall as they watch the magazine dying and the brand struggling and they cannot do anything about it.
The TV channel, oh god I don't even want to talk about it. It's a bunch of awful game shows.
Taking the company private a few years ago cutoff what little outside input there was. I got a nifty little Bunny logo pin as my thanks for being an investor and my shares were deemed worthless. I don't mind the loss of the money. I invested because I believed the company had huge growth potential if they simply monetized their unique brand. They've done some of it with fragrances and other novelties. They NEED to monetize the Playboy Bunny image, i.e. the Bunny girl. That is iconic and basically Playboy's alone the world over, except Japan where it's been embraced outside of Playboy. So there is an opportunity to take the brand and the bunny girl likeness global, as a sexy but safe image which Playboy can promote as uniquely theirs. Nah. Hef didn't want to hear it. They've done very little with it except for occasional publicity events, like putting a bunch of bunnies on a bus and driving them around Hollywood. Then they don't even promote it. How is THAT supposed to build the brand? These ladies look amazing and the costumes really show off what makes the brand unique. They need to be everywhere.
Fine. It's his company. I know.
I used to have a lifetime subscription to the magazine but I called them a couple years ago and had it stopped. It was getting my blood pressure up seeing some of the things that happened after the company went private.
The new editor, whom I do not know, has his work cut out for him. He got Hef to agree to this change. It is a good sign that he may in fact be allowed to reinvent things. I wish him well.
Given how Lockheed Martin seems completely incapable of bringing in ANY project on time or budget it is fitting that they not be awarded any new contracts -yes I can dream anyway, especially with NASA where they simply don't have the option of asking for billions of extra dollars to cover bullshit overruns like the F-35 has seen.
Nor can NASA afford to overspend on a project like the F-35 that cannot actually DO what it was designed to do.
This company would be a criminal enterprise under normal circumstances in any other industry. But they get a pass for being so vital. And well connected.
Aside from some radar beams and a very few directed communication attempts, no radio signals generated by humans would be detectable at even the closest star system. Regular broadcast TV and radio and most other things are simply too weak.
Those signals will probably not make it out of the solar system. A passing ship or probe might hear us. But probably not.
Some very high-power military radars might be detectable at a distance but those signals aren't meant to communicate. They would appear artificial, though, and might be noticed. Arecibo has transmitted a few times. Those signals might make it and might be interpreted as communication.
But the old myth about aliens watching our old TV shows or listening to radio dramas is just not going to happen.
If that machine did exist, it would ultimately amount to only a temporary climate change. Unless it also fixed the magnetic field, all the released air and water would simply get eroded by the solar winds and Mars would end up red and dry again.
It's this exactly. Without a magnetic field, the solar wind dried out the planet and blew away a large amount of the already thin atmosphere. The low gravity didn't help any. The planet had a lot going against it from the beginning and was probably never a good place for complex life to appear. Barring some sort of cosmic change like how we got our moon and added a huge amount of iron and mass, Mars was always doomed to end up freeze-dried.
We currently have no way of fixing this problem so all the grand plans to terraform Mars won't work, unless they also restart the magnetic field, which we don't know how to do. It might take slamming a proto-planet into Mars to get things going again, which we can't currently do, and which would also make the planet essentially unusable for hundreds of millions of years, at least.
It also risks all kinds of other issues like disturbing other planets and introducing a lot of chaos into the solar system. But luckily we don't know how to knock planets into each other. And I suppose if we DID and we had that sort of tech, we would not need to bother with Mars. We'd just find a suitable planet elsewhere, which is probably easier.
My Samsung Galaxy S3 was an awesome phone, up until the moment it died without warning. It was simply sitting on my desk charging one moment, and then completely gone the next. Battery swap didn't fix it.
I had insurance on the phone and ended up using it, but the phone was dead and there was no way to wipe it. I had to send back the dead one as-is in exchange for a replacement. What happened to that broken phone, I have no idea, but it would not surprise me if a pile of broken phones ended up being repaired and all bets are off.
That's only because somebody decided an arbitrary limit defined who was an astronaut.
It's like somebody deciding that going to the state next door makes you a world traveller. You get the label because they said so, not because you actually are a world traveller.
The concept of what space IS anyway has been cheapened by considering low Earth orbit is outer space anyway. It's not. The ISS is as close to me as the next major city. It's not even far away.
80KM isn't space. Low Earth orbit should not be space. Even going to the moon, which is as far as we have ever gone, should be considered near space since it is still gravitationally bound to the Earth. Outer space should be defined, in my opinion, as at least beyond the moon, and I really wonder if the term should not be reserved for things literally outside the Sol system entirely.
I know, I'm in the minority here. But the real point here is that whatever name we humans choose to put on something or what category we choose to make it, does not in fact change what it actually IS.
Typical story. Some developer (as in land, not software) comes to a pudunk rural town and talks up a big plan to make something new and big and famous, and have money for new schools ("Hey that old 1950's school... wouldn't you like a nice new one? With me you can have it and more!") but he wants something from the locals, and well, it's fine if they don't want to be a part of it, he'll understand and talk to another town that is interested. And you, the developer says, the first ones to jump on this will make a fortune! Think about it!
And the locals hem and haw and debate about finally getting a shot at being something and they stretch real hard and throw in their pennies and agree to it.
Great, the developer says! We'll break ground immediately. And then something happens or it takes too long but oh well, to the developer it's merely one of many deals and he moves on. The town cannot move on. It chased a load of promises and dreams and pays dearly for it.
Branson doesn't have a great track record with successful projects. People hear about the airlines and things but not so much about the abject flops. But he's so good at promoting his brand, which is himself, nobody notices. He and Donald Trump are very similar. They both talk big and quietly bury their failures.
So one program to find giant space rocks has ended. There are others.
But in any case, we don't have the ability at the moment to DO anything about it even if we found a rock heading for us. We'd probably need several decades to get our act together, and we have a terrible track record about responding to things like aging sewers where we can pay somebody minimum wage to fix it, versus tens of years of heavy spending (way beyond 450 mill) to come up with a way to stop the asteroid. I don't think humanity is capable of working together in the way it would need to happen.
May never happen in the US. Before the EMV cards rolled out, the main use of smartcards in the US was for satellite TV access cards.
In an effort to stop satellite TV piracy, the Feds made a Big Deal out of making life hell for anyone who bought smartcard readers, which again, would be the same as an EMV card reader. The Feds affirmed that nobody could possibly have ANY legitimate use for smartcard readers so anyone who had them was automatically a satellite TV pirate. People were prosecuted for this, in some cases because they had in fact made things like smartcard-controlled access for their work building or some other actual legitimate purpose. The Feds would hear none of this and simply arrested people left and right.
As a result, I for one will have nothing to do with a smartcard reader. Not in my possession, no way.
This has happened to me too but the problem is when the charge is declined at checkout and you then use a second card to pay.
Then the phone rings asking if the charge was legit. Well, what do you say? If you say yes, MAYBE they will process the charge that you already paid for another way, but if you say no, maybe they block your card from then on or flag the merchant who did nothing wrong.
What do you do? It's a terribly flawed way to determine if fraud has happened.
Used to have an HSBC US Mastercard. They recently sold that card business to CapitalOne. They are the card issuers now and have converted everyone to CapitalOne cards. Yay, said I.
If you travel in Canada a lot, no doubt you know Mastercard is by far the predominant card in Canada. Everyone and then some accept it. Fewer accept Visa, and far fewer things like Amex or Discover.
Next time going to Canada, just take a Mastercard.
Same exact thing happens with my credit union, once at a car repair place and again when I was buying an expensive electronic device at a store. I don't mind, because the same CU verification service also called me when someone had in fact stolen my debit card (the only time this has ever happened to me in decades, knock on wood) and used it to buy gift cards at a department store I never shop at in a part of the area I never visit.
Their detection algorithms saw it, called me, and when I told the computer NOT MY CHARGES, the card was locked down instantly after only about $100 had been spent. And I got that money back after filing an affidavit. I made a point to write a letter to the CU thanking the anonymous programmers who coded the fraud detection program, because it damn well works brilliantly.
It works SO well in fact the replacement debit card they issued would not allow me to reuse my old pin, even on a whole new card number. Nobody at the CU was aware reuse wasn't allowed so I got to teach them, in a way, just how well their own fraud detection was working. Very happy customer.
Contrast that with American Express, who didn't like the looks of a charge I made at a printing company buying some print for work, to be reimbursed later. Amex called me, and when I did verify the charge was legitimate, they said fine but instantly crushed my credit limit and caused the card to be maxed out, where it had plenty of credit before. This Amex card had a fixed credit limit as opposed to the traditional cards that get paid off every month. I was traveling at the time and lost the use of that card which caused a huge mess of trying to pay for things like dinner, hotel, etc. Amex also crushed the credit limit on another card I had with them.
They were unyielding and refused to reverse the changes even after I told them there was no fraud taking place. Total assholes.
Slashdot Mirror
It hasn't been done exactly like this before in the US. That's all.
This is impossible to disprove because any environment where a tree lives and subsequently falls is populated by various forms of live with a nervous system. Probably no tree has ever fallen in an environment devoid of insects, invertebrates, birds, tree rodents, etc.
However, a tree falling would create a sound shockwave which would affect any nearby object regardless of whether it had ears or a nervous system or was alive or not. It is a simple matter of physics. Therefore a tree falling would make the same sound regardless of whether any particular thing heard it.
While I do feel there is growing evidence to support the simulation theory, I do take issue with this idea that the sim needs to save CPU cycles.
The universe, simulated or not, is a huge and very complex place. The CPU power and programming code needed to create and run this is probably beyond our comprehension and may always remain that way. But clearly whatever would be capable of doing this would be extremely powerful. A CPU with effectively infinite processing power.
Therefore, I find it silly to suggest that this CPU would need to conserve processing cycles. Something powerful enough to sim the entire universe would, but nature of the task, have enough capacity to do the universe and then some, having plenty of capacity left over. In other words, it should be capable of fully simulating every atom at all times. If it can do so, it will. Trying to decide which atoms to pause would probably consume more CPU than if the atoms were left alone to run the sim normally.
Kari was hired to work as a sculptor and model maker and artist in the M5 business and was already working there. She happened to be around when the TV series pilot episodes needed help, but she was an M5 employee and wasn't officially added to the show cast until later.
People who work for M5 do not automatically work for the show. They have always been separate.
It's currently on Saturdays on the Science channel. It IS a bad sign when a show begins changing the day it airs week to week, and worse when it hops from the main Discovery channel where it got good ratings and now airs on Science which is usually one of the least-watched channels.
Discovery has buried the show to kill it. Everyone involved knew it.
But it was ruined by overdubbing the sound of the explosion in every single playback.
Beyond Productions has kicked this show around for years. Too expensive to make, too many people, too many everything. And Discovery whined and complained and cheapened it to death all the while getting eternal reruns out of older episodes.
Then they kept moving the show from one day to another and then from network to network to network so nobody knows where the new episodes are even running. It's Saturday nights, you know, the science night of the week. Well ok, Friday nights are worse. And it's on Science channel which is watched by approximately one dog with a TV set in Ohio, and only because he ate the remote and can't change the channel.
The second team got axed last year and went back to making money the normal way. And no shocker, the main cast will do the same now. Actually, they have all been doing "other jobs" all the while anyway because the show never exactly paid a lot and it only filmed a few weeks a year anyway. They HAD to have real jobs.
Extended Super Basic Cable shows don't pay well.
Something is worth what someone is willing to pay.
Just got laid off from a place like that. For the last several years, the mantra had been "We want to be just like Zynga!" nevermind how THAT company was rotting from the inside out. And then management decided to adopt Google's OKR process. A key problem is that management talked big about doing these things but rarely ever actually does them, so you end up with some teams and groups doing OKRs and others who have none, for years. So when the annual reviews come around, you cannot say you have met any OKRs because you and your manager and their manager and in fact the entire department never had any OKRs.
But of course the REAL secret of the OKRs we did was to set ridiculous goals you could never meet. For example, the team I was in was kind of a helpdesk/front line firefighter team, doing things like on-call support at 3:00AM. Client support stuff. We eventually got an OKR of "increase sales turnovers by 20%" but of course we weren't IN sales and had no training or tools to do that, and if we'd actually tried, the real sales side would have had a fit. So nobody ever met that OKR. It was impossible and stupid. By attaching OKRs like that to most of the teams and pinning bonuses on results, what they did was rig it so very few people qualified for bonuses any more. Now they SAID "we're setting sky-high impossible OKRs so you will reach for the sky and achieve the amazing" but they meant "we've set a goal not even God can meet, good luck to you hahahaha!"
At the same time, they began hiring H1Bs, kids fresh from college, and co-ops and interns, all working for half the wages and sometimes actually buying the "We're just like Google!" bullshit.
Anyway, they'd been gunning for me for a while. Had a decent review and scored well. They went back and changed it and decided no, I needed to be on a PIP. Because somebody had to be. Gave me stupid goals and priorities and then while I was on approved vacation, my manager told HR I'd quit.
Raised a stink about that but they laid me off two weeks later anyway. More than a decade at that place. Absolutely thrilled to be gone.
In the hacking/spy drama movie Sneakers, there is a scene where Robert Redford's character is confronted with an office door protected by a keypad lock, which cannot be picked. But he needs to get into that office. The lock looks impenetrable. Surely the mission is about to fail.
So he asks his support team for help with the lock. What they tell him is never shown on screen, only Redford mumbling and agreeing to try it.
He takes a couple steps back and KICKS IN THE DOOR. The lock was completely irrelevant, in the end.
The lesson from that scene is extremely powerful when you understand the same lesson applies to ANY problem. When you are faced with a heavily secured door, or an encryption standard, the attack vector is often going to be something other than going through the face of the door or the front end of the encryption. What you'd do is KICK IN THE DOOR. And the TLAs know this and do exactly that. Their people have always kicked in doors while normal people look at the locks and shrug and walk away.
As a former investor in Playboy Enterprises, I got to see first-hand that the basic problem with the company is Hef. No matter what is on the masthead of the magazine, NO decision of any import happens without Hef signing off on it.
As the creator of the brand, certainly he is due some consideration.
But I have to be extremely blunt and say that Hef is simply out of touch with what readers wanted, and it's been this way for years. Hef has yes or no approval on every centerfold, so if it seems like a lot of them look similar, that's because Hef is choosing them. Even as editors stand there and offer up candidates, Hef has final say. Note that he has almost nothing else to do with the magazine, has no interest in financial stats and figures or reader feedback. If Hef wants a skinny blonde (and that is usually his type), Hef gets it. Month after month.
Taking this even farther, most years the magazine and website had reader voting to choose the Playmate of the Year. They make somewhat of a big deal about the voting process, at least online. None of it means anything. Hef has final say. He alone picks the PMOY. The editors can suggest their own ideas and they can present the public's vote. But Hef makes the call. End of story. It tends to be whatever playmate he is interested in that day. There is a lot more I can say about what keeps him interested, that but it's third party stuff. Some of the ladies have written their own books about it.
Hef meddles in other ways as well and it had been driving the editorial staff up a wall as they watch the magazine dying and the brand struggling and they cannot do anything about it.
The TV channel, oh god I don't even want to talk about it. It's a bunch of awful game shows.
Taking the company private a few years ago cutoff what little outside input there was. I got a nifty little Bunny logo pin as my thanks for being an investor and my shares were deemed worthless. I don't mind the loss of the money. I invested because I believed the company had huge growth potential if they simply monetized their unique brand. They've done some of it with fragrances and other novelties. They NEED to monetize the Playboy Bunny image, i.e. the Bunny girl. That is iconic and basically Playboy's alone the world over, except Japan where it's been embraced outside of Playboy. So there is an opportunity to take the brand and the bunny girl likeness global, as a sexy but safe image which Playboy can promote as uniquely theirs. Nah. Hef didn't want to hear it. They've done very little with it except for occasional publicity events, like putting a bunch of bunnies on a bus and driving them around Hollywood. Then they don't even promote it. How is THAT supposed to build the brand? These ladies look amazing and the costumes really show off what makes the brand unique. They need to be everywhere.
Fine. It's his company. I know.
I used to have a lifetime subscription to the magazine but I called them a couple years ago and had it stopped. It was getting my blood pressure up seeing some of the things that happened after the company went private.
The new editor, whom I do not know, has his work cut out for him. He got Hef to agree to this change. It is a good sign that he may in fact be allowed to reinvent things. I wish him well.
Given how Lockheed Martin seems completely incapable of bringing in ANY project on time or budget it is fitting that they not be awarded any new contracts -yes I can dream anyway, especially with NASA where they simply don't have the option of asking for billions of extra dollars to cover bullshit overruns like the F-35 has seen.
Nor can NASA afford to overspend on a project like the F-35 that cannot actually DO what it was designed to do.
This company would be a criminal enterprise under normal circumstances in any other industry. But they get a pass for being so vital. And well connected.
Aside from some radar beams and a very few directed communication attempts, no radio signals generated by humans would be detectable at even the closest star system. Regular broadcast TV and radio and most other things are simply too weak.
Those signals will probably not make it out of the solar system. A passing ship or probe might hear us. But probably not.
Some very high-power military radars might be detectable at a distance but those signals aren't meant to communicate. They would appear artificial, though, and might be noticed. Arecibo has transmitted a few times. Those signals might make it and might be interpreted as communication.
But the old myth about aliens watching our old TV shows or listening to radio dramas is just not going to happen.
If that machine did exist, it would ultimately amount to only a temporary climate change. Unless it also fixed the magnetic field, all the released air and water would simply get eroded by the solar winds and Mars would end up red and dry again.
It's this exactly. Without a magnetic field, the solar wind dried out the planet and blew away a large amount of the already thin atmosphere. The low gravity didn't help any. The planet had a lot going against it from the beginning and was probably never a good place for complex life to appear. Barring some sort of cosmic change like how we got our moon and added a huge amount of iron and mass, Mars was always doomed to end up freeze-dried.
We currently have no way of fixing this problem so all the grand plans to terraform Mars won't work, unless they also restart the magnetic field, which we don't know how to do. It might take slamming a proto-planet into Mars to get things going again, which we can't currently do, and which would also make the planet essentially unusable for hundreds of millions of years, at least.
It also risks all kinds of other issues like disturbing other planets and introducing a lot of chaos into the solar system. But luckily we don't know how to knock planets into each other. And I suppose if we DID and we had that sort of tech, we would not need to bother with Mars. We'd just find a suitable planet elsewhere, which is probably easier.
We have a long time to figure out how to get along well enough to emigrate to another world.
And if we haven't figured it out by then, we probably don't deserve to have another shot at a world.
My Samsung Galaxy S3 was an awesome phone, up until the moment it died without warning. It was simply sitting on my desk charging one moment, and then completely gone the next. Battery swap didn't fix it.
I had insurance on the phone and ended up using it, but the phone was dead and there was no way to wipe it. I had to send back the dead one as-is in exchange for a replacement. What happened to that broken phone, I have no idea, but it would not surprise me if a pile of broken phones ended up being repaired and all bets are off.
Well, According to http://www.thespacereview.com/... to only need to make it to 80K to get your astronaut wings.
That's only because somebody decided an arbitrary limit defined who was an astronaut.
It's like somebody deciding that going to the state next door makes you a world traveller. You get the label because they said so, not because you actually are a world traveller.
The concept of what space IS anyway has been cheapened by considering low Earth orbit is outer space anyway. It's not. The ISS is as close to me as the next major city. It's not even far away.
80KM isn't space. Low Earth orbit should not be space. Even going to the moon, which is as far as we have ever gone, should be considered near space since it is still gravitationally bound to the Earth. Outer space should be defined, in my opinion, as at least beyond the moon, and I really wonder if the term should not be reserved for things literally outside the Sol system entirely.
I know, I'm in the minority here. But the real point here is that whatever name we humans choose to put on something or what category we choose to make it, does not in fact change what it actually IS.
Typical story. Some developer (as in land, not software) comes to a pudunk rural town and talks up a big plan to make something new and big and famous, and have money for new schools ("Hey that old 1950's school... wouldn't you like a nice new one? With me you can have it and more!") but he wants something from the locals, and well, it's fine if they don't want to be a part of it, he'll understand and talk to another town that is interested. And you, the developer says, the first ones to jump on this will make a fortune! Think about it!
And the locals hem and haw and debate about finally getting a shot at being something and they stretch real hard and throw in their pennies and agree to it.
Great, the developer says! We'll break ground immediately. And then something happens or it takes too long but oh well, to the developer it's merely one of many deals and he moves on. The town cannot move on. It chased a load of promises and dreams and pays dearly for it.
Branson doesn't have a great track record with successful projects. People hear about the airlines and things but not so much about the abject flops. But he's so good at promoting his brand, which is himself, nobody notices. He and Donald Trump are very similar. They both talk big and quietly bury their failures.
So one program to find giant space rocks has ended. There are others.
But in any case, we don't have the ability at the moment to DO anything about it even if we found a rock heading for us. We'd probably need several decades to get our act together, and we have a terrible track record about responding to things like aging sewers where we can pay somebody minimum wage to fix it, versus tens of years of heavy spending (way beyond 450 mill) to come up with a way to stop the asteroid. I don't think humanity is capable of working together in the way it would need to happen.
May never happen in the US. Before the EMV cards rolled out, the main use of smartcards in the US was for satellite TV access cards.
In an effort to stop satellite TV piracy, the Feds made a Big Deal out of making life hell for anyone who bought smartcard readers, which again, would be the same as an EMV card reader. The Feds affirmed that nobody could possibly have ANY legitimate use for smartcard readers so anyone who had them was automatically a satellite TV pirate. People were prosecuted for this, in some cases because they had in fact made things like smartcard-controlled access for their work building or some other actual legitimate purpose. The Feds would hear none of this and simply arrested people left and right.
As a result, I for one will have nothing to do with a smartcard reader. Not in my possession, no way.
This has happened to me too but the problem is when the charge is declined at checkout and you then use a second card to pay.
Then the phone rings asking if the charge was legit. Well, what do you say? If you say yes, MAYBE they will process the charge that you already paid for another way, but if you say no, maybe they block your card from then on or flag the merchant who did nothing wrong.
What do you do? It's a terribly flawed way to determine if fraud has happened.
Used to have an HSBC US Mastercard. They recently sold that card business to CapitalOne. They are the card issuers now and have converted everyone to CapitalOne cards. Yay, said I.
If you travel in Canada a lot, no doubt you know Mastercard is by far the predominant card in Canada. Everyone and then some accept it. Fewer accept Visa, and far fewer things like Amex or Discover.
Next time going to Canada, just take a Mastercard.
Same exact thing happens with my credit union, once at a car repair place and again when I was buying an expensive electronic device at a store. I don't mind, because the same CU verification service also called me when someone had in fact stolen my debit card (the only time this has ever happened to me in decades, knock on wood) and used it to buy gift cards at a department store I never shop at in a part of the area I never visit.
Their detection algorithms saw it, called me, and when I told the computer NOT MY CHARGES, the card was locked down instantly after only about $100 had been spent. And I got that money back after filing an affidavit. I made a point to write a letter to the CU thanking the anonymous programmers who coded the fraud detection program, because it damn well works brilliantly.
It works SO well in fact the replacement debit card they issued would not allow me to reuse my old pin, even on a whole new card number. Nobody at the CU was aware reuse wasn't allowed so I got to teach them, in a way, just how well their own fraud detection was working. Very happy customer.
Contrast that with American Express, who didn't like the looks of a charge I made at a printing company buying some print for work, to be reimbursed later. Amex called me, and when I did verify the charge was legitimate, they said fine but instantly crushed my credit limit and caused the card to be maxed out, where it had plenty of credit before. This Amex card had a fixed credit limit as opposed to the traditional cards that get paid off every month. I was traveling at the time and lost the use of that card which caused a huge mess of trying to pay for things like dinner, hotel, etc. Amex also crushed the credit limit on another card I had with them.
They were unyielding and refused to reverse the changes even after I told them there was no fraud taking place. Total assholes.