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Comment Re:Priorities (Score 1) 23

You know things are bad when their stock price drops back to under $20, their COO quits, a whole new site Gab was created to fight their wildly biased censorship practice, and to solve the problem, they put the ban-hammer into overdrive.
Twitter's key shareholders include #3: Steve "Monkeyboy" Balmer, and #2: Saudi royal PrinceAlwaleed Bin Talal. Meanwhile buyout investors are not happy with what they see.

Comment Police are addicted to lazy investigative methods. (Score 1) 353

As soon as the first (legal) wire taps started yielding results, police have gotten lazier and increasingly addicted to doughnut-friendly investigation techniques.
Technology has caught up, plugged the phreaking and now wiretapping holes. Lazy investigators should be following suspects, working leads, and building cases, not whining about the technology.
Bad guys aren't caught by peppering the entire world with script kiddie cracking vulnerabilities.
Do your job.

Comment Re:Only 8% HF Ops? (Score 1) 141

Hey VHF and UHF are cool. Not saying anything bad, about them, just a matter of range. In fact, you could make long-distance contacts with the right antennas by using amateur satellites, or with a lot of power, the Moon. And then there's these crazy guys. http://www.df5ai.net/Material/... I'd hate to have to rely on that for comms, but it's remotely possible. My first cross-pond QSO was via Packet on 2M connecting up to an HF gateway to London in '92. Back then it was pretty impressive, I didn't get my first real email address til 1994. The great thing about our hobby is that there are so many different ways to be a ham, there's something for everybody!

Comment Only 8% HF Ops? (Score 1) 141

Surprising that so few hams in Nepal are setup for HF operations. I wonder how many HF ham stations there are in the U.S. One can't tell by license class. I know that in a real emergency my QRP FT-817 is not going to be the most reliable but until I can fork out for some bigger solar panels and batteries to run an amp, 5 Watts is going to be what I've got. With morse code that's enough to work the world, sometimes. Beats the hell out a walkie talkie.

Comment Re: I suspect he's wrong. (Score 5, Insightful) 580

Funding for space goes up in Republican administrations because space exploration has traditionally been an outgrowth of the armaments industry. Put a capsule on a Titan II and it's a rocket. Put a warhead or several on it and it's an ICBM. Building and testing peaceful rockets helps national defense.

Comment Why banks and healthcare providers? (Score 2) 205

WTF are private organizations allowed to issue identities for? Government IDs may be a hassle, but they're the ones with the vested interest in keeping track of people. We don't permit Walmart to issue driver's licenses or passports. We already have a mess with the private CAs on the Internet. Do it once, do it right and keep a monopoly on it. IDs and currency are Government's job! If the Treasury had issued decent ecash, Bitcoin wouldn't have a market and Credit Card Companies wouldn't be adding their 2.9% inflation to every purchase. If the Gov't were to do this right, with closed-loop verification necessary for anybody to do anything with your Identity, and if it were secure it would be a great boon. No more having to notify 42 entities of your change-of-address. Change it once at the Identity agency, and it's changed everywhere. I really doubt they'll manage to get it right though. No, I don't work for the Government. I'm just a guy who hates constantly giving and updating contact info.

Comment Not impossible, used to bulls-eye womprats (Score 0) 235

Summary says "impossible to" . Article says Next to Impossible to. Let's have the boys in the ISS take a few pics out the window. It's not as convenient and the passes are much less frequent, but hey, it's something. Also GOES 14 is coming on-line. Now if that fails, we really will be limited to ISS observation.

Comment Re:Salvage Rights (Score 1) 204

This is true, but launching large items is difficult, volume-wise. I know there are ideas for for inflatable mirrors and spray-on aluminum, but so far there has been virtually no manufacturing in space, aside from tiny crystals and SuitSat. I think the L2, or at least BEO position of the mirror is advantageous. We don't want to clutter LEO even more with debris, and there's no point in bringing an asteroid all the way back to Earth to melt with a solar furnace, especially if you're going to be using the products further out. We're already up the Well with Herschel, at substantial sunk cost.

Comment Re:Salvage Rights (Score 2) 204

If it were easy, anybody could do it, and it'd already be underway. Good summary of the issues. I think robotic dexterity is probably sufficient for the mission, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Hand and Robonaut2 http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/robonaut.html The real challenge is software, the light lag at L2 would make realtime teleoperation infeasible. Darpa has teams working on recovery robots for terrestrial uses. I'm all for launching big mirrors also, but this one has already paid the energy cost of getting out of LEO. I think there are substantial savings here, especially if we use existing assets and pair the tug + robot at the ISS. The big issue that I can see is political. The JWST is already slated to be positioned at L2 and they won't want industrial debris floating around. May have to tug the Herschel out of range before recovering the good bits. An ion drive can do that, slowly.

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