Robert Heinlein, in "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress", suggested differing standards to pass a new law or repeal an existing one. A new law should require 2/3 support, while repeal should require only 1/3.
Alternatively, here in the United States, all laws are supposed to abide by our Constitution. Require that all proposed laws should explicitly state the provision of the Constitution that authorizes such a law. In the case of drug laws, for example, no such provision exists. We had to have a Constitutional amendment to ban alcohol; why wasn't a similar amendment necessary to ban drugs?
The Pilgrims who sailed on the Mayflower didn't expect to ever return to Europe. And half of them died in the first couple of years, in the horrible wilderness called "Massachusetts".
Everybody who goes to Mars will die. (Some quickly, some slowly, some from old age.... maybe even some who come back to Earth.) EVERYBODY dies. Many pioneers died along the Oregon Trail, or heading to California. Exploration isn't safe, but staying home in bed doesn't protect you from dying.
A casino on the Moon, retirement colonies on the Moon (low gravity will make it easier for geriatric billionaires to walk around), and hotels in space, and radio telescopes on the far side of the Moon? I like them all!
Humans WILL build colonies on the Moon. The primary language probably won't be English. I'd rather it be Russian than Chinese.
In the 1960's, the USA was faced with a decision; go to the moon fast using a lunar-orbit rendezvous technique, or take our time and do it right, with an Earth-orbit rendezvous. The Earth-orbit rendezvous would have built a space station, assembled the actual Moon rocket in space, and returned to Earth orbit to actually land in a landing capsule.
Von Braun wanted to get there FAST, without bothering to assemble any space infrastructure along the way, and we won the "space race". But in doing it that way, we didn't learn anything about space construction, or build anything that would last, and we haven't been back to the moon in nearly 50 years. If the Russians are smart, they'll build their moon rocket in orbit near the ISS, and use that as a "construction shack" to building some actual orbital infrastructure. With that many launches, it almost sounds like they've chosen that path.
As a dedicated American patriot (and retired Navy officer), I can only say, "Godspeed, Russia! SOMEBODY has to build a lunar colony, and if it isn't going to be America, at least it'll be HUMANS back in space!"
Men who make things - union or not - took second fiddle to health care workers unions and teachers' unions during the "stimulus" that failed miserably to stimulate spending. Of course, great chunks of that money went to crony-capitalists like Solyndra, which pissed away a half a billion dollars and accomplished nothing at all. Road and bridge repair got virtually NO "stimulus" money, even after a couple of high-profile bridge collapses.
Auroras: spaceweather.com does daily aurora reports. Check them out. Auroras are not, generally, predictable; they are more common during times of geomagnetic storms, but sometimes happen when geomagnetic activity is low, and are sometimes absent when the activity level is high.
I was going to say much the same thing, but you've said it better.
Just to add SOMETHING to the mix, however, I would have thought that hardening our electrical grid _MIGHT_ have been one of the things the gub'mint should have spent a little of the trillion wasted "stimulus" dollars on. But as Instapundit Glenn Reynolds puts it, that might have given real jobs to burly men rather than to the natural Democrat constituencies.
Further, as the recent article from Nature pointed out, ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica have recently revealed spikes in C-14 and Be-10, indicative of a truly MASSIVE solar storm, in 774 and 993, perhaps as much as 5 times more powerful than the Carrington Event. So, yeah, perhaps we should think about planning to begin.
The mitigation plan for most of these terrible events is "be somewhere else when it happens". Some humans need to leave the Earth and live elsewhere as the ultimate insurance plan against mega-disasters. Mars. The Moon. Space habitats in the Asteroid Belt. Ceres, or Ganymede, or Titan, or all of these.
The "chance" is perhaps one in 15,000 per year (but we can't be sure, since it's pretty rare; the Barringer Meteor Crater, the Younger Dryas, Tunguska, Chelyabinsk are examples within the last 100,000 years) but the level of damage can be anywhere from "ouch!" to "civilization-ending". So I think it's not worth getting panicked about, but definitely something to work on the long-range plans for. The risk is low, but non-zero.
A Mars probe - or a space probe to any other place - has to be designed with sensors to detect what you're looking for. That means that you can ONLY find the stuff you EXPECTED to find - or not find it at all, which the first Mars lander did. A person on the scene can try other things and build new sensors in near-real-time. In order to discover the truly unknown, we have to GO THERE for ourselves, or at least be close enough to learn from our mistakes.
A Phobos base makes perfect sense; minimal gravity, someplace to park material until we're ready for it. An actual space station would be better, because we could spin it for artificial "gravity", but perhaps we can cannibalize Phobos for that later on.
A Predator or Reaper has a small number of missiles and bombs. UAVs are excellent SURVEILLANCE assets, but they're limited in firepower. Use them to do long term watching for the target, with one or two weapons to kill it. Then fly home. UAVs are for a few high-value targets.
An A10 can't stay onstation as long - but the weapons load can be as much as the weight of the rest of the aircraft. Sort of like the old AD1 "Skyraider" in that regard. A10s are for massed infantry and vehicles.
I have a number of devices that contain electric motors. There's a vacuum cleaner, a blender, a mixer... It would probably be possible to create a "multi-purpose household appliance" that would do every possible task with just one electric motor.
But the fact is that a device that does several different tasks does NONE of them well. My carpet shampooer isn't a vacuum cleaner, and there is no "multi-mission floor care device" that is both a carpet shampooer and a vacuum cleaner, even when they are superficially similar.
A USAF air-superiority fighter isn't going to do a great job as a ground attack aircraft. A ground attack aircraft isn't going to be a great interceptor. Hell, there aren't even any good fighter-interceptors. And the F-35 apparently sucks at ALL of these jobs.
The notion of "One Aircraft To Rule Them All" is an utter fantasy.
Most climate-change "models" are incapable of predicting anything. Given all the data up to last week, they cannot predict the weather today. The Old Farmer's Almanac has more accurate predictions.
When you have to file lawsuits to silence your opposition, that's the clearest possible sign that you are not a scientist, and what you're doing is nothing CLOSE to being a "science".
No, although drones big enough to fly out of line-of-sight must have SOME way to inform the operator where they are, and GPS is pretty darned cheap these days. It would take less processing power to retain its flight track over an hour or so than it would to record HD video, which many of them already can do.
But my suggestion is that when the drone detect the "Go away" signal, it reverse course until the signal is no longer detectable. The "Go away" transmitter should be pretty low-powered and aimed up; properly implemented, it shouldn't really block vast areas of terrain. And the signal would itself be line-of-sight.
Franken's "lead" came ENTIRELY from previously uncounted "forgotten" ballots from some poll worker's trunk that were mysteriously ALMOST UNANIMOUSLY for Franken.
Voting machines are used AT LEAST 4 times every 4 years; primary for the presidential, general for the presidential, primary for the intermediate Congressional/Senate elections, general for same.
Now find me a district that never has a runoff, or a special election, or a school board or referendum election. I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that a majority of all districts have at least one of these every cycle.
But the only voting technology that never goes obsolete are PAPER ballots. I sell and install scanners and document management systems, and I'm very comfortable recommending electronic systems. But for voting, only paper is good enough.
There are NO secure and verifiable electronic voting systems. All of them have flaws, back doors, defects, and vulnerabilities. The only even vaguely secure voting system is PAPER ballots. Every voter should mark a PAPER ballot. (If somebody wants to design a voting machine that then prints out a PAPER ballot to be verified by the voter, I suppose that would be OK.)
Paper ballots, unlike electronic ballots, can be re-counted. They can be examined for signs of tampering. Once the ballot is marked, it can be scanned and electronically counted. After the election has been certified, THEN the ballots can be destroyed.
And every poll worker must be required to certify that EVERY ballot has been sent in to the County Board of Elections; any "boxes of ballots" that appear the next day, a la Al Franken, should earn a LONG jail term for the poll worker responsible.
First, design a "Go Away!" transmitter. These could be deployed in security areas, wildfire areas, and where ever they are needed. Might use normal WiFi bands with a digital code.
Second, require that all drones be equipped with a receiver for these "Go Away!" transmitters. Reception of such a signal would cause the drone to reverse course and fly away until the signal was no longer received.
Even where there are laws and procedures in place to prevent this, it STILL happens. Examples: Any Hollyweird "celebrity" who goes into the hospital has an excellent chance that his/her patient records and photographs may be leaked to the press, by the hospital staff themselves. And even though the person sometimes goes to jail for it, it's still happening!
There are a number of interrelated issues involved in this.
First of all, for the last 30 years or so, new surveillance abilities have been developed, and new laws passed relating to these new abilities. In EVERY case, the rationale for the law has been to justify tracking terrorists and drug smugglers, but in the main these abilities have been used to target petty crime, not terrorists.
The Bush administration expanded these efforts somewhat, and were resisted by leftists; but when Obama was elected, he VASTLY expanded these efforts and then politicized everything, to the point where both the left AND the right distrust ANY of these governmental surveillance efforts.
And finally, the entire state security apparatus is astonishingly incompetent; in fact, given the levels of government corruption that currently exist, it may be that the level of incompetence is the only thing that prevents the formation of a "1984"-style police state. Between the politics, the corruption and the incompetence, I think that many people are feeling that even if nothing can be fixed, at least it can be left broken for far less money than we're spending.
Slashdot Mirror
Robert Heinlein, in "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress", suggested differing standards to pass a new law or repeal an existing one. A new law should require 2/3 support, while repeal should require only 1/3.
Alternatively, here in the United States, all laws are supposed to abide by our Constitution. Require that all proposed laws should explicitly state the provision of the Constitution that authorizes such a law. In the case of drug laws, for example, no such provision exists. We had to have a Constitutional amendment to ban alcohol; why wasn't a similar amendment necessary to ban drugs?
The Pilgrims who sailed on the Mayflower didn't expect to ever return to Europe. And half of them died in the first couple of years, in the horrible wilderness called "Massachusetts".
Everybody who goes to Mars will die. (Some quickly, some slowly, some from old age.... maybe even some who come back to Earth.) EVERYBODY dies. Many pioneers died along the Oregon Trail, or heading to California. Exploration isn't safe, but staying home in bed doesn't protect you from dying.
A casino on the Moon, retirement colonies on the Moon (low gravity will make it easier for geriatric billionaires to walk around), and hotels in space, and radio telescopes on the far side of the Moon? I like them all!
Humans WILL build colonies on the Moon. The primary language probably won't be English. I'd rather it be Russian than Chinese.
In the 1960's, the USA was faced with a decision; go to the moon fast using a lunar-orbit rendezvous technique, or take our time and do it right, with an Earth-orbit rendezvous. The Earth-orbit rendezvous would have built a space station, assembled the actual Moon rocket in space, and returned to Earth orbit to actually land in a landing capsule.
Von Braun wanted to get there FAST, without bothering to assemble any space infrastructure along the way, and we won the "space race". But in doing it that way, we didn't learn anything about space construction, or build anything that would last, and we haven't been back to the moon in nearly 50 years. If the Russians are smart, they'll build their moon rocket in orbit near the ISS, and use that as a "construction shack" to building some actual orbital infrastructure. With that many launches, it almost sounds like they've chosen that path.
As a dedicated American patriot (and retired Navy officer), I can only say, "Godspeed, Russia! SOMEBODY has to build a lunar colony, and if it isn't going to be America, at least it'll be HUMANS back in space!"
Men who make things - union or not - took second fiddle to health care workers unions and teachers' unions during the "stimulus" that failed miserably to stimulate spending. Of course, great chunks of that money went to crony-capitalists like Solyndra, which pissed away a half a billion dollars and accomplished nothing at all. Road and bridge repair got virtually NO "stimulus" money, even after a couple of high-profile bridge collapses.
Auroras: spaceweather.com does daily aurora reports. Check them out. Auroras are not, generally, predictable; they are more common during times of geomagnetic storms, but sometimes happen when geomagnetic activity is low, and are sometimes absent when the activity level is high.
They have "Top. Men." working on their plan.
I was going to say much the same thing, but you've said it better.
Just to add SOMETHING to the mix, however, I would have thought that hardening our electrical grid _MIGHT_ have been one of the things the gub'mint should have spent a little of the trillion wasted "stimulus" dollars on. But as Instapundit Glenn Reynolds puts it, that might have given real jobs to burly men rather than to the natural Democrat constituencies.
Further, as the recent article from Nature pointed out, ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica have recently revealed spikes in C-14 and Be-10, indicative of a truly MASSIVE solar storm, in 774 and 993, perhaps as much as 5 times more powerful than the Carrington Event. So, yeah, perhaps we should think about planning to begin.
The mitigation plan for most of these terrible events is "be somewhere else when it happens". Some humans need to leave the Earth and live elsewhere as the ultimate insurance plan against mega-disasters. Mars. The Moon. Space habitats in the Asteroid Belt. Ceres, or Ganymede, or Titan, or all of these.
The "chance" is perhaps one in 15,000 per year (but we can't be sure, since it's pretty rare; the Barringer Meteor Crater, the Younger Dryas, Tunguska, Chelyabinsk are examples within the last 100,000 years) but the level of damage can be anywhere from "ouch!" to "civilization-ending". So I think it's not worth getting panicked about, but definitely something to work on the long-range plans for. The risk is low, but non-zero.
Footfall, Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle.
http://www.amazon.com/Footfall...
I'm astonished that a Slashdot reader isn't familiar with that already.
A Mars probe - or a space probe to any other place - has to be designed with sensors to detect what you're looking for. That means that you can ONLY find the stuff you EXPECTED to find - or not find it at all, which the first Mars lander did. A person on the scene can try other things and build new sensors in near-real-time. In order to discover the truly unknown, we have to GO THERE for ourselves, or at least be close enough to learn from our mistakes.
A Phobos base makes perfect sense; minimal gravity, someplace to park material until we're ready for it. An actual space station would be better, because we could spin it for artificial "gravity", but perhaps we can cannibalize Phobos for that later on.
A Predator or Reaper has a small number of missiles and bombs. UAVs are excellent SURVEILLANCE assets, but they're limited in firepower. Use them to do long term watching for the target, with one or two weapons to kill it. Then fly home. UAVs are for a few high-value targets.
An A10 can't stay onstation as long - but the weapons load can be as much as the weight of the rest of the aircraft. Sort of like the old AD1 "Skyraider" in that regard. A10s are for massed infantry and vehicles.
I have a number of devices that contain electric motors. There's a vacuum cleaner, a blender, a mixer... It would probably be possible to create a "multi-purpose household appliance" that would do every possible task with just one electric motor.
But the fact is that a device that does several different tasks does NONE of them well. My carpet shampooer isn't a vacuum cleaner, and there is no "multi-mission floor care device" that is both a carpet shampooer and a vacuum cleaner, even when they are superficially similar.
A USAF air-superiority fighter isn't going to do a great job as a ground attack aircraft. A ground attack aircraft isn't going to be a great interceptor. Hell, there aren't even any good fighter-interceptors. And the F-35 apparently sucks at ALL of these jobs.
The notion of "One Aircraft To Rule Them All" is an utter fantasy.
Most climate-change "models" are incapable of predicting anything. Given all the data up to last week, they cannot predict the weather today. The Old Farmer's Almanac has more accurate predictions.
AlGore paid millions for an on-the-beach mansion, which is prima facie evidence that even HE doesn't really believe in "global warming".
When you have to file lawsuits to silence your opposition, that's the clearest possible sign that you are not a scientist, and what you're doing is nothing CLOSE to being a "science".
No, although drones big enough to fly out of line-of-sight must have SOME way to inform the operator where they are, and GPS is pretty darned cheap these days. It would take less processing power to retain its flight track over an hour or so than it would to record HD video, which many of them already can do.
But my suggestion is that when the drone detect the "Go away" signal, it reverse course until the signal is no longer detectable. The "Go away" transmitter should be pretty low-powered and aimed up; properly implemented, it shouldn't really block vast areas of terrain. And the signal would itself be line-of-sight.
Franken's "lead" came ENTIRELY from previously uncounted "forgotten" ballots from some poll worker's trunk that were mysteriously ALMOST UNANIMOUSLY for Franken.
Voting machines are used AT LEAST 4 times every 4 years; primary for the presidential, general for the presidential, primary for the intermediate Congressional/Senate elections, general for same.
Now find me a district that never has a runoff, or a special election, or a school board or referendum election. I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that a majority of all districts have at least one of these every cycle.
But the only voting technology that never goes obsolete are PAPER ballots. I sell and install scanners and document management systems, and I'm very comfortable recommending electronic systems. But for voting, only paper is good enough.
There are NO secure and verifiable electronic voting systems. All of them have flaws, back doors, defects, and vulnerabilities. The only even vaguely secure voting system is PAPER ballots. Every voter should mark a PAPER ballot. (If somebody wants to design a voting machine that then prints out a PAPER ballot to be verified by the voter, I suppose that would be OK.)
Paper ballots, unlike electronic ballots, can be re-counted. They can be examined for signs of tampering. Once the ballot is marked, it can be scanned and electronically counted. After the election has been certified, THEN the ballots can be destroyed.
And every poll worker must be required to certify that EVERY ballot has been sent in to the County Board of Elections; any "boxes of ballots" that appear the next day, a la Al Franken, should earn a LONG jail term for the poll worker responsible.
How about a two-part solution?
First, design a "Go Away!" transmitter. These could be deployed in security areas, wildfire areas, and where ever they are needed. Might use normal WiFi bands with a digital code.
Second, require that all drones be equipped with a receiver for these "Go Away!" transmitters. Reception of such a signal would cause the drone to reverse course and fly away until the signal was no longer received.
Even where there are laws and procedures in place to prevent this, it STILL happens. Examples: Any Hollyweird "celebrity" who goes into the hospital has an excellent chance that his/her patient records and photographs may be leaked to the press, by the hospital staff themselves. And even though the person sometimes goes to jail for it, it's still happening!
+1 Insightful.
If I had mod points this week, I'd certainly mod this up.
There are a number of interrelated issues involved in this.
First of all, for the last 30 years or so, new surveillance abilities have been developed, and new laws passed relating to these new abilities. In EVERY case, the rationale for the law has been to justify tracking terrorists and drug smugglers, but in the main these abilities have been used to target petty crime, not terrorists.
The Bush administration expanded these efforts somewhat, and were resisted by leftists; but when Obama was elected, he VASTLY expanded these efforts and then politicized everything, to the point where both the left AND the right distrust ANY of these governmental surveillance efforts.
And finally, the entire state security apparatus is astonishingly incompetent; in fact, given the levels of government corruption that currently exist, it may be that the level of incompetence is the only thing that prevents the formation of a "1984"-style police state. Between the politics, the corruption and the incompetence, I think that many people are feeling that even if nothing can be fixed, at least it can be left broken for far less money than we're spending.