For most of its time at Mars, the MAVEN spacecraft provided a relay for scientific data uplinked from NASA’s rovers and landers on the Martian surface. The relay allowed NASA to return significantly more data and imagery from rovers like Perseverance and Curiosity than would be possible through a direct-to-Earth radio connection.

With MAVEN out of the picture, NASA has four other orbiters it can use to provide this critical radio link. But officials aren’t sure how much longer they will last. Three of the four remaining relay orbiters are older than MAVEN, which played an outsized role in the relay network thanks to its higher orbit.

“Over the life of the mission, MAVEN supported more than 8 percent of all of our relay sessions planned by our rovers and landers, but it accounted for nearly 18 percent of all of the data returned, illustrating its usefulness when returning large data volumes,” said Tiffany Morgan, director of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program.

The network still has plenty of capacity to support the Perseverance and Curiosity rovers, with some minor caveats.

“We do have remaining assets, and those assets have adjusted the amount of data that they return, and the rovers have also adjusted their planning for how they connect to those assets,” Morgan said. “There is a slight delay on occasion, because we don’t have as many assets in view, to getting our science data back, and MAVEN was critical in returning science data versus operational data. But the Mars Relay Network is resilient enough at this point in time to accommodate, for the most part, the loss of MAVEN with the added delay.” //

jimlux Ars Tribunus Militum
12y
1,671

jlredford said:
It's interesting that they're able to use so many different orbiters to do this relay function. Interesting and resilient! It's great that it can handle dropouts like MAVEN. As the system gets upgraded, I hope they keep all this inter-operability to handle the next failure. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is the main link these days, and it's now 20 years old, almost twice the age of MAVEN.

That’s because most of them (at least those launched after 2005) fly the JPL developed Electra software defined radio (they’re manufactured by L3, but the hardware design and the software is JPL). The landers also use Electra radios (or Electra Lite). MER was the first Mars lander to use relay ops with an orbiter to return data, and after a week or two, it had returned more data through the relay link than all previous Mars missions combined. It’s that effective (compared to basic X-band Direct to Earth at 8 kbps)

And as far as interoperability goes, that’s part of the Prox-1 standard from the Consultative Committee on Space Data Standards (ccsds.org) - most people flying a relay payload use it (as will the new Mars Telecom Network, and similar spacecraft planned for the Moon). 400 MHz UHF at Mars for now, but S-band is coming, as is Ka-band.

But in a majority opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court accepted the FCC argument that carriers could have obtained jury trials if they refused to pay the fines and the government tried to collect. Carriers could either pay the fines and challenge them in circuit appeals courts, or not pay the fines and wait for the government to collect in a process that ultimately would result in a jury trial for each carrier.

“The FCC’s forfeiture proceedings fit comfortably within” the Supreme Court’s Seventh Amendment precedents, Roberts wrote. “The orders at issue did not settle the carriers’ legal obligations because, stated simply, they did not create an obligation to pay. And the orders did not reflect the ultimate determination of any fact because, before the carriers could have been made to pay, the Government was required to prove its case to a jury.”

During oral arguments, justices expressed skepticism of AT&T and Verizon’s claims and seemed to agree that FCC fine decisions are nonbinding until enforced by a court. Justice Brett Kavanaugh described the case as a victory for carriers either way, because the government acknowledged its orders are nonbinding without a jury trial. //

“The Commission now agrees that AT&T and Verizon would have been entitled to a jury trial de novo in an Article III court had they declined to pay,” Thomas wrote. The majority, Thomas said, “accepts the Government’s newfound account that under the Act, the Commission’s self-styled ‘orders’ were mere nonbinding notices that the regulated parties were free to ignore.”

Thomas supports this interpretation and said it “should govern future proceedings so as to bring the Commission’s enforcement practices into harmony with the Constitution.” But as for the case involving AT&T and Verizon, Thomas argued that the FCC did not comply with the limits described in today’s Supreme Court ruling.

“If AT&T and Verizon did not pay, they arguably were subject to immediate statutory penalties for defying Commission forfeiture orders,” Thomas wrote. “The procedure for judicial review of the orders that is the basis for this Court’s jurisdiction treated them not as requests for voluntary payment, but as ‘final orders.’”

Thomas wrote that “AT&T and Verizon did what courts ordinarily encourage: They paid under protest and filed suit to get their payments back. Today, the Court punishes AT&T and Verizon for complying with a government order that they in good faith believed was obligatory, diligently preserving their objection to that order, and then litigating that objection so effectively as to cause the Government to change its position years later.”

When they’re being eaten, bean plants release chemicals that draw in parasitic wasps.

Nations are not economic zones.

That matters, because from a pure GDP standpoint the ideal citizen is someone who gets cancer, gets divorced, crashes the car, and hires a small army of professionals before dying.

Nobody contributed more to UK GDP this week than Henry Nowak’s killer.

Think about that.

Police response. Medical response. Detectives. Public affairs officers. Dozens of lawyers. Prison for life. All of it staggeringly expensive. Vickrum Digwa has already made up the entire lifetime GDP contribution of the man he killed. Probably a hundred times over.

Migration isn’t just about votes.

Consider yourself. A patriot who lives a simple life.

You are not a burden on society, so you contribute little to GDP. //

Your pastor told you that becoming an electrician, a plumber, a nurse, a firefighter, a teacher would contribute to society. He told you to live a simple life. To love and protect your family and your neighbors. He told you not to gamble or drink or have affairs.

Don’t you see why they hate the church?

Why they hate you?

In their eyes you are wasted space.

You may contribute enormously on the human scale, the only scale that has ever actually mattered, you may contribute non economic values like love, honor and duty. You might contribute locally on a micro-economic scale.

But in the big picture you are an economic loss. Because you contribute almost nothing to GDP.

You contribute far far leas than a criminal migrant with a mental disorder, gambling addiction and cancer.

You are a great American in the eyes of your church.

But on an economic GDP scale you are the very worst type of American.

The story of the Ecurie Ecosse Tojeiro at Le Mans is not a story of victory. It is something much more important than that. It is a perfect reminder of the spirit of the great privateer teams, a time when a small group of determined, passionate, and slightly mad enthusiasts could build a world-beating car in a shed, crash it, fix it, paint it in a field, and then turn up at the world's greatest race and give the giants a proper scare. It was a magnificent failure.

There is a wonderful and slightly awkward secret at the heart of the modern Aston Martin. For years, the company has cultivated an image of bespoke, blue-blooded, British excellence. The soul of that image has been its magnificent V12 engine. The problem is, this quintessentially British heart isn't entirely British at all. If you scratch beneath the surface, you'll find that its DNA is about as exotic as a Ford Mondeo. //

Aston Martin, now safely under Ford ownership, needed a world-class engine for its next generation of cars. Ford's accountants had a much cleverer and cheaper idea than a clean-sheet design. They looked at their excellent 3.0-liter Duratec V6 engine, found in countless sensible family saloons, and had a thought: what would happen if we just glued two of them together?

For anyone who's owned a classic British car, three words guaranteed to send a shiver down the spine: Lucas Electrical Systems. For decades, the products made by this Birmingham company became the source of endless, infuriating failures that turned British motorists into unwilling comedians. Headlights would dim to a romantic glow just as you needed them most. Indicators would flash with the random enthusiasm of a broken disco ball. Windscreen wipers would choose the exact moment of a downpour to take early retirement. It's for this reason that Joseph Lucas, the company's long-dead founder, earned the posthumous nickname "Prince of Darkness."

Which makes the story all the more remarkable, because Joseph Lucas himself built his business on exactly the opposite reputation: rock-solid reliability and genuine innovation. //

In the 1920s, Lucas signed cross-licensing deals with Bosch, Delco, and other major electrical suppliers that carved up the world between them. Lucas agreed not to sell in their territories; they agreed not to sell in Britain. By the 1930s, Lucas had achieved something close to a complete monopoly on automotive electrics in Britain.

If you were building cars in Britain, you bought your headlamps, starter motors, alternators, and wiring from Lucas. Austin, Morris, Jaguar, Rover, Triumph, MG - they were all captive customers. There was literally nowhere else to go. This should have been a recipe for excellence, with guaranteed demand allowing investment in the best possible products. Instead, it became a lesson in how monopolies breed complacency. //

The folklore that grew up around Lucas failures became part of British motoring culture. "The Lucas motto: Get home before dark." "Why do the British drink warm beer? Because Lucas makes their refrigerators." "Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, Joseph Lucas invented the short circuit." The jokes were funny precisely because they reflected real experiences shared by thousands of frustrated drivers.

jdhardy Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
15y
127
Subscriptor++

eoink said:
Voicing = Speaking about that? Asking as a European.

Yep. Classic English register split - "speak" is the native (low register) Old English/Germanic version, "voice" is the mid-register (Norman) French-derived version, and "communicate" would be the high-register Latin-derived version.

Lots of terms follow this pattern - hence the expression that English is really three languages in a trench coat.

Is it a hidden gem, a cult classic, or hopelessly dumb? We vote “all of the above.” //

Even operating at its most frantic peak in 1985 just before Challenger’s loss, the shuttle hardware managed a maximum of nine flights in one calendar year; for most of the 1990s, it performed at five or six flights per year. Civilians in space—to say nothing of Big Bird—would have to wait.

And into that post-Challenger disillusioned summer of 1986, Hollywood brought us SpaceCamp. It had all the right ingredients: A stacked cast with a solid leading duo (Kate Capshaw and Tom Skerritt), tons of real NASA location footage, and a big, brassy score by none other than John Williams. The film was completed before the Challenger disaster, leaving 20th Century Fox with something of a nightmarish choice on their hands—to shelve the film and lose millions, or send it to theaters and risk a PR disaster.

For better or for worse, Fox chose to release the film, which ultimately made about $9.6 million on a reported $25 million budget. Ouch.

What do British fantasy epics, Russian family dramas, ancient philosophy, and Christian apologetics have in common? This might sound like the setup of a joke or riddle, but it’s the premise of the latest book from philosophy professor and prolific author Peter Kreeft.

Now 89 years old, Kreeft has penned over 100 books on philosophical and religious topics. He’s been a professor of philosophy at Boston College for over 60 years. Over his scholarly career, Kreeft has taken an unusual position, namely, applying philosophy to Christian apologetics. As a Calvinist in childhood who converted to Catholicism during his college years, he believes in the unity of different denominations and often uses nonsectarian language which can apply to all Christians and non-Christians alike.
Last year his latest book was published: “The Two Greatest Novels Ever Written: The Wisdom of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and ‘The Brothers Karamazov.’” In this simple yet profound book, Kreeft uses two renowned fictional classics to pierce the mysteries of philosophical truths and theological concepts.

While it may seem illogical to use two complex novels to delve into the even more complex fields of philosophy and religion, this brilliant scholar manages to simplify the books and the concepts in 15 short chapters. //

Anyone earnestly seeking the truth will likely be enriched by reading this thoughtful analysis. Wrapping such inspiring philosophy in an analysis of two fictional novels isn’t a gimmick. The very point of the book is that art is the most powerful vehicle for truth. In the Introduction, Kreeft writes:

“Beauty is the point of the arrow that first pierces the heart, which is also the first door we open to God, however anonymously. … The arrows of beauty enter the heart in order to break it. … The heartbreak is art’s holy task. It’s like digging: It creates a space for truth and goodness to fill.”

Covering most of America’s history, here are 10 single-volume books discussing the most important eras in US history.

Is one of your apps or windows hidden off-screen? This is usually a problem for computers that have external monitors attached, but it can also happen due to issues with your settings. No matter the cause, we’ll teach you how to regain your hidden windows in seconds.

If you’ve ever been to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., you’ll know it’s a majestic site, with the 19-foot-tall Georgia white marble statue of Honest Abe overlooking the Reflecting Pool and then further off, the Washington Monument and the U.S. Capitol.

Something you presumably didn’t see on your visit, however, is a massive 50,000-square-foot foundation built to keep the whole thing from sinking into the swamps of D.C. It’s called the Undercroft, and it’s been a tightly held secret for decades. In June, the Department of the Interior will invite the public to see the hidden vault, Secretary Doug Burgum announced Sunday:

Because the kernel session is restored from the disk, your drivers never fully reinitialize after a "shut down." This leads to weird bugs where Bluetooth devices suddenly won't pair, USB devices aren't recognized, or your audio randomly isn't working. When you read the advice "restart your computer to fix the issue," it's because a restart is the only way to guarantee that everything actually starts from a clean slate. Turning the PC off and back on doesn't work like you'd expect, which is an extremely common problem. //

If you want your PC to actually shut down, you can do it with one command. Run PowerShell as administrator and run the following command:

 powercfg /h off

This disables hibernation entirely, which removes Fast Startup as a side effect and frees up any disk space used by the hiberfil.sys file. Every time you click shut down after that, your PC will completely shut down, just like restarting your PC or disconnecting the power.

Alternatively, clicking the Restart button will always work as you'd expect. If you don't care to disable Fast Startup, make sure to actually click Restart instead of clicking Shut Down.

Williams has not ruled on any of the underlying claims. What she has done is hand a win to a group founded by one of Trump's impeachment lawyers, who filed a motion with a judge appointed by Barack Obama and got exactly the result they were looking for. //

Tech in RL
3 hours ago
Sure, re-open the case and press forward for $10 billion. Trump is in a no-lose situation. He either wins a huge award for weaponization of government because guilt is certain since a guy went to jail for it, or the people get a weaponization fund. If Trump wins a big award from this, he can set up his own fund without worrying about politics. //

Old Texan
2 hours ago edited
"whether the case should be reopened because "the court was the victim of a fraud"

Perhaps she should review the thousands of cases filed against everything Trump does, and then let me know if the judiciary is not committing fraud on a regular basis. Perhaps then I will give credence to her concerns. //

anon-isiz
2 hours ago
What are the 35 judges’ standing to question the settlement? None.

District9 anon-isiz
30 minutes ago
Democrat challengers automatically have standing everywhere. Standing only comes into play when Republicans question something.

Captain is relatively easy. The responsibility is a metric shitton, and it crushes some people. But otherwise the job is mentoring, monitoring, and instilling serenity and confidence in the crew, then pushing the nasty stuff down to your number two so you can keep a clear head.

So what was it, beyond handling the nasty stuff, that made a great chief mate? I truly didn't know.

Then I read The Mirror of the Sea by my favorite author, Joseph Conrad. Conrad (originally Konrad) was an actual ship captain before he was an author. Most of his books are fiction. This one is his lessons learned. //

I've written extensively that our admirals today are too nice. Killers get filtered out. Assholes get tossed. The people who pound on standards, readiness, and lethality don't make flag.

That's a serious problem. Patton wasn't nice. King wasn't nice. Halsey wasn't nice. MacArthur certainly wasn't nice.

But here's what I haven't written about: the particular type of asshole we should want as Deputy SecNav, as Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, as Vice CNO, as Vice Commandant.

It's the type Conrad writes about. It's Chief Mate B--.

It's the man who knows everything. Who is constantly watching for problems. Who is passionate about readiness to the point of paranoia. The man who wants everything perfect. The Cassandra.

That is the type who keeps a ship from sinking in the storm.

You don't want a paranoid captain. The captain needs a clear head. He can't fixate on every cloud shape and every small drop in the barometer. He needs to be optimistic, because his optimism is what the crew runs on.

But the captain can afford that optimism only because Chief Mate B-- exists. B-- holds the watch. B-- carries the worry and the dread for the entire ship so the captain doesn't have to. The optimism at the top is purchased by the paranoia one rank down.

Now look at how we build our flag and general officer corps.

The result is a chain of command in which everyone is the captain and no one is the chief mate. Everyone is projecting confidence. Nobody is grappling with the impending calamity at the table over the salt beef. The bad news has nowhere to go, because the second in command was promoted precisely for not being the kind of person who delivers it.

This is why our readiness numbers are fiction. This is why our shipbuilding programs slip for a decade before anyone in a deputy chair says the program is dead. This is why magazine depth, drydock capacity, and mariner manning all degraded in plain sight while every brief said green. The watchstander role was abolished by personnel policy. We optimized the second in command for comfort, and comfort is the one thing a number two is never supposed to provide.

The fix is unpleasant, which is why nobody will like it.

Stop promoting deputies for likability. Promote them for the trait Conrad hated and trusted in the same breath: the unrestful one. Find the officers who make their bosses uncomfortable. Find the ones with the uneasy eye, the ones everlastingly ready for the calamity, the ones whose determined silences imply the ship is not safe. Then put them one rank below the optimists, on purpose.

Find the ones insecure about our readiness.

It will be miserable. The captains will resent them, exactly as Conrad resented B--. Good. That friction is the system working. A deputy who never makes the principal uncomfortable is not doing the job. He is just a second optimist, and two optimists in a storm is how ships sink.

A compendium of Pilot Rules (Number 30 is Gospel in Fighters).

1. The only three things a wingman should ever say are:
   “Two's up. “
   “Lead, you're on fire.”
   “I'll take the fat chick.”

2. In a multi-place aircraft, there are only three things the copilot should ever say:
   “Nice landing, Sir.”
   “I'll buy the first round.”
   “I'll take the fat chick.”

3. As a new copilot on a bomber I was told to say these three things and to otherwise keep my mouth shut and not touch anything:
   “Clear on the right.”
   “Outer (marker) on the double (indicator).”
   “I'll eat the chicken.” (Crew meals consisted of one steak and one chicken to avoid possible food poisoning of the cockpit crew).

4. As an aviator in flight you can do anything you want. As long as it's right. And we'll let you know if it's right after you land. //

5. As a pilot only two bad things can happen to you and one of them will:
   One day you will walk out to the aircraft knowing that it is your last flight in an airplane.
   One day you will walk out to the airplane not knowing that it is your last flight in an airplane.

6. Any flight over water in a single engine airplane will absolutely guarantee abnormal engine noises and vibrations.

7. There are Rules and there are Laws. The rules are made by men who think that they know better how to fly your airplane than you; the Laws (of Physics) were made by God. You can, and sometimes should, suspend the Rules but you can never suspend the Laws. //

8. He who demands everything that his aircraft can give him is a pilot; he that demands one iota more is a fool. //

9. It is solely the pilot's responsibility to never let any other thing touch his aircraft. //

10. The aircraft G-limits are only there in case there is another flight by that particular airplane. If subsequent flights do not appear likely, there are no G-limits.

Wikipedia's volunteer editors didn't just write articles. They argued. They fact-checked each other. They demanded citations. They noticed when something felt off and went looking for why. That adversarial collaborative process — messy, sometimes petty, occasionally maddening — is genuinely good at converging on accuracy over time. It has a feedback loop. It has stakes.

An LLM has confidence. Which is almost the opposite of what you want in an encyclopedia. It'll tell you something wrong with exactly the same authoritative tone it uses for things that are true, because it doesn't have a "this seems weird, let me double check" reflex. It learned from what it was given, weighted toward consensus, and reports accordingly. If the inputs were good, great. If they weren't — and increasingly they won't be — it has no way to know the difference.

And despite what the industry very much wants you to believe, we are nowhere near the kind of AI that reasons its way out of that. We don't have Data or C-3PO. We definitely don't have R2-D2 — the one who improvised, reasoned under uncertainty, made judgment calls with incomplete information because the mission required it. R2 was capable of that partly because he was never wiped. His decades of accumulated operational experience were his intelligence. Every new AI model is essentially a wipe and retrain. The institutional memory doesn't carry forward.

What we have is a very articulate and very confident pattern-matching system that works impressively within its training distribution and hallucinates a bridge to familiar territory when it hits something outside of it. The industry is actively profiting from the confusion between what it is and what people imagine it to be.

Meanwhile the humans who could tell the difference are being handed severance packages.

Wikipedia's editors built the training data. The Foundation sold access to that data to AI companies. The AI money gave the Foundation the confidence to restructure. The restructuring targeted the union organizers and the team serving the community. The community is threatening to strike. If they do — or if they just quietly disengage — the quality of new Wikipedia content degrades. The AI that trained on old Wikipedia trains the next model on whatever fills the gap. The gap fills with slop.

The AI companies need the growth story to justify the valuation. The valuations need the IPO. The IPO needs enterprise adoption. The enterprise adoption is fueled by CEOs who saw a demo and got stars in their eyes and decided that the humans were the expensive part of the problem. One of those humans used to make sure the Battle of Gettysburg happened in Pennsylvania.

It's a machine that runs on hype and needs constant fuel regardless of whether the underlying reality supports it. And the fuel it's burning through right now includes some of the last load-bearing infrastructure of reliable information on the internet.

One minute the two space Hab astronauts were scoop-diving the atmosphere, the next they'd been shot down over the North Dakota Glacier and were the object of a massive manhunt by the United States government.

That government, dedicated to saving the environment from the evils of technology, had been voted into power because everybody knew that the Green House Effect had to be controlled, whatever the cost. But who would have thought that the cost of ending pollution would include not only total government control of day-to-day life, but the onset of a new Ice Age

Stranded in the anti-technological heartland of America, paralyzed by Earth's gravity, the "Angels" had no way back to the Space Habs, the last bastions of high technology and intellectual freedom on or over the Earth. But help was on its way, help from the most unlikely sources ...

The existing process, which involves roasting ore/sulfuric acid, came in at just under $9,000 for each usable tonne of lithium. By contrast, they estimate that the new process should only cost a bit over $5,000 per tonne. That’s roughly comparable to the cost of isolation from high-quality brines. If the silicon and aluminum products can also be sold, then the cost of the whole process would drop by over $1,000, making it highly cost-effective. //

So the real world will undoubtedly be more complex than these calculations might suggest. Still, in our increasingly lithium-dependent world, it’s nice to have alternatives in case a serious supply crunch ever does hit.

Plus, it’s pretty neat to see that there’s still room for chemists to rethink large industrial processes.