Leaving out Boeing would be budget suicide for NASA.
No one should be left out because there should be no contract. Instead, NASA should be fostering a spot market for launches. They should have a separate bid for each launch: "We want X satellite in Y orbit, and insured for Z dollars." Then give the launch to the lowest bidder. That way each company can work continuously to cut costs and improve services, knowing that if they leapfrog the competition, they can win the next launch, instead of being locked out for years.
That is not feesable. It take years to be trained to fly in a spaceship - whether the lifting body like the Shuttle or Dream Chaser, or a capsule such as Soyuz, CST-100, or Dragon V2. You have to build not only the rocket, but a tower to carry the crew to the top of the rocket along with an arm to get the astronauts into the vehicle (which is not compatible/spacecraft). Escape systems need to be installed. It's very expensive, and it would never be built without assurance that the demand is there. At this time, there is no market for launches except from NASA or ESA. Cosmonauts would ride Russian spacecraft, Indians and Chinese are developing their own systems, etc. The public demand is too little at this time. Without a long-term contract, NASA is not enough for your proposal.
Am I the only one that read the statement? It seems to me that they are collecting information. In fact McDonald's doesn't deny they attacked him, they only state that their employees denied it. It's an important distinction. Their employees are quite naturally saying, "We're innocent!" while Mann's saying "They're guilty." Mann provided proof that one of their statements - namely that they didn't damage any of his property - is incorrect. But it doesn't seem McDonalds, as a whole, is calling Mann a liar. Here's the statement:
We share the concern regarding Dr. Mann’s account of his July 1 visit to a McDonald’s in Paris. McDonald’s France was made aware of Dr. Mann’s complaints on July 16, and immediately launched a thorough investigation. The McDonald’s France team has contacted Dr. Mann and is awaiting further information from him.
In addition, several staff members involved have been interviewed individually, and all independently and consistently expressed that their interaction with Dr. Mann was polite and did not involve a physical altercation. Our crew members and restaurant security staff have informed us that they did not damage any of Mr. Mann’s personal possessions.
While we continue to learn more about the situation, we are hearing from customers who have questions about what happened. We urge everyone not to speculate or jump to conclusions before all the facts are known. Our goal is to provide a welcoming environment and stellar service to McDonald’s customers around the world.
Q: Do you like movies with gladiators? A: My favorite type is comedy. I like the "Naked Gun" series best. Heck, any movie with Leslie Nielsen it is tops in my book!
Interesting that your quotes comes from "Airplane!", a movie starring Leslie Nielsen.
Whoops. Allow me to correct my own post. Not all of the Higgs particle's mass is from the Higgs Field:
In particular, as you can see in Figs. 3 and 7, the Higgs particle itself does not get all of its mass from the non-zero Higgs field — and the strength of its interaction with itself is not directly related to its mass. [There is a correlation, but not proportionality.] This is not unusual.
I wonder how it gets the rest of its mass? That's a good question.
The RIAA and Co. have never sued anyone for using their own music digitally. They have sued when a third party is involved. The issue isn't that you are able to stream your music to you from your own system, or even from a web server somewhere else that you operate. The problem is that you are uploading your songs to Google or Amazon, which may very well be copyright infringement.
The DVD-CCA (an organization run by the motion picture studios) sued Kaleidescape for making a personal server where you could upload your DVDs and then play them anywhere in your house. Kaleidescape won their suit, fortunately. Of course the DVD-CCA isn't the RIAA; however, I feel they are cut from the same cloth.
I concur. The export restrictions are frankly ridiculous in this case. If they wanted to, the Iranian government could just send someone to US to download Google's software for free. If Iran can import centrifuges to purify Uranium, they can surely use proxies to download the software directly too (spoofing their country of origin). It's probably a face-saving gesture for he more "senile" members of congress.
Indeed, Google says they worked with US government officials before releasing the software with these restrictions according to TFA. They believe that releasing the software to Iranians will help promote the flow of information and help them exercise more freedom of speech and assembly, as shown in during protests of the 2009 election in Iran. Someone in the US government probably thinks so too.
IN B4 "Android Fragmentation"
Wasn't that part of the plot to one of the Star Trek movies?
So, were they mislead, or is this more of a type of "buyers remorse"? There are plenty of places where the local population is uneducated and unlikely to fully understand genetic testing, should we stop studying them, and in the process deny them the good (potential treatments for disease that they suffer from) to protect them from "the bad" (the possibility that their world-view will be challenged, or that the data will be applied to larger studies)?
Also, one of the big issues here seems to be that the findings contradict their folklore: Another article, suggesting that the tribe’s ancestors had crossed the frozen Bering Sea to arrive in North America, flew in the face of the tribe’s traditional stories that it had originated in the canyon and was assigned to be its guardian. Listening to the investigators, Ms. Tilousi felt a surge of anger, she recalled. But in Supai, the initial reaction was more of hurt. Though some Havasupai knew already that their ancestors most likely came from Asia, “when people tell us, ‘No, this is not where you are from,’ and your own blood says so — it is confusing to us,” Rex Tilousi said. “It hurts the elders who have been telling these stories to our grandchildren.” So science showed that their fable about springing from the ground in this canyon was, at best, unlikely. So what. We don't accept that the Earth is the center of the universe, that sex with virgins cures disease, that human sacrifice improves crop yield, or that it's turtles all the way down, why should we care about this story either. I'm not inclined to "turn off" science just because results show that a stone-age story is just a story.
I agree with your second part. Challenging anyone's worldview is always a good thing. Whether they are Christians, Havasupai, or even athiests, challenging people with evidence contradicting their ignorance is a good thing! It keeps society from stagnating by encouraging free thinking!
Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.
