It's said that making a mistake in manufacturing work on equipment for the Russian space program could have consequences a lot worse than just being fired.

It's true that we place more value on lives of famous astronauts lost than we place on all of those people inconveniently freezing to death because they have nowhere to sleep but our city sidewalks, etc. Nobody's holding a years-long investigation about them.

And I am totally, totally pissed off at all of the news coverage that goes to a few westerners killed on Everest compared to the 10,000 little people who got buried alive in Nepal.

But I am not sure any of this says a thing about what nation will lead in space.

Saturn V is the ride to orbit, not the vehicle for the astronauts. You can't just count the cost of Saturn V against the shuttle, you need to count the cost of one or more vehicles that were never built, because the Apollo would not have been sufficient to the task.

Make that "Little Joe II test for the Apollo capsule". The Saturn V sat that one out :-)

The first big test is next week. They will do a crew escape test from a scaffold, rather than a rocket, with the Crew Dragon getting away from an assumed "exploding rocket" on its Super Draco thrusters, and landing safely for the presumed crew. I doubt the capsule is reusable for much other than drop tests after an escape, and soft ground landings for the capsule are not scheduled to be a feature until well after the start of its manned use.

There will be a full escape test after this, perhaps later this year, in which the rocket is launched and the capsule escapes at Max-Q. Something like the "Little Joe II" test for the Saturn 5 when I was a kid.

Soyuz has killed its own astronauts. Progress is an unmanned Soyuz.

Crew Dragon and Falcon will kill astronauts too. Much as I cheer for SpaceX and hope for a wonderful future, this really is rocket science and people will die. That is the price we pay.

It's actually pretty easy to prompt a visit from the army if you pop up on frequencies where you are not expected, in some countries. Never mind any nice citizen-consulting sunshine-respecting mostly-independent part of the Executive Branch like FCC. Guys with guns come.

There are more licensed hams today than ever before. Part of that is because we modernized the licensing rules and don't have a Morse code test any longer (for which I take partial credit). And they already have a commercial niche. Most of them have jobs. Many of us got those jobs because of the skill we developed through Amateur Radio. In general they pay as well or better than offering ISP service to the boonies.

We don't want to see commercial use of those frequencies, even if such use would help some folks get more equipment, because if that happened, there would not be room for Amateurs any longer.

You should consider that all of the ham HF frequencies together are smaller than one WiFi channel. And they have global range. So, if you offer a good bandwidth signal to some home in the boonies, you have potentially used up that freuquency for the whole world!

The link went to an article which mentioned research on CCD done at Montana State U (where I was once upon a time a biochemistry/microbiology double major) and U of MT. Didn't find a link to the actual paper offhand but didn't look that hard either; no doubt you can find it.

I really have noticed people who were looking for me, standing outside of the mailbox store looking confused.

I did; I posted a link to it upstairs somewhere. Shame you didn't read it.

I'll take the validity of research at my alma mater above most anything else, because I know the quality of the research departments.

I'm familiar with the Microchip implementation. This is a 300-MHz-class 32-bit processor. Not particularly modern and not really fertile ground for R&D.

We did have two or three suggestions from commenters of open MIPS processor implementations, some of which are more modern. One uses a proprietary high-level HDL, which I haven't investigated.

Airborne particulates is a false equivalency.

I get the feeling you won't be happy until everyone admits your particular point of interest is the culprit, which isn't exactly a scientific method either. It's fine to look at every possible candidate. It's not fine to decide that's the culprit when it's not even present in many regions of interest.

Also, if neonics are the culprit, that should be very easy to demonstrate -- you should be able to reliably induce CCD in fairly short order just by isolating a hive with a treated food source.

But Georgia isn't everywhere, and wheat isn't a bee-pollinated crop.

The relevant thing is that bees are affected without ever being anywhere near a treated area, in fact without being near an area treated for anything at all.

Well, yes it is, since it doesn't have an infinite half-life and doesn't move around by itself. You're certainly not going to find it used in Montana wheatfields, yet CCD has affected bees here as well... so now what to blame?? Indeed, most of our acreage is never treated with anything, being non-arable grazing land or wilderness. Hasn't helped bees any.

I'd guess in addition to the viral and fungal agents that when they occur together have been determined as CCD causes already, there might be a genetic susceptibility in some lines of bees, but far as I know that hasn't been looked at yet.

I'm reminded that many a time, some OMG-Death-Chemical reaction has proven to in fact be due to a genetic defect. Frex, see MDR1 (multi-drug resistance gene) in dogs. Nope, it wasn't ivermectin causing illness and death; it was a genetic defect.