What could possibly go wrong? A Pennsylvania school district has begun scanning the thumbprints of students who receive lunch at the school.
They are then turning the data over to the federal government.
The competition heats up: SpaceX has replaced one of its automated first stage landing barges with an upgraded version.
With dimensions virtually identical to Marmac 300, she carries some new features, including a steel blast wall erected between the rear containers and the landing deck, in addition to the steel bow wall as previously seen on Marmac 300. Ongoing work visible on deck suggests that a second blast wall may be installed at the forward end of the landing deck as well.
The article also provides us a nice contrast between the government and the private sector. While a private company is now willing to buy a flight with a recovered first stage, even before a successful landing, the government is far more cautious:
According to Mr. Musk, officials have asked for “repeated, successful” demonstrations of a first stage landing on the drone ship before a landing attempt will be allowed at the Cape.
That the company has already demonstrated twice that the first stage can return very precisely to its target should have already satisfied these officials. Moreover, the landing site would be well secured and maintained by SpaceX, and they appear quite willing to bear any repair costs should the stage crash on that landing site.
Philae today sent another 2 minutes worth of information to Rosetta.
The downlink was stable; the two contacts received by Rosetta lasted two minutes each. Both delivered numerous packets of lander housekeeping and status data, 185 in total, which are still being analysed at the time of this writing. No science data were anticipated or received.
The competition heats up: Commercial satellite company SES has requested SpaceX that one of its satellites be the first to be launched with a recovered Falcon 9 first stage.
SES has seven satellites under construction, five of which are contracted for SpaceX launches, starting with SES-9. SES said it has been given a guarantee by SpaceX that the launch will occur no later than September. SES has agreed to allow SES-9 to be the first launch using an upgraded Falcon 9 main-stage Merlin 1D engine, whose performance is being increased to allow SpaceX to attempt first-stage recovery even on launches to geostationary transfer orbit, the destination of most telecommunications satellites.
Just as it secured an attractive SpaceX price for the SES-8 by being one of the first established customers, SES now wants a cut-rate price on a Falcon 9 with a previously used first stage. “Our launch vehicle for SES-9 will be a recoverable vehicle,” Halliwell said. “We believe they will be able to recover it on this mission. We actually asked them: If we do recover it, can we use it again and get a good price discount? We’re still in discussions.”
In other words, if SpaceX is successful in landing the first stage after it puts SES-9 into orbit in September, they want first dibs, at a good price, of using that stage on a future SES launch.
SES’s willingness to do this changes my estimated time frame for the first successful reuse of a first stage. I had assumed that the commercial satellite companies would all be reluctant to put one of their payloads on a rocket using a recovered first stage, until they had seen at least one test flight of such a stage. SES proves this assumption wrong, to my delight.
An evening pause: Here is an fine example of a man following his dream and making it happen.
Hat tip Danae.
Some good news: In a 9-0 ruling the Supreme Court struck down a local Arizona town’s ordiance that restricted a church’s right to post signs about its upcoming events.
What is most encouraging about this ruling is that all nine justices agreed to it. This suggests that there is a strong majority on the court that supports freedom of speech, and will not look kindly at the Obama administration’s effort to impose its will on the speech and activity of religious and conservative organizations.
This morning civilized people the world over were greeted with several stories of hate and violence, where the perpetrators attempted to kill large numbers of people, merely because of their race or religion.
The first — and the one that our bankrupt mainstream media will spend all of its time reporting — occurred in Charleston, where a hate-filled racist killed nine black church-goers during a prayer session.
This was an evil act, committed by an evil and sick man. No sane or civilized person on the left or right condones it.
Two other stories, both reported in the Israeli news outlet The Jewish Press, described two attacks in the Middle East, one on a Jewish religious site and the other on a Christian religious site.
Both of these Middle Eastern attacks are as evil as the massacre in Charleston. Both expressed the same mass hatred of a group of people, this time based on religion rather than race. And as in Charleston, no sane or civilized person on the left or right should condone them.
Sadly, I expect America’s modern leftwing intellectual class, represented by our mainstream media, to focus entirely on the first, not only condemning the murderous attack in Charleston but to use that act as an excuse to attack all conservatives, essentially repeating the crime by expressing a mass hatred of an entire group of people, this time because of their political beliefs.
The Middle East violence will meanwhile be ignored. In fact, if you dig hard enough, you will likely be able to find examples in the left wing press where these acts are condoned.
In a sense, the reactions of people to these violent evil events provide us a litmus test for hate. They will reveal who is civilized and who is not. Those who are civilized will condemn them all, and will not spend any time trying to assign the act to their political opponents. Those who are not will try to make political points and will try to assign blame in all the wrong places.
Watch and listen. If you pay close attention over the next few days, and keep a clear mind, you will be able to learn a lot.
The House today passed a revised fast track authority bill for any trade bills that President Obama might negotiate.
This bill did not include the job training section that was defeated last week and that the Senate included in its version of fast track. Thus, the Senate must now vote again on fast track, this time on the House-passed version. It is unclear whether the Senate will agree, as Democrats have opposed fast track without the jobs aid.
Overall this whole incident illustrates how misguided our elected leaders are. Right now we have much bigger problems than negotiating a new trade agreement, especially considering the secrecy in which Obama wishes to complete that negotiation.
Trying to avoid what’s in it: Faced with the possibility that the Supreme Court could declare that the Obamacare subsidies are illegal in most states, House Republicans have come up with a new bill to revise the law.
In the tentative responses discussed in separate closed-door meetings Wednesday, House GOP leaders said they would continue the subsidies for a year. Then, states could receive federal block grants for the following two years that they could structure into any kind of health care aid they wish. All of the health law’s regulations would end for those states, including popular ones like assuring coverage of children until age 26. In 2017 — when Republicans hope to control the White House — the entire health law would be eliminated.
The law would also immediately repeal the Obamacare tax on medical devices as well as the Obamacare advisory board designed to ration care to save money.
We know already that Obama will veto this plan, which to my mind is a good thing. The only solution that will work to fix Obamacare is to repeal it in toto. Partial fixes, even ones that last only a few years, can only cause more harm and will increase the chances that legislators will chicken out of full repeal when it is finally time to kick in.
The competition heats up: Though it mentions the efforts of other spaceports, the story is mostly about Blue Origin’s spaceport in western Texas and how their rising activity is revitalizing the town of Van Horn.
Cool image time! Using archival data from Venus Express, scientists have identified several spots on Venus where it appears there are active lava flows.
Using a near-infrared channel of the spacecraft’s Venus Monitoring Camera (VMC) to map thermal emission from the surface through a transparent spectral window in the planet’s atmosphere, an international team of planetary scientists has spotted localised changes in surface brightness between images taken only a few days apart. “We have now seen several events where a spot on the surface suddenly gets much hotter, and then cools down again,” says Eugene Shalygin from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany, and lead author of the paper reporting the results in Geophysical Research Letters this month. “These four ‘hotspots’ are located in what are known from radar imagery to be tectonic rift zones, but this is the first time we have detected that they are hot and changing in temperature from day to day. It is the most tantalising evidence yet for active volcanism.”
The hotspots are found along the Ganiki Chasma rift zone close to the volcanoes Ozza Mons and Maat Mons. Rift zones are results of fracturing of the surface, which is often associated with upwelling of magma below the crust. This process can bring hot material to the surface, where it may be released through fractures as a lava flow.
There have been hints of volcanic activity on Venus since Pioneer Venus Orbiter first circled the planet from 1978 to 1992. This appears to be the first solid evidence of it.
An evening pause: My only comment: This is insane!
Hat tip Tom Biggar.
