Actually, no they cannot. After auto-sequence start, nobody but the computer can stop the launch. It's meant to prevent last minute jitters from scrapping the mission, but then, there's always the possibility of something the computer cannot detect/compensate for. (IE: hole in orbiter wing)
Of course, there are a variety of abort scenarios, the problem with those is that if it's a critical problem immediately after launch, you can't abort because you are still flying a brick... once you get a certain amount of altitude, it's a different story, but still, for about 17 seconds before launch, (if I remember correctly, and I probably don't, though I was the first attending the Space Camp program to ever get the number right) and a couple of minutes afterwards, there is no feisable abort.
After that, you can Return to Launch Site, Landing Site, after Once Around, or now, ISS abort, but that's only for an unlandable ship that otherwise can fly... as I remember it's a PAIN to get to the ISS, which is why the launch windows are so small.
It's inducing a state of unnessisary fear IMHO though. Most of us have really nothing to fear from this, as, realistically, there's little to nothing we can do about it for the forseeable future. If an outbreak occurs, maybe it's safer to telecommute to work in the interim whenever possible, but until then, I won't worry about it, and you shouldn't either. I love to see the problem being tackled agressively by drug companies, (on a theorhetical level... I don't like the fear mongering they'll do to induce everyone to buy their products) but the problem I see with it is that it's a hit and miss game. The vaccine they develop for today's bird flu may not kill the one that hits us.
Also who knows if it will be truely deadly? We have some theories, but until the mutated strain actually gets out there, we won't know how potent it is.
My one last thought is this: The price is worth it TO YOU, but think about whos chickens are being slaughtered. I guarentee you, the economic effect of this isn't being felt hardly at all by larger farms in wealthier countries like the US, that have the money to kill their entire stock of chickens and buy new ones.
The problem isn't really the high speed modems. Sure it's trivial to push firmware to them, but you need to consider the outdated infrastructure as well. In front of that modem is likely a router which doesn't support ip6 very well at all, so you just moved ip6 one step out, then got stopped again.
Add to that the problem that assuming you can do the upgrades, IP6 introduces a new rats nest of security problems. Software firewalls that aren't built to support it suddenly aren't protecting the computers anymore, because the ip6 packets pass right by their hooks into the TCP/IP stack.
IP6 is not, and has never been a problem of implementing the technology. Instead, it's an exercise in sunk costs that would have to be spent again. Take for example the example from where I'm currently living: In Japan, cars drive on the left side of the road, and many walkways are also on the left side. I say many, because JR seems to be a little... inconsistent on this point with stairs... sometimes the right is where you should walk, sometimes the left... it's so bad they have signs every few feet to tell you where you should be walking.
Why doesn't Japan switch to driving on the right side of the road tomorrow? That's the exercise in switching from IP4 to IP6. Further, there's no immediately pressing need to do this transition. Nobody (ok, I admit there may be a few people who have died due to extreme circumstances, but the number isn't very large) is dying from the fact that we're using IP4 instead of IP6. We don't see protests on the streets for IP6, etc.
It's a great idea, and the theory is great, but it's like color television... the ISPs don't see a profit motive in it because so few people are asking, and users don't see a point in doing it because it doesn't really get them anything. Nobody is publishing anything they can't get with IP4 aside from a badly rendered dancing turtle.
Until there's a profit motive, you can expect to see IP6 on a lazy roll out schedule that corresponds to the last priority work that managers let their IT people do for fun, and I mean no insult to managers when I say that, it's simply where this migration ranks in their to-do lists.
Excuse me, but do you live in Tokyo? Obviously not because the last time I checked, the people I saw wearing masks were doing so as a curtesy to others BECAUSE THEY ARE SICK!
Yes of course, there are people who don't live in Tokyo because the pollution in the city center is worse than mountainous areas like say... Chichibu, which again, I can vouch for personally. This is universal, and if I may add, a seperate issue from Global Warming. What point does posting something like that have to the main discussion?
So I'll put it back in the context of a Global Warmng discussion: Your argument here is simmilar to the urban heat island effect. Pollution in the big cities is of course worse than in areas that we don't have factories in, and areas that the pollution doesn't blow over. Simmilarly we know we're causing localized warming because of how we build cities, but noone knows exactly how much, which is a problem, because many of the thermometers we use to measure global temperature are now located in cities due to urban sprawl.
Here's another bit of knowledge for you: Just because we are having a measurable effect in some places, and on some parts of the environment, doesn't mean we're to blame for everything that's happening. There are quite a lot of things beyond human control, and it's arrogant to assume we even KNOW what we're doing, much less think we can control something as complex as the global weather patterns by imposing something like the Kyoto Protocol.
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Actually, no they cannot. After auto-sequence start, nobody but the computer can stop the launch. It's meant to prevent last minute jitters from scrapping the mission, but then, there's always the possibility of something the computer cannot detect/compensate for. (IE: hole in orbiter wing)
Of course, there are a variety of abort scenarios, the problem with those is that if it's a critical problem immediately after launch, you can't abort because you are still flying a brick... once you get a certain amount of altitude, it's a different story, but still, for about 17 seconds before launch, (if I remember correctly, and I probably don't, though I was the first attending the Space Camp program to ever get the number right) and a couple of minutes afterwards, there is no feisable abort.
After that, you can Return to Launch Site, Landing Site, after Once Around, or now, ISS abort, but that's only for an unlandable ship that otherwise can fly... as I remember it's a PAIN to get to the ISS, which is why the launch windows are so small.
It's inducing a state of unnessisary fear IMHO though. Most of us have really nothing to fear from this, as, realistically, there's little to nothing we can do about it for the forseeable future. If an outbreak occurs, maybe it's safer to telecommute to work in the interim whenever possible, but until then, I won't worry about it, and you shouldn't either. I love to see the problem being tackled agressively by drug companies, (on a theorhetical level... I don't like the fear mongering they'll do to induce everyone to buy their products) but the problem I see with it is that it's a hit and miss game. The vaccine they develop for today's bird flu may not kill the one that hits us.
Also who knows if it will be truely deadly? We have some theories, but until the mutated strain actually gets out there, we won't know how potent it is.
My one last thought is this: The price is worth it TO YOU, but think about whos chickens are being slaughtered. I guarentee you, the economic effect of this isn't being felt hardly at all by larger farms in wealthier countries like the US, that have the money to kill their entire stock of chickens and buy new ones.
The problem isn't really the high speed modems. Sure it's trivial to push firmware to them, but you need to consider the outdated infrastructure as well. In front of that modem is likely a router which doesn't support ip6 very well at all, so you just moved ip6 one step out, then got stopped again.
Add to that the problem that assuming you can do the upgrades, IP6 introduces a new rats nest of security problems. Software firewalls that aren't built to support it suddenly aren't protecting the computers anymore, because the ip6 packets pass right by their hooks into the TCP/IP stack.
IP6 is not, and has never been a problem of implementing the technology. Instead, it's an exercise in sunk costs that would have to be spent again. Take for example the example from where I'm currently living: In Japan, cars drive on the left side of the road, and many walkways are also on the left side. I say many, because JR seems to be a little... inconsistent on this point with stairs... sometimes the right is where you should walk, sometimes the left... it's so bad they have signs every few feet to tell you where you should be walking.
Why doesn't Japan switch to driving on the right side of the road tomorrow? That's the exercise in switching from IP4 to IP6. Further, there's no immediately pressing need to do this transition. Nobody (ok, I admit there may be a few people who have died due to extreme circumstances, but the number isn't very large) is dying from the fact that we're using IP4 instead of IP6. We don't see protests on the streets for IP6, etc.
It's a great idea, and the theory is great, but it's like color television... the ISPs don't see a profit motive in it because so few people are asking, and users don't see a point in doing it because it doesn't really get them anything. Nobody is publishing anything they can't get with IP4 aside from a badly rendered dancing turtle.
Until there's a profit motive, you can expect to see IP6 on a lazy roll out schedule that corresponds to the last priority work that managers let their IT people do for fun, and I mean no insult to managers when I say that, it's simply where this migration ranks in their to-do lists.
Excuse me, but do you live in Tokyo? Obviously not because the last time I checked, the people I saw wearing masks were doing so as a curtesy to others BECAUSE THEY ARE SICK!
Yes of course, there are people who don't live in Tokyo because the pollution in the city center is worse than mountainous areas like say... Chichibu, which again, I can vouch for personally. This is universal, and if I may add, a seperate issue from Global Warming. What point does posting something like that have to the main discussion?
So I'll put it back in the context of a Global Warmng discussion: Your argument here is simmilar to the urban heat island effect. Pollution in the big cities is of course worse than in areas that we don't have factories in, and areas that the pollution doesn't blow over. Simmilarly we know we're causing localized warming because of how we build cities, but noone knows exactly how much, which is a problem, because many of the thermometers we use to measure global temperature are now located in cities due to urban sprawl.
Here's another bit of knowledge for you: Just because we are having a measurable effect in some places, and on some parts of the environment, doesn't mean we're to blame for everything that's happening. There are quite a lot of things beyond human control, and it's arrogant to assume we even KNOW what we're doing, much less think we can control something as complex as the global weather patterns by imposing something like the Kyoto Protocol.