I'm sorry but Venus is not tidally locked to the Earth..
You wouldn't think so, but, strangely, Venus very nearly is rotationally locked to the Earth: It presents the same face to the Earth on each closest approach.
(583.92-day interval between conjunctions to Earth ("synodic period") = 5.001444 Venusian solar days.
But this can't be a tidal effect, however: the tidal effects are way too low to have any possible effect on Venus' rotation. Best guess is that it is simply a coincidence.
No, it is idiotic, but not as idiotic. "0,0" will let pretty much every user know that the data is missing.
Here's a metaphor. If you are weighing a letter to see how much postage is needed, and for some reason the scale is malfunctioning, if it reads "0 grams", you probably can guess it's not making a measurement. If it has a little microprocessor inside that reads garbage from the sensor, and it's programmed so that if the sensor reading makes no sense, the scale should report out a plausible average value for weights-- that's bad.
Absurd data may not be good-- but plausible wrong data is much worse.
It would make more sense if they returned latitude 0, longitude 0.
Why? That's a location off the coast of Africa in the Gulf of Guinea, which means that it doesn't even have the benefit of being useful for identifying the correct country, which is what the software is currently configured to do.
You are making a fundamental error if you think that telling a user that an IP address is at a specific street address in Kansas when all that is known is that it is registered somewhere in the United States is a "benefit" and it is in any way "useful."
Telling them that it's in the Atlantic Ocean at 00 is a far better indication of "I don't know" than giving a wrong address that actually exists.
"Somewhere in the United States" is not a latitude and longitude location, and should not be reported as such. The map on a typical IP address geolocation site does have a circle around it... but there is no statement that the circle indicates a radius of uncertainty (until you said that, I had no idea). And, in any case, if the uncertainty is 2000 miles in radius, the circle won't show up on the map, because it's off the edge. It would make more sense if they returned latitude 0, longitude 0. Anybody looking at that would probably understand that "zero" indicates something other than "it is located here", but anybody who actually DOES try to go there will go to a undistinguished spot in the Atlantic Ocean.
That was 129 votes, a bit more than "ones and two's".
So, yes-- a gubernatorial election twelve years ago was decided by a little more than 100 votes, and it's "among the closest political races in United States election history." I think that pretty much demonstrates my case: even here, voting fraud at the ones and two at a time level isn't what we need to worry about; it takes voting fraud on a much larger scale to swing an election. And you can count on most elections not being that close.
Here we go again, with the "it isn't secure, and we're gonna hack the election" conspiracy. Funny how our entire banking system is online and secure enough, yet voting isn't.
But it isn't. Bank fraud happens all the time. When it happens, you show the paper trail, and the bank verifies it and gives you your money back. They accept the loss as the cost of doing business. How do you get your vote back?
“But wait,” you're entitled to object, “banks, online stores and stock markets operate electronically. Why should something as simple as recording votes be so much more difficult?”
Voting is much trickier for a couple of reasons. Whereas monetary transactions are based on a firm understanding of your identity, a vote is supposed to be anonymous. In case of bank trouble, investigators can trace a credit-card purchase back to you, but how can they track an anonymous vote? And credit-card and bank fraud goes on constantly. It's just a cost of doing business. But the outcome of an election is too important; we can't simply ignore a bunch of lost or altered votes.
I'm sure every single mailed in vote is actually cast by the intended person and not by one person in the household "helping" or by churches rounding up the elderly to "help", or nursing home "helpers", etc.
That would be one-ballot-at-a-time election stealing. I'm not terribly worried about that; it would take such a massive program to alter 50,000 votes that way that this wouldn't be an effective way to steal an election. It's changing the entire count that I worry about.
Few elections are ever decided by ones and twos of votes. It's wholesale changing that is the problem.
You can take a screen shot or a picture of the screen that shows your vote.
But, what do you do with the picture? I suppose if you're being paid for your vote, that might be a way to verify that you should get paid, but it won't tell you whether your vote is correctly added to the tally.
Still, nothing beats good old paper ballots. Too bad not enough people are demanding it.
Paper ballot with optical scanner seems a good compromise: you can count electronically, but if there's a problem, you have a paper trail.
That's not what TFA says. What the article says is that customers on the unlimited plan who use more than 100 GB-- and only ones using more than 100 GB-- must move to a different plan by August 31 or their accounts will be canceled.
If your account gets canceled if you use more than a 100 GB, that means "unlimited" data is not unlimited.
And your point is? Venera 7, the first Soviet probe to land on Venus, was launched in August 1970-- that's a year after Apollo 11 landed on the moon.
During the Apollo years, the main focus of the Soviet program was on their human space program. Yes, they did some robotic planetary mission, withs (up until Venera 7) rather indifferent success. But their robotic program was much smaller and much less well funded than their human program, contrary to what anonymous coward had posted.
Over the same time period, we were flying the Mariner missions and just beginning the Pioneer series, both of which had some spectacular successes, so I'm really not sure what your point is.
Why would you use a heavier-than-air craft to essentially hover? Wouldn't an aerostat accomplish the same goal at a much lower cost, and lower risk of bodily harm should it fall from the sky?
A vehicle has to fly faster than the local wind to stay stationary over one spot. So, you are talking about a powered vehicle in any case, regardless of whether it's an aerostat or an airplane.
Since you have to be powered anyway, you might as well use the power for lift.
No, the great achievement really was putting people on the moon, and the enormous technical, industrial, and organizational effort that took.... At least one major power other tried and failed. It wasn't a given.
Tried and failed ?? Who was that ?
The Soviets once tried to work with the US on manned space missions to the moon but gave up.
A significant difference between the Soviet and the American space programs is that the American program was done in public, with failures as well as successes in the public eye, while the Soviet program was done in secret, with missions not announced until they succeeded.
After the Apollo successes, the Soviets let it be assumed that they didn't have a moon program at all; they never tried to beat the Americans. It was only years later that the Soviet society started to embrace openness ("glasnost", in Russian), and the full history of the Soviet manned moon program was slowly revealed.
They did have a manned moon program, and a big one.
The Soviets could have sent a man there but they realised it was too expensive for the result
As it turns out, no, they could not. They tried, but failed. Ultimately, they gave up after their large booster, the N-1, failed for the third time. It was a key element in their lunar program, but they never got it to launch successfully. (By this time the Americans had already landed on the moon, so at best they would have come in second in a race with two competitors.
so they put their money into robotic exploration...
Or, more specifically, they made the announcement that this is what they were after all along. But it wasn't.
Interesting article, but hardly good evidence that the shuttle was clearly a bad idea viewed from the vantage of 1976. Writing forty years after the decision it is discussing, the article concludes: "So was the shuttle the right path or not? That’s debatable."
The problem is that you hit material and physical limits. That's the end of the space fantasies, you neck-bearded virgin. Look at air travel, same thing there too, a lot of development in a short period, then... coasting. We don't even have the Concorde anymore, you four-eyed sci-fi writing nerd.
Wow. I'm flattered that you actually went to the trouble of reading my bio. If I had mod points, I'd mod you up one just for that (except obviously I can't, since I've already commented in the thread.)
Yeah, in my own 20-20 hindsight, I now wish I'd managed to take a trip on the Concorde back when it was still flying. Talk about the glorious but un-economical engineering dreams of the '70s!
but it's not entirely because even by the late 90s there were jokes how Russia's shuttle was nothing but a copy of the American shuttle, but the difference between the Russians and the Americans was that the Russians had the good sense to see it as the enormous money waste it was and cancel it long before the Americans did.
The Russians cancelled Buran in 1993. If it had been obvious without the clarity of hindsight that the shuttle had been a bad idea, they wouldn't have started the program in the first place. Cancelling Buran in 1993 is no evidence that it was obvious in 1976 that the shuttle would be a terrible idea.
If you're suggesting that it was obvious that it was a terrible idea in 1976, you need to show this using what was known in 1976.
I will suggest instead that the problem with the shuttle was that it was kept in service so long.
In the 1960s, we went from launching humans on Redstone, to Titan-II, to Saturn 1B, to Saturn V. Four generations of human launch vehicles in ten years.
In the 1970s, we developed: shuttle. One vehicle in a decade.
In the 1980s, we developed-- nothing new.
The problem isn't that the shuttle didn't turn out to be as cheap and as reliable as it had been expected to be. The problem is that we stopped the practice of try something, learn what works and what doesn't, and then design something new.
You learn by doing. It's no flaw if something doesn't work as well as you hoped... that's the way to find out, to try it. But that only works as long as you can learn from it and design something better the next time.
One of the things I learned is that the deeper in a planet's gravity well (ie. closer to the surface) I perform the braking maneouver, the less fuel I need to use, and obviously, the lower the periapsis of the resultant orbit.
Right. This is the Oberth effect.
Why would they perform a braking maneouver resulting in orbit outside Callisto?
They performed the braking burn as close to Jupiter as possible, so the perijove is right over Jupiter's clouds. But it's a highly elliptical orbit, so the apo jove is very high-- thus, the orbit moves from way in to way way out, beyond the moons.
They want to spend as little time close to Jupiter as possible, because being close to Jupiter is very unhealthy.
Partlyy, but actually, the perijove is in below the radiation belts. The highly elliptical orbit is because they want to traverse the whole of Jupiter's magnetic fields-- but also because the highly elliptical orbit is the one that takes the minimum amount of fuel to get into.
They're basically zipping in for a quick pass then retreating to transmit data and prepare for the next pass.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry but Venus is not tidally locked to the Earth. .
You wouldn't think so, but, strangely, Venus very nearly is rotationally locked to the Earth: It presents the same face to the Earth on each closest approach.
(583.92-day interval between conjunctions to Earth ("synodic period") = 5.001444 Venusian solar days.
But this can't be a tidal effect, however: the tidal effects are way too low to have any possible effect on Venus' rotation. Best guess is that it is simply a coincidence.
No, it is idiotic, but not as idiotic. "0,0" will let pretty much every user know that the data is missing.
Here's a metaphor. If you are weighing a letter to see how much postage is needed, and for some reason the scale is malfunctioning, if it reads "0 grams", you probably can guess it's not making a measurement. If it has a little microprocessor inside that reads garbage from the sensor, and it's programmed so that if the sensor reading makes no sense, the scale should report out a plausible average value for weights-- that's bad.
Absurd data may not be good-- but plausible wrong data is much worse.
I know that explanations have to be simplified for a non-tech audience. But radio waves "wobble"? Really?
Yes, didn't you know that? Radio consists of big balls of wibbly-wobbly ether-wether stuff.
imagine a beowulf cluster of those !
The nineties called. They wanted their in-joke back.
It would make more sense if they returned latitude 0, longitude 0.
Why? That's a location off the coast of Africa in the Gulf of Guinea, which means that it doesn't even have the benefit of being useful for identifying the correct country, which is what the software is currently configured to do.
You are making a fundamental error if you think that telling a user that an IP address is at a specific street address in Kansas when all that is known is that it is registered somewhere in the United States is a "benefit" and it is in any way "useful."
Telling them that it's in the Atlantic Ocean at 00 is a far better indication of "I don't know" than giving a wrong address that actually exists.
So they truly live in the Middle of Nowhere?
If you define "The United States of America" as "Nowhere", yes.
"Somewhere in the United States" is not a latitude and longitude location, and should not be reported as such.
The map on a typical IP address geolocation site does have a circle around it... but there is no statement that the circle indicates a radius of uncertainty (until you said that, I had no idea). And, in any case, if the uncertainty is 2000 miles in radius, the circle won't show up on the map, because it's off the edge.
It would make more sense if they returned latitude 0, longitude 0.
Anybody looking at that would probably understand that "zero" indicates something other than "it is located here", but anybody who actually DOES try to go there will go to a undistinguished spot in the Atlantic Ocean.
That was 129 votes, a bit more than "ones and two's".
So, yes-- a gubernatorial election twelve years ago was decided by a little more than 100 votes, and it's "among the closest political races in United States election history." I think that pretty much demonstrates my case: even here, voting fraud at the ones and two at a time level isn't what we need to worry about; it takes voting fraud on a much larger scale to swing an election. And you can count on most elections not being that close.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Here we go again, with the "it isn't secure, and we're gonna hack the election" conspiracy. Funny how our entire banking system is online and secure enough, yet voting isn't.
But it isn't. Bank fraud happens all the time. When it happens, you show the paper trail, and the bank verifies it and gives you your money back. They accept the loss as the cost of doing business. How do you get your vote back?
Here is David Pogue's comment in Scientific American (www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-will-we-be-able-to-vote-online/):
I'm sure every single mailed in vote is actually cast by the intended person and not by one person in the household "helping" or by churches rounding up the elderly to "help", or nursing home "helpers", etc.
That would be one-ballot-at-a-time election stealing. I'm not terribly worried about that; it would take such a massive program to alter 50,000 votes that way that this wouldn't be an effective way to steal an election. It's changing the entire count that I worry about.
Few elections are ever decided by ones and twos of votes. It's wholesale changing that is the problem.
You can take a screen shot or a picture of the screen that shows your vote.
But, what do you do with the picture? I suppose if you're being paid for your vote, that might be a way to verify that you should get paid, but it won't tell you whether your vote is correctly added to the tally.
Still, nothing beats good old paper ballots. Too bad not enough people are demanding it.
Paper ballot with optical scanner seems a good compromise: you can count electronically, but if there's a problem, you have a paper trail.
I would venture to guess that hardly any American would know how to dress really at 7C or 70C...they are meaningless in every day use here in the US.
30 is warm
20 is nice
10 is cool
0 is ice.
That's really all you need to know.
Liberal: "I want someone who'll fight for me."
Conservative: "I want someone who'll leave me the fuck alone
...but will regulate the heck out of all the people I don't like or who have different religions or who want to use birth control or something.
No, they're saying "we were giving you unlimited, but we won't any more".
...because you reached the limit.
That's not what TFA says.
What the article says is that customers on the unlimited plan who use more than 100 GB-- and only ones using more than 100 GB-- must move to a different plan by August 31 or their accounts will be canceled.
If your account gets canceled if you use more than a 100 GB, that means "unlimited" data is not unlimited.
And your point is? Venera 7, the first Soviet probe to land on Venus, was launched in August 1970-- that's a year after Apollo 11 landed on the moon.
During the Apollo years, the main focus of the Soviet program was on their human space program. Yes, they did some robotic planetary mission, withs (up until Venera 7) rather indifferent success. But their robotic program was much smaller and much less well funded than their human program, contrary to what anonymous coward had posted.
Over the same time period, we were flying the Mariner missions and just beginning the Pioneer series, both of which had some spectacular successes, so I'm really not sure what your point is.
My idea would just be to incorporate both methods.
And thereby you'd be likely to make a vehicle with all of the disadvantages of an aerostat, and all of the disadvantages of an airplane.
Why would you use a heavier-than-air craft to essentially hover? Wouldn't an aerostat accomplish the same goal at a much lower cost, and lower risk of bodily harm should it fall from the sky?
A vehicle has to fly faster than the local wind to stay stationary over one spot. So, you are talking about a powered vehicle in any case, regardless of whether it's an aerostat or an airplane.
Since you have to be powered anyway, you might as well use the power for lift.
Yes-- according to Verizon, "unlimited" has its limits.
The point is, if you get cut off after reaching a limit... it really isn't unlimited, is it?
I really do hope somebody hits them hard for false advertising
No, the great achievement really was putting people on the moon, and the enormous technical, industrial, and organizational effort that took....
At least one major power other tried and failed. It wasn't a given.
Tried and failed ?? Who was that ?
The Soviets once tried to work with the US on manned space missions to the moon but gave up.
A significant difference between the Soviet and the American space programs is that the American program was done in public, with failures as well as successes in the public eye, while the Soviet program was done in secret, with missions not announced until they succeeded.
After the Apollo successes, the Soviets let it be assumed that they didn't have a moon program at all; they never tried to beat the Americans. It was only years later that the Soviet society started to embrace openness ("glasnost", in Russian), and the full history of the Soviet manned moon program was slowly revealed.
They did have a manned moon program, and a big one.
* http://www.wired.com/2010/10/r...
* http://fas.org/spp/eprint/lind...
* http://www.popularmechanics.co...
The Soviets could have sent a man there but they realised it was too expensive for the result
As it turns out, no, they could not. They tried, but failed.
Ultimately, they gave up after their large booster, the N-1, failed for the third time. It was a key element in their lunar program, but they never got it to launch successfully. (By this time the Americans had already landed on the moon, so at best they would have come in second in a race with two competitors.
so they put their money into robotic exploration...
Or, more specifically, they made the announcement that this is what they were after all along. But it wasn't.
Interesting article, but hardly good evidence that the shuttle was clearly a bad idea viewed from the vantage of 1976. Writing forty years after the decision it is discussing, the article concludes: "So was the shuttle the right path or not? That’s debatable."
The problem is that you hit material and physical limits. That's the end of the space fantasies, you neck-bearded virgin. Look at air travel, same thing there too, a lot of development in a short period, then... coasting. We don't even have the Concorde anymore, you four-eyed sci-fi writing nerd.
Wow. I'm flattered that you actually went to the trouble of reading my bio. If I had mod points, I'd mod you up one just for that (except obviously I can't, since I've already commented in the thread.)
Yeah, in my own 20-20 hindsight, I now wish I'd managed to take a trip on the Concorde back when it was still flying. Talk about the glorious but un-economical engineering dreams of the '70s!
There is a bit of hindsight
You got it. Hindsight is perfect.
but it's not entirely because even by the late 90s there were jokes how Russia's shuttle was nothing but a copy of the American shuttle, but the difference between the Russians and the Americans was that the Russians had the good sense to see it as the enormous money waste it was and cancel it long before the Americans did.
The Russians cancelled Buran in 1993. If it had been obvious without the clarity of hindsight that the shuttle had been a bad idea, they wouldn't have started the program in the first place. Cancelling Buran in 1993 is no evidence that it was obvious in 1976 that the shuttle would be a terrible idea.
If you're suggesting that it was obvious that it was a terrible idea in 1976, you need to show this using what was known in 1976.
I will suggest instead that the problem with the shuttle was that it was kept in service so long.
In the 1960s, we went from launching humans on Redstone, to Titan-II, to Saturn 1B, to Saturn V. Four generations of human launch vehicles in ten years.
In the 1970s, we developed: shuttle. One vehicle in a decade.
In the 1980s, we developed-- nothing new.
The problem isn't that the shuttle didn't turn out to be as cheap and as reliable as it had been expected to be. The problem is that we stopped the practice of try something, learn what works and what doesn't, and then design something new.
You learn by doing. It's no flaw if something doesn't work as well as you hoped... that's the way to find out, to try it. But that only works as long as you can learn from it and design something better the next time.
One of the things I learned is that the deeper in a planet's gravity well (ie. closer to the surface) I perform the braking maneouver, the less fuel I need to use, and obviously, the lower the periapsis of the resultant orbit.
Right. This is the Oberth effect.
Why would they perform a braking maneouver resulting in orbit outside Callisto?
They performed the braking burn as close to Jupiter as possible, so the peri jove is right over Jupiter's clouds. But it's a highly elliptical orbit, so the apo jove is very high-- thus, the orbit moves from way in to way way out, beyond the moons.
They want to spend as little time close to Jupiter as possible, because being close to Jupiter is very unhealthy.
Partlyy, but actually, the perijove is in below the radiation belts. The highly elliptical orbit is because they want to traverse the whole of Jupiter's magnetic fields-- but also because the highly elliptical orbit is the one that takes the minimum amount of fuel to get into.
They're basically zipping in for a quick pass then retreating to transmit data and prepare for the next pass.
Yep.